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 hear from a former union president who was transformative in bringing the home visits practice to St. Paul.

We’ve been connected with Parent Teacher Home Visits since around 2010. My role at that time was a teacher at a community school on the east side of St. Paul. I was also beginning to be a leader at the St. Paul Federation of Educators. I was on the executive board at the time. I’d been sent, through Saint Paul Public Schools, to a leadership development conference in Toledo, Ohio, for a week-long training offered by a chapter of the same community-organizing group that helped found the national Parent Teacher Home Visits Project. Theirs is called Sacramento ACT; ours is called Isaiah.

I went out there, and I was kind of bragging to one of the other chapter leaders there about all the things we were doing with parents and community as a union and all the things that we were doing differently. A staff member from Sacramento ACT says, “Well, do you do home visits because that’s what we do.” I was intrigued and asked him to say more. He shared the Home Visit Project and how it was happening and rolling out in Sacramento and their partnership with both the union and the district.

There’s nothing in my 20-and-some years of teaching at that time that struck me as such a win-win for kids, for the union, and for the district. I knew I wanted to try to start a Parent Teacher Home Visits project in St. Paul. When I came back, I didn’t go to our union right away with it, but I went to our assistant superintendent who was in charge of the community schools. I said, “This really seems like a great thing to do.” Of course, I got the typical reply: There’s no money for that.

Then I scheduled a time with our district person who was in charge of parent involvement. She explained that the district was going down this path of parent academies and other initiatives and again, there’s no money for that. I thought at the very least, I’d really like to get some folks in our school building trained. It was at this point that I went to our union and talked to our union president. She had some money left over to pull folks out for a training. Carrie Rose (former executive director of PTHV) and Yesenia Ramirez (PTHV co-founder and senior advisor) came out and trained five or six teachers from our building. Our principal and our union president went through the training as well. And so did our Achievement Plus coordinator and a community liaison within our community school.

We just did five or six home visits each that year. For my first few visits I went on, not as the lead, but the paired educator. I was a science specialist at the time so I saw all students. One of my first few home visits was with a student who had two moms. They were struggling with how they were being perceived as women of color and as two moms. This would be formative to my work later on in promoting home visits within the district and ensuring that our home visitors could learn how to empathize on the spot and have experiences that they could share on the spot to ensure the visits were successful.

However, we got trained in November and then well, you know, Minnesota winter hits, and everything gets complicated outside the school building. But even with just a few visits, we really felt like they had a huge impact on us as educators and really wanted to spread the word about that. We talked about our experiences with leadership at our union. The buy-in was quick. They said that if the district isn’t willing to do this, let’s put it on the bargaining table. Contract negotiations were coming up. That was the same year also that we opened bargaining to not only all of our members, but to the community as well.

We went into open bargaining, and our members came to the table to testify about what a difference home visits made. We had some parents speak to their beliefs that home visits were a good idea. That’s how we won contract language around that. In the excitement of getting the win on contract language, we were faced with getting the practice rolling. I knew were going to need more capacity because the district was still resistant. Their only obligation was to pay stipends for folks who did the visits, but we had taken on the obligation of doing the trainings and the work around administering the whole thing. I pulled together some other teachers, and eventually a parent, to pull together a whole “train the trainer” team. I again spoke to our union president about our capacity needs to run Parent Teacher Home Visits. We found some funds to release me from the classroom to develop my ideas around parent engagement more.

This is how, within a few years, we went from having about 15 visits to a few thousand visits across the district, and visits in more than 40 of our schools. Moreover, we used the same strategy with placing Parent Teacher Home Visits into contract language with APTT later on, so PTHV was instrumental in many ways in transforming family engagement for us. This is not to say it was easy. I think in those early years, the district was reluctant to give up their coordination of parent involvement. To be sure, great things were happening with parent academies and all the other initiatives. But other than conferences, Parent Teacher Home Visits were the only time when there was cultivation of capacity for educators to engage with parents. I zeroed in on this during one of our trainings from the national office of PTHV when Carrie said, home visits help you understand that no matter who you are, or what life has dealt you, all parents have something to offer you as a teacher that you can learn from to become a better educator for their kid. The whole idea of lifting up the expertise of our parents opened up a whole new capacity for us. And we, like a lot of urban districts, were primarily a white teaching force who had primarily parents and communities and families to learn from and build better relationships with.

We also knew from feedback from our members that our home visits practices could easily dissolve given how they were being treated in different school buildings. So another thing we put into our language was a requirement around attending debriefs, which became unexpectedly profound spaces to learn. To receive compensation—stipends—they had to attend debriefs at our local union hall. Paired teachers had their individual debrief sessions, but our union had facilitators who would meet to do larger debrief sessions about how the visits had gone, what teachers needed more assistance with, and the things they struggled with. From an organizing standpoint, these sessions became good places for folks to agitate each other, especially when some home visitors were entering those spaces from a “white savior” mentality. Fellow educators or facilitators would push back gently and help them grow in that area as well. Even though we were having difficult conversations, these sessions became times educators enjoyed coming to because we got pushed and pressed in them.

There are a few ways I knew our Parent Teacher Home Visits practice was a success. We had an evaluation by Emily Goff (PTHV Board Secretary). As part of that process, we first conducted a survey of our members about the impact home visits was having on them. About 90 percent of our members said their attitudes toward parents, or how they saw parents, changed through home visits. That was huge for us, that home visits were changing how our members perceived their families and the kids as they showed up in the classroom. That really struck me. The other piece was seeing the next generation of Yesenias bubble up. To see one of our trainers go on to become a school board member, and another trainer become a leader in the district was so exciting.

I’m retired now, and I reflect back on the elements that made home visits so successful in St. Paul, the union’s partnership stands out as crucial. We took cues from national about the collaboration between the district, community organizations, and unions. From my perspective, I can see why other important initiatives, including one on social justice, flailed in our schools—it was because it was a top-down project. If the union had been approached and had they been the ones to explain its importance to our members, things might have gone differently. Instead, it suffered under the weight of a lot of new programs, changes, resistance, and unproductive drama. PTHV came in with strong leadership from the union, which had a natural community organizing bent to it. By having these three entities—the union, community organization, and the district—working together to hold each other accountable, PTHV worked.

I have hopes and dreams for the future of Parent Teacher Home Visits. Like many I’m sure, I want it to continue to grow. I also hope that it becomes a catalyst for us as a country to take family engagement seriously. We’re in a really weird time now, like here we saw a gubernatorial election swing on the matter of parent engagement, and parents around the country are taking bolder steps to have a say on what’s happening in the classroom. I’ve watched these conversations closely, and I reflect back on how we know that if parents had relationships with their child’s teacher and knew the values, love, and caring that those teachers bring into the classroom, they wouldn’t be so worried about the things we’re seeing in these parents’ rights headlines. That’s because they’d have a firsthand relationship with the educator in the classroom. Maybe that’s just a dream on my part, but it feels like home visits can break down some of this tension that is, quite frankly, being used as a political wedge. And it shouldn’t be that way. Parents should have some say in what happens in the classroom, and that should happen through a real relationship with the educator who’s in front of their kids every day.