Hitting the for home visits

Home visits can bridge the chasm between families and schools by increasing parent engagement, student achievement and attendance. Here are some tips for effective visits.

n the fall of 2007, a teacher at our 1,000-student independent studies high school in urban Long Beach approached me with frustration. This caring and hard-driving professional was tired of 50 percent of his students disappearing (dropping out) before they completed 90 days on his roll sheets. His phone calls home were met with recordings extolling him to Have a blessed day, or informing him that this number has been disconnected. In either case, he was having trouble making the human connection. I want to go out to the kids homes. Will you go with me? the teacher asked. And so our experiment with home visits began. We used the ready, fire, aim approach to home visits. The morning after our conversation, we visited a students home. The mother welcomed us into the living room in Spanish. Thank goodness the teacher is bilingual! I made a mental note that we should have researched the home language in advance. The student rushed out of the bathroom wearing only a small towel around his waist.

I made another mental note that we should always go out in teams. Final mental note: Do some research about how to do home visits!

Samples of school and district home visits

Teachers and administrators from many schools across the country are hitting the streets in an attempt to increase parent, community and school communication. Each school or district model is slightly different, but each has at its core a desire to bridge the chasm between families and institutions: to increase parent participation, school attendance and student achievement. Benefits seem to be particularly apparent in low-income communities with large numbers of immigrant families who might be intimidated by the system (Delisio, 2008). Sacramento City Schools, for example, has sponsored a voluntary teacher home visit program for the last decade. According

By Amy Colcord Stuht

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to an article in Education World (2008), students became more motivated after home visits, resulting in higher achievement, reduced student misbehavior, increased parent involvement, and greater grass roots interest in school reform. Most schools and districts experimenting with home visits are not acting in isolation in their efforts to embrace families through a home visit plan. The Sacramento program, along with similar programs in Kansas City, Mo. and Columbus, Ohio, were launched with the support of community groups, often coalitions of churches. In some cases, these community organizations wrote grants to help pay for the extra time teachers spend in training for and conducting home visits (Delisio, 2008). In the fall of 2008, Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert put a different spin on home visits. They led district and city employees in a Saturday door-knocking activity inviting potential dropouts back to school. Site personnel opened the schools for registration and parent meetings that weekend as part of this unprecedented city- and district-wide effort to stem the flow of dropouts. The Dallas districts graduation rate is only 62.5 percent (Fox, 2008). Such pilot efforts have encouraged schools and districts from Colorado to North Carolina, Missouri to Chicago, and as far away as England, Australia and Japan to institute home visits as a requirement, a linchpin in their school reform plans (SteeleCarlin, 2001).

Develop a checklist. Schools or districts

attempting widespread home visit programs benefit from a guide for personnel. Additionally, individual teachers should develop some method of documentation. We record each visit in a student database designed by our independent studies high school.
Always go in teams. We realized the im-

ers, is important. We use our visits for many purposes, but we always carry a cell phone. The teacher on my team speaks fluent Spanish, but we can call an office aide to translate in Khmer or Vietnamese.
Timing is everything. If a school has a

welcome visit policy, it is professional and courteous to make an appointment with the

portance of teamwork during our first visit. A teachers safety or professionalism should not be jeopardized because of home visits.
Decide upon your purpose. Sacramento

How to conduct a home visit

While the benefits of home visits are clear, when teachers plan their first visits, they can make mistakes or miss important elements. Like the independent studies teacher and me stumbling onto techniques that reduce anxiety and protect participants (including teachers), long-standing programs have developed protocols that guide home visits. Here are some of the things we have learned, but teachers in different settings, visiting students for different purposes, will need to create their own approaches.

schools want teachers to make at least one home visit per student every year. Dallas officials conducted a one-time high profile drive to collect potential dropouts and get them enrolled in school. We want to check up on alternative education students with whom we have lost contact. We problemsolve, mediate, and sometimes transfer students to more appropriate settings as a result of our visits. We keep them in the school family.
Decide how you want to communicate. Some schools use the initial visit as a time to meet parents and fill out necessary forms and paperwork. Others use these visits to investigate the students study space. Still others use the visit as a follow-up when a student is falling behind or having behavioral difficulties. Deciding what the communication purpose and mode are, as well as making preparations for possible language barri-

family. For other purposes, such as checking to see if a student actually lives at a particular address, an unannounced visit works well. We have discovered that for us, unannounced visits are best made between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., when students and parents are most likely to be at home, yet when someone knocking on the door in a dangerous neighborhood might not be too frightening for families. Because we are trying to bring students back into the fold when other communication methods have failed, the majority of our visits are unannounced.
Keep your conversations with families friendly, but hold a timeline in mind. Many cultures appreciate personal small talk, but other cultures value a businesslike and clipped pace. It is important to read the situation, but not to fall into cultural or racial stereotypes. Regardless, it is necessary to move into the meat of the meeting within a reasonable amount of time. Be mindful of what you wear. Do not wear an abundance of expensive jewelry. Do not wear perfume or cologne in case fam-

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ily members have allergies. Be sure to wear socks in case you are welcomed into a home where courtesy requires you to remove your shoes at the door.
Above all, it is important to treat people as you would like to be treated. The visit should not be set up to feel like a judgmental or snoopy intrusion.

For an example of extensive, formalized home visit checklists and forms, visit www. michigan.gov/documents/Guide_to_Home_ Visits_44583_7.pdf. However, be prepared to develop your own format based on the purpose of your visit and the nature of your community.

Have home visits worked for us?

We have visited one student every Wednesday morning for almost two years. While researchers credit home visits with increasing student attendance and achievement, as well as both student and parent attitude and engagement with school, it is hard to quantify how effective our visits to highly

at-risk alternative education students have been. We have not been able to visit each student on just one teachers ever-changing roll sheet. Given individual teacher variables, it would be difficult for us to tease apart the teacher effect even if we were to establish a control group within the school and follow matched pairs. Finally, the sample size is too small to draw conclusions. In spite of these limitations, we have received encouraging anecdotal feedback from both parents and students. Most comments include thanks for the level of caring and amount of time we take to make personal connections. We feel a greater connection with and more empathy for the students and families we serve, as well. Instead of complaining about a constraint, we have taken the initiative to make changes, and feel more empowered and hopeful because of our action.

a deeper professional bond as fellow educators, not just teacher and administrator, through conducting visits together and planning interventions based on what we experience in our students homes. n

References
Delisio, E. (2008). Home visits forge school, family links, Education World. www.education-world.com/a_admin/ admin/admin342.shtml. Fox, L. (2008). DISD leaders will hit the streets to save dropouts. The Dallas Morning News : Dallas, TX. Steele-Carlin, S. (2008). Teacher visits hit home, Education World. www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin241. shtml.

Forging deeper professional bonds

An unexpected outcome of our experiment is that the teacher and I have forged

Amy Colcord Stuht is the former assistant principal at Educational Partnership High School in Long Beach. She currently serves as assistant principal at Jordan High School in Long Beach.

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