Parent Teacher Home Visits is an organization that celebrates the power of discovering the hopes and dreams that families and educators have for their students. It is a question that sparks the seeds of partnership between the most important adults in a child’s life. We owe this evidence-based practice in great measure to the experiences of Yesenia Ramirez, PTHV co-founder and now senior advisor.

Though she’s humble about her incredible legacy of changing the trajectory of hundreds of thousands of students who have received home visits, it’s challenging for her to describe what her own hopes and dreams were when she was a child. She waxes wistful, and then delivers the raw truth that educators who’ve been trained by her have come to know and respect and admire.

“Coming from a background where you’re being raised in a home where there’s a lot of abuse, it’s kind of hard to think about hopes and dreams for yourself,” she said. “I was just trying to survive every day. As I got older, my hope was just to be able to figure out how I could get out of the situation that I was in.”

After a little reflection, she remembers wanting to style hair, and she once dreamt of traveling to different places to learn how to do hair professionally. Later, it was to become a history teacher because that, too, meant traveling to learn about the world. Alas, traveling was always a proxy for escaping her abusive father. She would take the long way home from school and hide out in certain sections of the neighborhood where she would go unnoticed, all to avoid returning home. Escape would come in her teenage years when she married young to be able to leave home. But that also meant leaving school, 17 and pregnant. And as is often the case, the cycle of abuse continued in her marriage.

“I did feel that my only way out was to be married because I didn’t have the resources. I didn’t have the education. I didn’t have the means to have those dreams come true.”

The Seeds of Hope

Hope seemed lost for Yesenia for a long time, but when she had her daughters, she began to dream again, this time for a successful future for them. With support, she relocated to Sacramento to build a new life. It wasn’t long before she realized that one of her daughters was struggling academically. Her daughter was in the fifth grade but reading at a first-grade level. Yesenia was at first fearful, being new to the area, and not having any contacts, she wasn’t sure what to do. But she was adamant that her children were going to do better in life.

The trouble was, she didn’t understand the language the school was using. Code words, like “low income,” were bandied about, and she didn’t understand what that meant and why it mattered when she went to the school for assistance. She simply wanted to be equipped to help her daughter with her homework and be a positive guide for the younger daughters coming up behind her. Yesenia was also afraid to ask for help because she feared her talking with authority figures would somehow result in her daughters being taken away from her. She mustered up the courage to go to the school anyway and to acknowledge that she didn’t know how to help her child. And she sat in an office for 45 minutes, without a soul asking her what she was there for.

“As I was walking out, I was cussing in Spanish,” she recalls, and at the moment she was leaving, the new vice principal overheard her and asked her what was wrong. “I completely broke down. I told her this was the second time I was here, and no one will talk to me, and I just need help for my Joanna. Nobody’s listening.”

That unearthed a long discussion about parent engagement in the school, and how the school was struggling to connect with the community. Internally, there was a pervasive belief that parents were doing the bare minimum of bringing their kids to school and picking them up in the afternoon. A tragic 0.8 percent of students were reading on grade level at the school. There was a belief that the parents in the community were drug addicts or dealers or engaged in some criminal vice that kept them from being more engaged in the school. But the vice principal said there were other parents who were experiencing the same thing as Yesenia, of trying to get help and not getting it. The vice principal had made it her duty to resolve this disconnect, and she enlisted the support of Sacramento ACT (Area Congregations Together). Two other parents, PTHV’s other cofounders, the late Jocelyn Graves, and Sandy Johnson, joined forces and helped facilitate building stronger relationships between the school staff (who Yesenia said “wanted absolutely nothing to do with us”) and families of children attending the school. There was a resource teacher and another educator who joined in and began offering their personal time to Yesenia, Sandy, and Jocelyn, coaching them on helping their kids, a version of the Academic Parent Teacher Teams model.

Next came a quick lesson in community organizing, with Sacramento ACT showing this growing body of parents how to assess problems, identify who had the power to fix them, and come up with strategies to create change. They cleaned up the neighborhood, had abandoned cars removed, and worked on several service projects of that sort, when Yesenia returned to the initial problem of trying to resolve the disconnect between school staff and the parents in the community. At the heart of grassroots organizing is the 1-on-1, a conversation you have with someone to build a relationship of trust, identify common grievances and shared interests, and move from deadlock to action. Organizers began a conversation of “what ifs.” What if we could do 1-on-1s with the teachers? What if we invited teachers into the homes of parents (to shift power away from the school building) and have conversations and, “just  figure out what are their hopes and dreams? What are they wanting for their students?”

Fun fact: the idea of 1-on-1s between teachers and parents was the brain child of Gina Martinez-Keddy, now executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits, then an early-career organizer who trained parents in community organizing while at Sacramento Act.

“My first reaction: I said, no, no, absolutely not,” Yesenia recalls. “I wouldn’t want anybody from the school in my home because my fear, again, was they’re gonna come into my house. They’re gonna judge me. They’re gonna come and see how I live. They’re gonna come and see if my house is clean. What if I’m not the parent that they want me to be for my girls? They’ll call CPS and they’ll come and take my girls away. I was willing to do anything else, but I was terrified to have them come into my house.”

Gina listened intently, and then she asked Yesenia, why? Why are you afraid of them coming to your home and talking to you. “I told her why. And she said, ‘but you let me come.’ And I remember looking at her and telling her, ‘but I trust you. I trust you.’  

“And she said, ‘well, that’s exactly what we’re gonna try to do. We’re gonna try to build trust.'”

The Birth of PTHV

From there, Yesenia and Jocelyn conducted 1-on-1s with parents in the community first, more than 150 of them, and then focus groups with schools to determine what the needs were and how to build a bridge between families and schools. This work went on for two years, and in time mobilized more teachers and principals from other schools to join in the effort. From there, the groups went to the teachers’ union, who “were amazed by all the work we had done with the community organization and loved the model we created.” The union pledged its support.

The next step was to take results of the research, 1-on-1s, focus groups, newly formed core practices and present the idea to the superintendent of schools, then Dr. Jim Sweeney. That first visit went a lot like Yesenia’s early visits to the school. He wouldn’t meet with the group, so they returned the next day and he agreed to see them. He heard their ideas about home visits, about how members of the community, including families and teachers and others had told them what they needed from the schools, and how home visits, modeled after 1-on-1s would be a revolutionary solution.

The superintendent thought the union would not agree to teachers going into families’ homes, but Yesenia let him know they already had union buy-in. They were there to get support to pilot the home visits project, and they wanted a commitment that educators would be compensated for their time when they conducted home visits. Yesenia and her colleagues invited the superintendent to a community meeting to discuss the plan in detail. More than 2,000 families came. They challenged him to go on home visits, and requested $100,000 to conduct the initial pilot. He agreed to do 20 home visits, but didn’t agree to the money right away.

“By the fifth visit, he totally got what we were talking about. He said he saw the power in it, and that’s how we launched in those first eight schools.

“I never dreamed that it would last this long. To me, it was something that Jocelyn and I worked very hard on because we wanted to make a difference, and we did.”

Yesenia’s dear friend and partner in building what would become Parent Teacher Home Visits suffered from an illness throughout the years they conducted home visits and launched the pilot. Knowing her days might not be long, Jocelyn told Yesenia, that this work was “going to be something that one day somebody is going to remember us by, so we have to keep going.” And to a great extent, it has been in Jocelyn’s honor that Yesenia has stayed with PTHV for all 25 of these years.

“Jocelyn once said to me, ‘We have to prove people wrong. It’s not true that just because we live in a low-income community, our children can’t learn.'”

That conversation was a catalyst for re-imagining what the future of her community could be like. It started with a very real and personal challenge to support her children, but became a responsibility to help all the children in the neighborhood and beyond who bore the brunt of stereotypes, biases, and other differences.

“I was fortunate to be taught by a wonderful group of community organizers who taught me that I could be a leader, and my job was to create other leaders. The mission became bigger. I didn’t expect this to get out of Sacramento, but then I thought we could make a difference in California, and then other states came to us wanting to do Parent Teacher Home Visits.”

Parent Teacher Home Visits has made a real impact on K-12 education. “It has connected and empowered parents in places where no family engagement was taking place. It has taught them they have what it takes to engage in their child’s education.”

PTHV introduced very powerful conversations around assumptions and biases, long before the movement for educational equity entered the lexicon, Yesenia recalls. We made it practical and accessible for schools and families to have courageous conversations and hold each other accountable in meaningful ways.

“I also think strongly especially now, after all these years, and I’m a testament of, is that Parent Teacher Home Visits has given education a way of saving our children. It has saved our kids just by coming into the home and building trusting relationships with families and students. Even if that trust doesn’t happen immediately, there’s this magic that happens when a student has the opportunity to go back to the school and feel comfortable talking with those two educators that were at their home. None of that had existed before.”