By Hipolito R. Corella and Sarah Garrecht Gassen
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Teacher Becky Brock includes card tricks, roller blading and a game of fetch with a dog named Waldo in her recipe for good learning.
Those activities were part of a visit Brock made last week to the home of Justin Vining, one of her sixth-grade pupils at Old Vail Middle School, 13299 E. Colossal Cave Road.
"It makes a wonderful difference," Brock said about home visits. "It allows you to get to know the children, and they get to know you as people with lives and interests."
For more than a decade, Vail School District east of Tucson has supported teacher home visits, offering tuition reimbursement or extra pay to those who make a minimum number of home visits each year.
And Vail isn't the only local school district to recognize the value of encouraging teachers to get involved beyond the classroom. Others in the Tucson area offer incentives that vary from district to district.
To Brock, the more-personal relationship she has with pupils - looking at family photo albums, meeting pets or baking cookies - makes pupils and their parents more comfortable in approaching her during the school year.
While the visits are helping Brock pay for her master's degree, she looks forward most to knowing more about her pupils and their families.
"We talk very little about school during that time. We have other times scheduled for that. This is literally a time to just get to know each other," Brock said.
It also gives her more information about the pupil's background and interests.
BUILDING TEACHER-PARENT CONNECTION
* Keep parents informed about what's happening in school through newsletters or monthly calendars.
* Provide time at school for
children to share what they've done or learned at home.
* Regularly invite parents to school and include them in classroom activities.
* Be responsive to parent and child needs (time constraints,
literacy level, number of parents in the home).
* Keep in contact with parents and families, and let parents know the school wants their participation.
* Create activities that enable parents and children to experience success.
* Greet parents at school meetings, provide refreshments and begin and end the meeting on time. Take notes on parent
concerns and ask for ideas for future meeting agendas.
* Send home a note early in the school year with school and teacher contact information, teaching philosophy, class rules and expectations and an invitation for parents to be involved.
SOURCE: Florida Center for Parent Involvement, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, University of South Florida
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Bob Vining said Brock was the third teacher who has visited his son at home.
"In my opinion, the teachers who have come over to the house for visits have also been the ones who have shown more concerns about the students," Vining said.
Teachers who meet a minimum number of home visits are eligible for $600 in extra pay or $900 in tuition reimbursement.
Brock and Vail Superintendent Calvin Baker said the value of the program is the better communication it creates between educators and the community they serve .
"I'm always very suspicious of educators who say they've changed one little thing in their total program and it caused their test scores to go up or down, because education is so extraordinarily complex," he said.
"The key element is that teachers demonstrate that they are interested in their students outside the school environment," Baker said.
Teachers have gone bike and horse riding with their pupils and get to see their rooms, pets and things at home that are important to them.
Tucson Unified School District does not have a formal program to reward teachers for extra involvement, but beginning this year will give each school four $500 stipends for teachers who take on a "leadership position," said Marilyn Freed, president of the Tucson Education Association, which represents the district's teachers.
Some extra-duty positions, such as certain athletic coaches, automatically receive a stipend, but most teachers volunteer their time, Freed said.
"I think there are people who simply go above and beyond. They just think, 'This is what I ought to do,' and go forth and do it," Freed said.
If districts can't pay teachers for their extra efforts, they make sure they at least get a pat on the back, Freed said.
"That is very motivating and powerful," she said.
Penny Kotterman, president of the Arizona Education Association, said it's getting harder for teachers not to be involved in school activities outside the classroom.
That's because an increasing number of parent-teacher school advisory groups that work on issues like campus discipline or curriculum are joining more traditional campus groups like PTOs.
"There are a lot of ways teachers are involved with parents. The schools demand that nowadays," Kotterman said.
Steve Olguin, a seventh- grade teacher at Sunnyside's Apollo Middle School, 265 W. Nebraska St., said involvement outside his classroom is part of his workday.
As the sponsor of the school's student council, Olguin organizes trips to Washington, D.C., and the state Legislature, "to see how government works and to broaden their experiences."
At school, Olguin said he encourages all parents to visit his classroom and uses his classroom phone and the Internet to keep in touch with parents who cannot make it to school.
"Parent-teacher communication is essential," says Olguin. "A quarterly parent-teacher conference is not enough.
"And simply sending memos to parents is the least effective."
Sunnyside School District is still working to finalize a menu of items teachers can do outside the classroom to increase student achievement and involve parents in the schools, said Monique Soria, a district spokeswoman.
Those things will get teachers extra money through the state's voter-approved education sales tax, she said.
Amphitheater Public Schools offers teachers a career ladder pay-for-performance program. The almost $3 million cost is split 50-50 between the state and the district, said manager Deanna Day.
"The idea is for teachers to become more involved in learning their craft as a way to increase student achievement," Day said.
"We're not looking to ask teachers to do more work or work a longer day, but to look at the quality of the time and the quality of what you do in the classroom," she said.
Teachers are graded on how well they teach the first few years in the program, then move on to student assessment and more research-oriented projects.
Brock and Justin build a card house at his home near Rocking K Ranch.
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For example, when Day participated in career ladder as a teacher, she spent one year trying "not to ever answer my own question as a teacher, but to constantly ask questions to get the kids to get to the answer."
Teachers earn $1,000 the first year they pass the career ladder teaching assessments, and $500 more each year after that, Day said. Almost 1,000 Amphi teachers - about 67 percent - participate, she said.
Amphi teachers also receive extra pay for academic or athletic coaching after school, but teachers don't take on extra responsibilities just for the cash.
"Teachers do that because they're involved, because they care and they have a passion for it," Day said.
Kindergarten teacher Sherry Romanoski said she doesn't stop at encouraging parents to get involved in her classroom, "I beg. I try to get them in, any way I can."
Over the summer, Roman-oski used parents and fifth- and sixth-grade pupils at Marana's Butterfield Elementary, 3400 W. Massingale Road, to help her in a project to help better prepare pre-kinder and kindergartners for school.
She used a $10,000 grant to put together 200 "literacy bags" filled with books, games and other activities parents and students can check out from her classroom and the school library.
One literacy kit had children predict whether items in the kit, like a popsicle stick or sponge, would float or sink in a plastic bowl filled with water.
They will let parents in the area know about the program through traditional newsletters, the school parents group and posting a message on the school marquee.
Romanoski said she enjoys working with volunteers.
"Parents give a different perspective - they'll say I think my child will enjoy reading this rather than that."
Students can offer a different perspective, too. "One of the students reminded me that the directions didn't say, 'Have fun.'"
They do now.
