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24 Leadership

I

n the all o 2007, a teacher at our

1,000-student independent studies

high school in urban Long Beach ap-

proached me with rustration. This

caring and hard-driving proessional wastired o 50 percent o his students disappear-

ing (dropping out) beore they completed 90

days on his roll sheets. His phone calls home

were met with recordings extolling him to

Have a blessed day, or inorming him that

this number has been disconnected. In ei-

ther 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, fre, aim approachto home visits. The morning ater our con-

versation, 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 o 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 rom 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

dierent, but each has at its core a desire to

bridge the chasm between amilies and in-

stitutions: to increase parent participation,

school attendance and student achieve-

ment. Benefts seem to be particularly ap-

parent in low-income communities withlarge numbers o immigrant amilies who

might be intimidated by the system (Deli-

sio, 2008).

Sacramento City Schools, or example,

has sponsored a voluntary teacher home

visit program or the last decade. According

By Amy Colcord Stuht

Hitting the

for home visitsHome visits can bridge the

chasm between amilies

and schools by increasing

parent engagement,

student achievement and

attendance. Here are some

tips or eective visits.

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November/December 2009 25

to an article in Education World(2008), stu-

dents became more motivated ater home

visits, result ing in higher achievement, re-

duced student misbehavior, increased par-

ent involvement, and greater grass roots

interest in school reorm.

Most schools and districts experiment-

ing with home visits are not acting in iso-

lation in their eorts to embrace amilies

through a home visit plan. The Sacramento

program, along with similar programs in

Kansas City, Mo. and Columbus, Ohio,

were launched with the support o commu-

nity groups, oten coalitions o churches. In

some cases, these community organizations

wrote grants to help pay or the extra time

teachers spend in training or and conduct-

ing home visits (Delisio, 2008).

In the all o 2008, Dallas Independent

School District Superintendent Michael

Hinojosa and Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert

put a dierent 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 or

registration and parent meetings that week-

end as part o this unprecedented city- and

district-wide eort to stem the ow o drop-

outs. The Dallas districts graduation rate is

only 62.5 percent (Fox, 2008).

Such pilot eorts have encouragedschools and districts rom Colorado to

North Carolina, Missouri to Chicago, and

as ar away as England, Australia and Japan

to institute home visits as a requirement, a

linchpin in their school reorm plans (Steele-

Carlin, 2001).

How to conduct a home visit

While the beneits o home visits are

clear, when teachers plan their frst visits,

they can make mistakes or miss important

elements. Like the independent studiesteacher and me stumbling onto techniques

that reduce anxiety and protect partici-

pants (including teachers), long-standing

programs have developed protocols that

guide home visits. Here are some o the

things we have learned, but teachers in di-

erent settings, visiting students or dier-

ent purposes, will need to create their own

approaches.

Develop a checklist. Schools or districts

attempting widespread home visit programs

beneft rom a guide or personnel. Addi-

tionally, individual teachers should develop

some method o documentation. We record

each visit in a student database designed by

our independent studies high school.

Always go in teams. We realized the im-

portance o teamwork during our frst visit.

A teachers saety or proessionalism should

not be jeopardized because o home visits.

Decide upon your purpose.Sacramento

schools want teachers to make at least one

home visit per student every year. Dallas

ofcials conducted a one-time high profle

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 problem-

solve, mediate, and sometimes transer

students to more appropriate settings as

a result o our visits. We keep them in the

school amily.

Decide how you want to communicate.Some schools use the initial visit as a time

to meet parents and fll out necessary orms

and paperwork. Others use these visits to

investigate the students study space. Still

others use the visit as a ollow-up when a stu-

dent is alling behind or having behavioral

difculties. Deciding what the communica-

tion purpose and mode are, as well as mak-

ing preparations or possible language barri-

ers, is important. We use our visits or many

purposes, but we always carry a cell phone.

The teacher on my team speaks uent Span-

ish, but we can call an ofce aide to translate

in Khmer or Vietnamese.

Timing is everything.I a school has a

welcome visit policy, it is proessional and

courteous to make an appointment with the

amily. For other purposes, such as check-

ing to see i a student actually lives at a par-

ticular address, an unannounced visit works

well. We have discovered that or us, unan-

nounced 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 some-

one knocking on the door in a dangerous

neighborhood might not be too rightening

or amilies. Because we are trying to bring

students back into the old when other com-

munication methods have ailed, the major-

ity o 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 all into cultural or ra-

cial stereotypes. Regardless, it is necessary

to move into the meat o the meeting within

a reasonable amount o time.

Be mindful of what you wear. Do not

wear an abundance o expensive jewelry. Do

not wear perume or cologne in case am-

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26 Leadership

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 peo-

ple as you would like to be treated.The visit

should not be set up to eel like a judgmental

or snoopy intrusion.

For an example of extensive, formalized

home visit checklists and forms, visitwww.

michigan.gov/documents/Guide_to_Home_

Visits_44583_7.pdf. However, be prepared to

develop your own format based on the pur-

pose of your visit and the nature of your com-

munity.

Have home visits worked for us?

We have visited one student every

Wednesday morning or almost two years.

While researchers credit home visits with

increasing student attendance and achieve-

ment, as well as both student and parent at-

titude and engagement with school, it is hard

to quantiy how eective our visits to highly

at-risk a lternative education students have

been. We have not been able to visit each stu-

dent on just one teachers ever-changing roll

sheet. Given individual teacher variables, it

would be difcult or us to tease apart the

teacher eect even i we were to establish a

control group within the school and ollow

matched pairs. Finally, the sample size is too

small to draw conclusions.

In spite o these limitations, we have

received encouraging anecdotal eedback

rom both parents and students. Most com-

ments include thanks or the level o caring

and amount o time we take to make per-

sonal connections. We eel a greater con-

nection with and more empathy or the stu-

dents and amilies we serve, as well. Instead

o complaining about a constraint, we have

taken the initiative to make changes, and

eel more empowered and hopeul because

o our action.

Forging deeper professional bonds

An unexpected outcome o our experi-

ment is that the teacher and I have orged

a deeper proessional bond as ellow edu-

cators, 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 orge

school, amily 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.education-

world.com/a_admin/admin/admin241.

shtml.

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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