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Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.11.2008
Teachers at one elementary school in Tucson are about to start making house calls.
Every parent with a child enrolled in Drachman Montessori Magnet School will get a personal home visit from a teacher by the end of the first quarter.
The school year starts today at Drachman, 1085 S. 10th Ave., and at other Tucson Unified School District schools.
"It's going to change things in a positive way," Principal Jesús Celaya said as he explained his new home-visit initiative at a meeting Thursday with four first-year teachers at the school, which teaches first- through sixth-graders.
"I see parents when their children are dismissed or when they come to see a concert, but I don't see those faces in the classrooms," he said.
Complicating things is the school's Montessori model, because parents sometimes don't understand it or know how to help out at home.
But with Drachman seeing a dip in test scores last year, Celaya is trying to recruit more help in meeting academic goals.
There was a time when if teachers rang the doorbell, that spelled trouble.
Tanya Lachowicz, a kindergarten and first-grade teacher who used to make home visits as a counselor, said one initial hurdle to overcome is the negative association that comes when school staff members show up on doorsteps.
"A lot of times, parents think anytime teachers are coming to the house, it's because their child has done something wrong," she said. "Even at parent-teacher conferences, some parents come in almost prepared for you to tell them what's wrong with their child."
Instead, Lachowicz said, it's a way for teachers to answer parents' questions, talk about homework strategies or just build relationships. "It's a chance for us to come to families and ask to be invited into their world."
At meetings with veteran teachers, Celaya was peppered with questions, largely about the logistics.
"One issue as a teacher is that you never have enough time in the day or week to get done what you need to do, so there's a little question about how we're going to fit that in," Lachowicz said. "But every teacher realizes how important and how valuable it is. It's a great extra information-gathering opportunity for the teacher and the family if it works the way it's supposed to."
Home visits, of course, aren't new and haven't always been used as a disciplinary tool — some government-sponsored preschool programs, for example, have required them for years. But the idea of a positive home-school connection has been gaining more traction since the 1990s as educators realize that parents have a greater role to play than just shoveling breakfast into Junior and bundling him off to class.
Since 1998, Sacramento City Unified School District in California has had an aggressive home-visit program, sponsored by the district, its teachers union and ecumenical groups. It encourages home visits from kindergarten through 12th grade in the bottom tier of its schools.
The program, which triggered legislative interest and funding, has been used as a model in other areas. Participating schools have seen better attendance, stronger academic performance and fewer disciplinary problems, said Carrie Rose, executive director of the Sacramento Parent-Teacher Home Visit Project.
"What we found was that there was a pretty pervasive cycle of blame at schools," Rose said. "Parents were saying that if the kids weren't succeeding, it must be the teacher's fault. Teachers were saying they were working so hard that if the kids were not succeeding, it must be the family's fault."
At the end of the day, the kids still weren't succeeding, and everybody was mad at each other, she said. The visits have helped to rebuild trust.
Celaya became a fan of home visits as a classroom teacher at Tucson's Mission View Elementary School at 2800 S. Eighth Ave. Sometimes, he said, he'd get only five parents to show up for conferences, even though notices were sent out in several languages.
When he started going into homes, he said, he learned that parents were staying away in part because some of them had bad experiences as children, including being punished for not using English.
In one case, he said, he met some Spanish-speaking parents who had been told they shouldn't speak to their bilingual children or it would confuse them. The house was a silent one, with the parents talking minimally to their children, who were sitting in front of the television set absorbing English-language shows.
Celaya encouraged the parents to continue developing literacy in both languages and to freely communicate with their children. They took his advice and started volunteering in a kindergarten classroom at school, so they could begin to learn English.
Over the year, he watched the couple's fourth-grader make academic bounds in English.
"That whole discussion took 20 minutes. But in that amount of time, you can learn a ton about a child and about how families approach education," Celaya said.
Melissa Martinez, a 36-year-old bookkeeper with a second-grader at Drachman, said she's looking forward to the visit.
When her daughter Alyssa was in preschool, her teacher came to visit. "She got really excited and wanted to show her teacher her room," Martinez said.
She said that unlike in parent conferences, which generally are scheduled in 15-minute increments, "we just sat at the table and talked. It didn't feel rushed at all."
Teresa Guerrero, 45, is likewise optimistic about having the opportunity to meet the teachers of 8-year-old Rodrigo and 7-year-old Rocio and talk about strengths, fears and expectations.
It will be an extension of what she did last year, when she invited their teachers to lunch at her home.
"For me, it's no longer territory that belongs to the school. It's where my comfort zone is, and it's a chance for them to see the kinds of things that are important in our lives," Guerrero said. "A lot of learning occurs in the home environment, and if they can get insight into what our children's interests are outside of school, they can really use that to ignite learning."
Not every parent is going to be as enthusiastic. And that's OK, Celaya said, adding that they can make arrangements to meet at a restaurant or just keep the relationship confined to school conferences.
And he's doing what he can to address the logistics. Teachers get out early on Wednesdays to focus on professional development, so he's allowing them to use that time for visits. He will set aside one of the parent-teacher conference nights for home visits as well.
Because the bulk of his teachers are monolingual Anglos and his students are largely Hispanic, he is asking staffers to go in pairs and to take bilingual paraprofessionals with them to serve as translators. For refugee students of African or Arabic descent, he said, he will line up district translators.
"There was a time in the past when educational philosophy was that a kid came to us as an empty vessel, and the wisdom of that child and that family was not considered valuable for academic purposes," Celaya said.
"But what we know is that we should be trying to figure out what life experiences parents have had and how they have influenced their children, because they have a wealth of knowledge to share," he added.
On StarNet: Find more education and TUSD news and resources at azstarnet.com/education.
● Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield at 806-7754 or at rbodfield@azstarnet.com.
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