Parent Teacher Home Visits is celebrating 25 years of building trusting relationships between schools and families. To commemorate our Silver Anniversary, we will share the stories of close friends, partners, and allies who have helped make PTHV what it is today. Watch this space regularly to see more “impact stories.” In this post, we share the story of a superintendent who learned of PTHV on his first day on the job.

On my very first day as superintendent at Sacramento City Unified School District in August 2009, I had been working on all those first-day-of-school things. The day had started at 5:30 in the morning. I raised the flag on the flagpole outside of the Serna Center. I was interviewed on television, and I had a full day that was fairly scripted and coordinated —visiting schools, the history museum, and so on.

At the end of the day, I find myself in one of our elementary schools, Earl Warren, learning about what, at the time, was called the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project. I was sitting in the library, and in the room were two representatives from the teachers union. There were a few teachers, the principal of the elementary school, and a few other individuals.

After an orientation, I had a chance to ask a few questions, but then I was out on a visit. My first visit was with Nancy Fong, who was a first-grade teacher. We visited the Castro family, who lived very close by. Now I will say that Earl Warren Elementary School was one of several that we had in Sacramento, where 100 percent of the students came from homes that lived in poverty. Earl Warren also became a Blue Ribbon School, nationally recognized for outstanding student achievement. The one thing all these schools had in common, besides a great principal, was that every one of the teachers did home visits.

So with that as a backdrop, let me tell you about my visit to the Castro family. They lived in a very needy neighborhood, and it was very hot in Sacramento. The curtains were closed, and the shades were drawn to keep the house cool. Mrs. Castro, a single mother of three children in a modest home, had put out a beautiful serving for us. I’ll never forget the beautiful brass, and she had some fruit and some other things that she had brought out there to be welcoming. We sat, and then Nancy started to ask some questions, including what were her hopes and dreams for her son Mohamed. What are the things that he’s interested in? At some point during the conversation, Mrs. Castro said, “There’s something I just want you to know. There are some mornings that Mohamed may be late to school. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to get to school on time, or that I don’t want him to get to school on time, or that I don’t care.” But she said, “I’m going through chemotherapy, and there are some mornings when it’s hard for me to get up. Mohamed has to get up, and he helps his siblings to get ready.”

It was in that moment when everything just melted away. I had been thinking about the blame game that happens between parents and schools. Why don’t you send your kids to school at their best? Why can’t the school do this or that? I mean, it all melted away in that instant. I could feel all the empathy and the care and the love that was in that room at that moment. The bond between parent and teacher and child—I call it the iron triangle. There’s a reason triangles are the strongest architectural shape, and I could see how it’s forged in that moment just like that.

I thought, how powerful is this simple act of going into your students’ home? Crossing the threshold into their domain, into their territory, when so much of education has always been about the child and family coming to our domain, crossing our threshold. When you change that dynamic and you get onto their terms, it is amazing. I’ll never forget it. It’s like it was yesterday. I saw how powerful this program was, and I could understand why a school like Earl Warren, whose teachers volunteered to do home visits for all their students, became a nationally honored Blue Ribbon School, and how easy it could be for other schools.

I knew this was a program that we had to illuminate for the rest of our school district to see. Parent Teacher Home Visits was in maybe 20 of our Title I schools at the time. So I began to think about how we make it accessible and how to encourage all of our teachers to do home visits.

I went on my second home visit with Teresa Cummings, who was a math teacher and a math coach at Hiram Johnson High School. We visited the home of an incoming ninth-grader. What I remember most about that visit, and about that afternoon, was the impression that Teresa Cummings made on me. And several months later, when I was looking for a chief of staff, I remember that home visit, and I remembered Teresa Cummings. I thought, how could it be any more powerful than to have as my chief of staff a teacher who was so active and involved in home visits?

That’s my little story about how it started. Every month after that, I went on a home visit, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but with a busy schedule, I committed to them, and I had some incredible visits.

There’s another visit that comes to mind. I went with Mr. Peters. It was a second visit, and the mother insisted on serving us this wonderful home-cooked meal. She told us how the first time Mr. Peters had come to her for a visit, she was petrified. In fact, she would leave her child at the corner, and the child would walk the rest of the way to school. She wouldn’t even come to the door of the school to drop off her son. But after that first visit, she was encouraged enough to bring her child to the school door and then, over time, into the school. And at the time I met her, she was volunteering in the Pre-K program. It just goes to show you, again, how powerful this strategy is. It’s an integral part of educating and developing children. It can lead to building partnerships between families, schools, and children.

I reached out to Carrie Rose (former executive director of PTHV) and said we’re making this a priority. You get the teachers, and I’ll get the funding. What better way to get more teachers involved than to have other teachers share the program? When we launched an effort in the spring of 2010 to turn around some of our neediest, most challenging schools as part of the school transformation plan, we had a list of non-negotiables. And one of them was every teacher who’s going to be in this turnaround school is going to do home visits. So, it was a powerful strategy. Then we had a broader effort with teachers who sold the virtues of the program so that it wasn’t this best-kept secret.

I have many hopes for the future of Parent Teacher Home Visits. For selfish reasons, I want to bring it to New Rochelle, but I always hope that this practice results and stories like mine and in experiences that can be shared. I want PTHV to be part of the story of why a school is so successful like it was with Earl Warren. And home visits become something we could build on to systematically. Traditional parent-teacher conferences are like drive-bys, very transactional. They could be built off a strong foundational relationship through Parent Teacher Home Visits. Home visits empower our families and they become multipliers. It’s like a transformer. One plus one equals four. So those are the ways that I think we continue to show this as a foundational strategy around teaching and learning, improvement, building relationships and a sense of community, and creating a supportive, welcoming climate and school culture.