Trevon Brandhorst is the senior manager for family empowerment and academic partnerships for Denver Public Schools. Denver is a notable partner in that they were the very first to adopt a Parent Teacher Home Visits Week. They’ve really served as our model for what national PTHV is rolling out in the fall of 2022. Denver has done an outstanding job using their Parent Teacher Home Visits Week to accelerate the growth and support for their local home visiting practice. Trevon shared insights from the district’s PTHV Week on a recent webinar. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of his talk.

I’ve been with the district now for about nine years and have been around PTHV in some aspect for that whole time. It’s been something that’s been really important in Denver my whole tenure here. You could see that from the buy-in that was developed through the multiple different stakeholders we have in our community.

Celebrate—with a Little Friendly Competition

Our first PTHV Week started in 2014-2015. We do have a fall and a spring PTHV Week. It’s just because we have so many great educators doing these things that we need more time to be able to celebrate them. It’s really that opportunity to celebrate the folks who make this a part of the work that they do every single day because, without them, we wouldn’t have this amazing program. So for us, it’s really again, this opportunity to celebrate, to inspire some friendly competition as well. We are big fans of competition. So hearing that is just going to get people more excited for another opportunity to show off how great these visits are and how impactful they are to their teaching, to their support and to the relationships that they are building with their families and their schools.

School Leadership and Advocacy Tools

Our Board of Education has been really supportive since day one. In 2011, they created a Parent Teacher Home Visits proclamation. We really love proclamations here in Denver. Our mayor likes the likes to send them out. Our governor likes to send them out. The board also wanted to celebrate this and to raise that up to everybody in our community—not just for our educators and our support staff [who] were going out and doing these visits, but really bringing our families along and bringing their communities along so they could advocate for this. We have really appreciated that support.

In our PTHV Weeks, we typically try to make sure that’s a big element: [to] make sure that our leaders in the district, our stakeholders who are important to our community members, are getting to experience home visits, especially if they’ve never had the opportunity to before. A lot of times, they’re the ones who can speak to this the best with their communities and then can get that grassroots buy-in from our community members to also ask for this at their schools, if they’re not seeing it.

We are excited that a lot of our schools do take part in the program—131 of about 200 schools. It gives us a goal. We have 70 other schools that we’re working to make sure that they’re leveraging this, or that they’re being intentional. Because a lot of this is happening, but we can structure it in a way, and we can value them for their time.

Marketing Opportunities

I specifically want to call out just the really catalytic tremendous growth that we had just within a few years of creating this PTHV Week and being able to use this as something that we could market out to our other schools, market out to our community, show them that folks are really interested in this opportunity. We can show them that educators want to build this relationship with them, that we want them in our schools. We want them to have a space where they feel comfortable in reaching out to our educators in our schools, knowing that that’s a space where their kids spend a lot of time and they spend a lot of time as well.

Data and Impact

You can see some of the great data points here after we launched. As I said, three years later, in 2017-2018, we grew from 59 to 135 schools. Every year it’s different. Some of our schools have different models, so it’s kind of ebb and flow in terms of the exact number of schools participating. But we’ve been around that number for several years now. Now we’re really looking at how do we get the voices of the schools who aren’t participating and hear that.

Pandemic Surprise

2019-2020? Yeah, it’s a tough one. Everyone experienced it. For us, it was about how do we keep this going? How do we make sure that we’re still celebrating these fabulous interactions that are happening, especially when people aren’t feeling as comfortable? We were really, really surprised to see how many visits we were actually able to accomplish that year. We had over 1,800. It was just one of those opportunities where we saw the planning, the thoughtfulness that we had in terms of what types of visits we could create, working out and still making this accessible to families.

Looking Ahead

Now here we are, moving into this next year. We were really honestly just excited to be able to attend today and get to be in and around this space. I’m always saying that to Gina and the team that, you know, for us, it’s just really valuable to be in and around others who understand what it’s like to be doing this day to day, to have to navigate the realistic things that come up in our worlds that can be really challenging to navigate, especially with grant funding and things like that. So being able to keep this going and this momentum going throughout this pandemic has been something that we’re really proud of our Denver educators, and our parents, for creating the opportunity to still welcome us into our homes and create that new space.

We appreciate this. We’re looking forward to celebrating this anniversary all year long with you all and to really having a spectacular Home Visit Week come this fall.