I started teaching in the Sacramento City Unified School District in 1998. I had been teaching for almost 10 years when Parent Teacher Home Visits came to our school through another teacher who had come from a different district.

At that time, I was pretty much done with teaching. I was planning to finish out the year. I’d already started looking for other jobs: I’d interviewed and had an offer with a bank. So teaching wasn’t what I thought I was going to be doing. There was so much emphasis on testing and test scores and reading and math. You couldn’t teach other subjects, and this was first grade. I had burned out.

PTHV representatives came to our school to do a training. I remember thinking to myself, “These people are so nice. They’re so positive.” The training was great. But because I planned to move on, I didn’t think I was going to do anything with it.

Later, a third-grade teacher needed a partner one day, and she asked me to go on a home visit with her. I still loved the kids. I loved my fellow teachers. I loved the families, I loved the community. I loved all that about teaching. It was all the other stuff that teaching had become under No Child Left Behind that became very intense.

I agreed and went on the visit with her. I remember meeting the little girl from her class, and her big brother was there. He was translating for us. I kept looking at him, and he kept looking at me. We both knew we’d seen each other before but couldn’t quite place it. All of a sudden, we both realized who each other was. He says, “Miss Berretta?” And I said, “Manuel?” We stood up, and we gave each other a hug. What a moment that was.

Manuel had been in my very first kindergarten class. His mother had passed away, unfortunately, and his father had remarried and had his two little sisters, and so I had, of course, lost touch with Manuel. He was in high school at this time. He had already been admitted into Sac State. When he was in my kindergarten class, he was just this cute little butterball, and he wouldn’t get off his dad’s leg. His parents owned a taqueria, and his dad would bring me food every couple of days because my daughter and I had just moved to Sacramento from Portland. The family was so welcoming to me. We didn’t really know many people in the area.

To see Manuel again after all this time and know that he was successful, was incredible. The family invited us to dinner, of course, and Manuel started talking about all these things that he remembered from kindergarten. It touched me so much because during that time of teaching, only the scores that your students had mattered. You were evaluated almost exclusively on their scores. So to have him say all these things that really mattered to him almost 10 years later—I can’t even describe what it was like.

I had an epiphany. He reminded me this is why I became a teacher, and the things I did mattered and they made a difference for him. Now, he’s successful and going to college. That visit was amazing, and life-changing.

I started doing home visits myself. Not every visit is as over-the-top or remarkable in the way that one was, but every visit touches you. I started developing different types of relationships with families and suddenly understanding stuff that I had never understood before about families. Different things than what we were told in staff meetings or in our staff rooms. For example, I understood how much families appreciated teachers, and how many of them viewed teachers as their child’s hope. I taught in Title I exclusively. Our families had financial struggles, but they appreciated me so much they would often give me gifts. My car would be so full of plants, fruits and vegetables, and blankets. One time, my partner teacher and I had to go back to school and drop off all those things because we had so much stuff from the families.

I was so humbled by this real love that the families have for us. All the other stuff kinda didn’t matter anymore. Teachers matter to the most important people, the families.

I continued doing visits and became a leader for Parent Teacher Home Visits at my school and, being in this role, I got to see that lightbulb come on for other teachers when they discovered the power of home visits. One of my friends was in the latter part of her career when she started visiting with me. When I initially approached her and told her it would be so worthwhile if she tried them, she flat-out rejected the idea, with some choice words. She said, “I don’t go to students’ houses. That’s not my job.”

I didn’t give up, and she finally started doing visits with me. It wasn’t long before she changed her tune. All of a sudden, there was this change. To see the lightbulb come on for your colleagues is just as rewarding as seeing it come on for yourself and for your students, because you see their hearts open. They realize teaching really is the greatest profession. That’s why I moved into this role as a PTHV training specialist, to see that lightbulb keep coming on. Every year, there are new teachers who send in pictures and call in with stories of how they, too, were done with teaching. They were exhausted. They were burnt out. They didn’t feel appreciated.

I remember when we had our strike, our families showed up. They came to these pickets and told us they would do anything for the teachers in our community. They say when the chips are down, you know who your friends are. That was a tough space for families, for teachers, for district staff. So to see families show up in that space with their kids was incredible. And I’ve seen that time and time and time again.

When COVID hit, my families that I’d had years ago were texting me, asking me if I was okay, if my son was okay. Do you need anything? Sometimes, all we heard about was that, we had to reach out to the missing students, but my students were actually checking in on me. It’s this continuous giving that keeps on giving back, that keeps on opening these new doors. I always say like nobody could pay me to do a better job at my job because it’s not a job. It’s a mission. It’s a mission to fill people’s hearts to fill people’s cups with the joy that comes from connection.

Again, not every visit produces an instant connection or relationship. I was challenged by families who would hang up on me when I called. Sometimes there were visits when families would have these short answers. What do you like to do as a family? “Watch TV.” What are your hopes and dreams. “I want them to do good.” I admit those were deflating, but sometimes, those same families would call the principal and say what a great visit they had. I learned sometimes your perception can be very different from the family’s, and to not take things personally when families didn’t want a visit. I learned so much from our parents and our parent trainers about how I represented an institution that had hurt them, even though it wasn’t me who had hurt them. Their experience of the institution calling them was not positive. And so those phone calls where people would say, “You’re not coming to my house. Why are you bothering me? Keep what you do at school,” were difficult. I also learned that if you kept with the spirit of home visits, which is of connecting and understanding the family, a lot of times those nos would turn into yeses. That’s another reason they are so rewarding: to have a family who didn’t trust not only you, but a whole institution, be able to trust you enough to let you come into their home.

And those connections translated to the classroom. When I was in my element, doing everything just how I wanted to do, I got to visit every student, or almost every student, before school started. So when you get back in the classroom, that first day of school is not like the first day of school at all. It’s like another day with students you already have a connection with. And the little things matter. I once had a student who I was so excited to see, but she came in slumped. Her mom told me her daughter wasn’t excited to go back to school. The student told me she didn’t want to miss her novellas. I sat down beside her and said I, too, would miss The Young and the Restless. I have to tape it now. She perked up, and that was our thing, supporting each other in missing our favorite TV shows.

Another student came in wearing a hoodie, which was grounds for suspension. His mom shared with me that his dog had died over the weekend. I rushed out, hoping to be the first one to get to him. I was able to leverage my connection with him and get him paired with kids who could show him extra support that day and ensure the rule about hoodies didn’t make the situation worse. Some days when I was struggling to connect with a student, I would remember something from a visit, like, there was a fishing pole or something like that. You find out these little tidbits that you can’t really record on paper that you have no clue are going to be helpful to you in connecting with a student.

If you embrace this practice, it’s not just about going about the visit. It’s about really caring about connection and caring about what that connection means—for your students and for yourself. Look at how many hours you spend with your students. You’re a part of their lives, and you’re caring about the whole little person. Everything’s built on relationships—I think COVID has finally unleashed that—and when you have a relationship, you can build out in so many directions.