Parent Teacher Home Visits (PTHV) is a simple but powerful way to unite educators and families on a common goal: helping students achieve success in school and beyond. Born in Sacramento's Meadowview neighborhood, PTHV is the leading national expert and, after more than 20 years, is still the only organization widely promoting and training educators on how to do home visits designed to build relationships.
Focusing on improving the family-school relationship leads to measurable benefits for students, families, teachers, and the school, confirmed by recent (2018) research by RTI International and Johns Hopkins University:
- Schools do better: All students do better at schools that systematically implement PTHV, even if their family did not get a visit. Student likelihood of chronic absenteeism goes down by 22%. Student odds of scoring proficient on English Language Arts tests goes up by 35%.
- Teachers change their thinking about students: They get better at engaging students, they show more empathy, and they rethink their assumptions about students.
- Families change their thinking about school: They feel more like partners with teachers, they are more likely to communicate with teachers and with the school, and they are less intimidated to get involved with their children's education.
To prepare teachers to conduct home visits, PTHV provides training sessions on how to develop a home visit practice that is relational (not punitive), available to all students (not just "problem" students), conducted by educators who visit in pairs so they can reflect together after the visit, compensates teachers for their home visit time, and centers on hopes and dreams for the child as the primary topic of conversation.
Founded in 1998 by two public school moms who were desperately seeking academic support for their children, PTHV began in eight schools in Sacramento's Meadowview neighborhood. This project evolved into a non-profit organization and word of the program's success spread beyond Sacramento. Founding parents and teachers answered hundreds of requests to train in school communities like theirs, from Alaska to Florida, in rural, suburban and urban districts across the United States. During the 2018-19 school year, PTHV and its partners trained nearly 5,000 educators at more than 700 school sites. In turn, these educators conducted more than 45,000 home visits during that period.