Parent Teacher Home Visits

Reviewed by the Sacramento Region Community Foundation

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.

Mission

PTHV advances student success and school improvement by leveraging relationships, research, and a national network of partners to advance evidence-based practices in relational home visits within a comprehensive family engagement strategy.

Needs

Funds to support the integration of a racial equity lens across PTHV's training and support modules.

Funds to support the redesign of current training modules to reflect new findings from our national research.

Funds to support the development of a new toolkit of best practices to support home visit schools.

Help keep PTHV running on a daily basis -- insurance and other office expenses add up; however, are necessary to continue and grow our work.

Equity Statement

PTHV embraces equity, both in its internal organization and in its programs. Internally, PTHV staff, trainers, and other subcontractors come from a variety of backgrounds, and their lived experiences inform and enrich the PTHV programs they share with educators. PTHV staff is comprised of 83% people of color and is woman-of-color-led. Additionally, 83% of staff are conversant or fluent in languages other than English. Among the subcontracted professionals who deliver PTHV training programs, 60% identify as people of color, and 40% are conversant or fluent in languages other than English.

Programmatically, PTHV has had a clear vision for equitable and effective family engagement, since its inception in 1997: PTHV aims to fundamentally change what it means to teach and learn for every student, family, and educator through the transformative power of trusting relationships.

PTHV home visits disrupt commonly held, biased assumptions that families are uncaring; they help redistribute and balance power between schools and families; and they create more just educational systems through a research-backed approach to family engagement that honors the wisdom and power of families. For teachers, experiencing a family’s home culture serves as a powerful learning opportunity that often exposes educators to their own biases. Honest reflection and discourse on this experience, in turn, allows them to examine how these biases influence their family engagement and instructional practices. Further, deeply listening to families and affirming students’ and families’ identities allows for authentic relationship-building to begin. These new trusting relationships have the potential to heal wounds of systemic racism and other forms of oppression, open a doorway for sharing common humanity, and help create the conditions for all students to achieve their fullest potential.

PTHV invests time, financial, and other resources in program development, ongoing staff and trainer development, and evaluation that propel relational home visits forward as a solid anti-racist, anti-oppression practice. By providing introductory and advanced training and support modules to educators, PTHV extends and deepens the home visit practice such that educators gain a deeper understanding of their students’ cultural backgrounds and personal interests as well as become better equipped to use the funds of knowledge garnered through visits to meet the individualized needs of diverse learners.

Organization Data

Summary

Organization name

Parent Teacher Home Visits

other names

PTHV

Year Established

1996

Tax id (EIN)

51-0477445

Mission Category

Education

Operating Budget

$500,001-$1 million

Organization Need

Funding: Program, Technology, Funding: Unrestricted

Demographics Served

Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx, Black/African American, Women/Female-identifying

BIPOC Leadership

Executive Director/CEO

Local Counties Served

El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Yolo

Equity Statement

Equity Statement

Address

2121 Broadway 189084 P.O. Box 189084
Sacramento, CA 95818

Service areas

Sacramento, CA, US

CT, US

CO, US

MI, US

TX, US

Phone

916-448-5290

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