Corner CAFE CoP #3: Authentic Partnerships with Families

Nikevia Thomas:

Thank you, everybody, for joining us for the Corner CAFE of family engagement community of practice from Maryland and Pennsylvania. We’re going to get started. Thank you for joining us today. To get us started with today’s community of practice, we’d like to get to know everybody, so if you could, would you please do two things, type in the chat your name, your state, your entity, and the role that you serve at your entity or organization?

And then we’d like to share with you access to our Community of Practice Padlet for Family Engagement and answer this question in the Padlet, what do you do most at a cafe, socialize or work? To access the Padlet, please type mochalatte, all one word. What do you do most at a cafe? Do you socialize or do you work? I’m going to stop sharing for a moment so that I can show you the Padlet. Here we go. Here’s our lovely Padlet in the Getting to Know You section. What do you do most at a cafe, work or socialize? You can type your responses in the add comment section here. I’m going to start, I work. Oops. What else can I do? I’m going to turn down our music.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

We have so many great people here from all over, we have people from Texas, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles. Welcome, everybody.

Nikevia Thomas:

Welcome. I am seeing that. That voice you hear, everybody, is Jessica. She is my colleague here at CAFE. We’ll give everybody a few minutes to access everything. I see a lot of people from all over.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

For those of you that are just coming in, we’ll put the Padlet link in the chat, and so please make sure that you access the Padlet. The password is mochalatte, all lowercase. You’ll find a number of resources that we’re sharing in the Padlet from our past community of practices, as well as information for today that you’ll find helpful.

Nikevia Thomas:

If you haven’t done so already, we do invite you to share in the chat your name, the state you’re from, the agency or organization you are joining us for, and your role there. Sure thing.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

I got it.

Nikevia Thomas:

Oh, thank you. I was typing, it is mochalatte, all one word.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

With that, do you think we’re ready to get started?

Nikevia Thomas:

Yep, I think so. Let’s continue. I have a lot of windows open here. You have seen and heard us here, here’s who we are. My name is Nikevia Thomas and I’m a Senior Specialist at MAEC. I work on a lot of projects for our Statewide Family Engagement Center, known as CAFE. I do a lot of work on our Maryland projects and also our interstate projects with Pennsylvania. And we have Jessica Webster. Jessica is a Senior Family Engagement Specialist at MAEC. Jessica, is there anything you want to say?

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Just how excited we are to be here today. As a former principal, I’m so excited for our topic today talking about home visiting, especially in that K through 12 space, which is not something that I was super familiar with before I had the chance to hear from Parent Teacher Home Visit. I’m so excited that we’re sharing that out with everyone today. Welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes. We are the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, or MAEC. We are a champion of innovation, collaboration, and equity.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Our agenda-

Nikevia Thomas:

Go for it.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Our agenda for today, obviously, we have some welcome and introductions and then we’ll spend the bulk of our time learning about Parent Teacher Home Visits. At the end, we’ll save time for some questions and interaction, we’re hoping there’ll be a lot, and our closing out activities. Next slide, please. A couple quick things about Zoom etiquette. Please use the chat box to talk to other participants. Make sure that you click on the chat icon at the bottom of the top toolbar in your screen. Please do not use the raise hand function.

We will have a community of practice throughout, but you may place your questions in the chat or in the Padlet under the “I Wonder” section and we’ll make sure to get to those as we go through the process. We do have the opportunity for live captioning. Next slide, please. That should show up at the bottom of your screen by default under CC live transcript. If you would like to turn them on or off, please click on the live transcript button and you can select to have the closed captioning or live transcript or you can select to hide it, if you so choose.

Nikevia Thomas:

Thank you, Jessica. We’d like to give you some background about MAEC. MAEC was founded in 1992 as an education nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to high-quality education for culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. MAEC envisions a day when all students have equitable opportunities to learn and achieve at high levels. Our mission is to promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice. Now, a little bit about CAFE, one of our projects. CAFE, or the Collaborative Action for Family Engagement, is a project of MAEC and we provide statewide family engagement for Maryland and Pennsylvania. We are the only statewide family engagement center that serves two states. We apply an equity lens to family engagement by building relationships among schools, parents, and community organizations, and we improve the development and academic achievement of all students.

The purpose of our community of practice, the Corner CAFE, is to create cross-state collaboration between Maryland and Pennsylvania. There are resources and successes that can be shared from both states and we want to promote that. This is an opportunity for networking to share resources and strategies with colleagues. This was a community of practice that was developed for practitioners by practitioners. Jessica and I, we work alongside a team of education stakeholders to help put this community of practice together. With that, we emphasize a systemic, integrated, and comprehensive family engagement approach to our work and we use the family engagement priorities from the Department of Ed for Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Let’s dive right in. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the NAFSCE Summit in October, where I had the privilege of attending a session by Parent Teacher Home Visiting. I would like to introduce to you our presenters for today. I’m so excited for the rich discussion that that will happen and the learning that’s going to happen today. So, next slide, please. With us today, we have Yesenia Ramirez. She is a trainer, founding parent, and senior advisor at Parent Teacher Home Visits. She helped lead the community organizing efforts that launched PTHV in 1997. As a parent who felt disconnected from her children’s school and whose own daughter was struggling, she brought critical expertise to the development of the PTHV model. She currently supports training and program development for the national network, ensuring the delivery of high-quality training modules, developing a certified national training team, and leading national PTHV trainings. Her story has inspired tens of thousands of educators, families, and community members across the country. She has six daughters and eight grandchildren and she has lived in Sacramento for 25 years and is fluent in both Spanish and English.

Joining her today is Nancy Lopez, who’s a national trainer for PTHV and a family and community engagement resource teacher in the Elk Grove Unified School District, the fifth largest school district in California. With more than 19 years of professional experience in public education, Nancy holds teaching and administrative credentials and has oversight of 68 school sites that conduct home visits. She credits her home visit practice with not only improving her teaching, but also with making her a better person. Home visits have enabled her to take what she learns about students’ lives and incorporate these lessons into the learning experience and she’s able to support families with their hopes and dreams for their children. Nancy is a first-generation Mexican American, she can fluently speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, with Spanish being her native language. Yesenia and Nancy, thank you so much for joining us today and we’re going to turn it over to you.

Yesenia Ramirez:

Thank you so much, Jessica, for that wonderful introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning the parts of the West Coast, we are still in the morning. It is an honor and a pleasure to be with all of you here today and it is really exciting to share with you all about Parent Teacher Home Visit. Nancy and I have a quick agenda for you and what we’re going to cover with our time with you today. As you can see here, we really want to do some connecting to the work and we are going to do an overview of Parent Teacher Home Visit. This is not the entire training, it’s an overview of some of the core components of what our training involves. And then we’ll do some next steps and some Q&A, as Jessica said, with our time together here. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Nancy so she can get us started.

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you, Yesenia. Welcome, everyone. Good morning if you’re over here on the West Coast, good afternoon over in the East Coast, and hello to everyone else in-between. To get us started, if we can move on to the next slide here, I’m going to have you start thinking a little bit more about family engagement and just thinking about some of those things that maybe you are part of or you have been part of. If I can get to the next slide so we can see the questions, please. Thank you. Also, if you’re not by your computer or your device, if you can come on back, we are going to go into breakout rooms in a minute here.

I want you to start thinking, what family engagement strategies do you tend to use most frequently, what is the impact of your family engagement efforts? I also like to look at this as a parent. I have a second grader, too, and so also, I’m an engaged as much as I can in at her school and here at home with family engagement, so thinking about those strategies, what is the impact of those? We’re going to give you about nine minutes to go into a breakout room and have that discussion with others in that breakout room and then we will have a share out and get back. I think we are ready to go ahead and go into our breakout rooms.

Nancy Lopez:

Okay, so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to invite you to go ahead and use the chat box and to go ahead and share with us what were some of those, maybe a theme that maybe was, during your discussion, during your breakout room, on what family engagement strategies you tend to use most frequently or the impact of those efforts. I’ll go ahead and look at the chat box and see what pops in there. I think maybe also, too, our group is not very, very large here, so if you feel like you really want to share out and say it out loud, too, go ahead and unmute and then you can go ahead and share. I do see one in the chat box right now, most frequent is technology-based. Again, if you feel like you would like to share out loud, go ahead, feel free to unmute. Family engagement in our district consists of events, curriculum nights, using community partnerships to support families. Our strategy is personal invitation, needs assessment, trusted community leaders.

Cynthia:

I just wanted to share out that everybody is really working hard on parent and family engagement and each LEA is different and parents have good intentions to actually be there, but when we look at social-emotional learning and supports, we have to also look at our parents. Our parents really do wish to be there, but they’re so overwhelmed with trying to put food on the table, trying to get dinner on the table, trying to help their kids with their homework, trying to do the wash, trying to do everything. I think parents really do need to have some social-emotional support themselves. How do we meet parents where they are, not where we wish them to be? We have to look at that and say, “Well, education is relationship-driven, “so sometimes they just need someone to be there to listen to them and build that genuine, authentic relationship, that circle of trust, Covey circle of trust, and then they’ll come to you more often. How do we meet them where they’re at so that they can be more involved?

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you, Cynthia, for sharing that with us.

Cynthia:

Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you. This is wonderful, wonderful.

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you. I see a couple others that popped in the chat box, as well, active listening, ask parents what they need and then provide it. I know I probably missed a few here, but I want to thank you all for sharing this and for you also, Cynthia, for sharing out loud. All of what we are saying on the strategies we use, it’s very important, yes, and I know for myself personally, too, it’s like, “But what else can I do or what’s that other missing piece to this?” Again, I thank you very much. I’m going to go ahead and move on to the next slide, because it ties in with what we are talking about right now with family engagement, with the strategies.

On your screen here, you see a chart of different strategies, events, that are of family engagement that you might have shared out or talked about in your discussion group. This is courtesy of the Flamboyan Foundation. What I want you to look at this here is I want you just to look at this chart and see where all these strategies are popping up and what you are most familiar with or what you talked about during in your chat room. I want you to think about the differences, though, between the lower impact strategies versus the higher impact strategies. And then the other thing that I want you to keep in mind is that family engagement should be relational, it should build capacity of families and staff and be linked to learning.

I’m just going to give you a few seconds here to look at this and think about the differences between the lower impact and the higher impact. And then just as we discussed, too, what will generate the biggest impact? Looking at these strategies, what is it that will generate the biggest impact in family engagement? Just again, a little personal note here, all of these are great strategies, great events to have. I know for myself as a beginning teacher, I focused a lot on those lower impact strategies such as those celebrations, the potlucks, the family support services. I taught kindergarten for over 13 years and I know that those performances and showcases were a huge hit, where I probably saw all of my families at that one event, so it was great, but I always kept on wanting to go over more to the higher impact side of these strategies, especially with home visits and positive phone calls home, I never had time to do that.

But once I started going out and building those relationships with my families and conducting those home visits, families would come to me and ask me, “How can we help you, Ms. Lopez? What is it that we can do to make your life easier?” I’d always just think, oh my gosh, no, no, no, I’m here for you, but then I thought, you know what? Yes, would you be able to help me with the performances and the showcases and the potlucks? I know my families enjoyed the potlucks and so I left them in charge of those events, because like I said, it’s something that they enjoyed coming to and doing, so then, it got me to have more time to do those higher impact, those strategies that would get me the biggest impact for my students and my families with academic. As it says up top, that family engagement should be relational and it should build capacity for not just families, but also for staff and for myself, building my capacity to be the best teacher that I could be for my students and my families was ultimately what I wanted.

Going into their homes and learning about them and making those positive phone calls really did build that relationship. I was able to learn more about my families and be able to really have the biggest impact for them, for me to them, and we would work together on the academic side of things. It wasn’t just the potlucks and the performances, although everyone enjoyed those. Again, this is just a very powerful slide for me as an educator that I still, even today, use because I want to make sure that there’s a balance with those fun events and those fun activities, but ultimately getting to that higher impact side of things, where we really want to make it more personalized. Again, this is courtesy of the Flamboyan Foundation, so if you’d like to get a copy of this, that’s where this was from. With that said, I’m going to go ahead and move on and we’re going to talk a little bit more about Parent Teacher Home Visits, where it started. For that, I’m going to go ahead and pass it on over to Yesenia.

Yesenia Ramirez:

Thank you, Nancy. On our next slide, you are going to see a little bit of the history of Parent Teacher Home Visit and how it all started. You heard, in the wonderful introduction that Jessica did, about me.,I was part of the beginning of how it was all created. It began here in my district, where my children still attend, in Sacramento City Unified School District. It started back in 1996 as a community organizing strategy through a community organization called Sacramento Area Congregations Together, or Sacramento ACT. Sacramento ACT came into our community to help us work on a lot different issues that we had, typical things that community organizations work on. We started by cleaning our community, getting some of the houses that were boarded and our kids would go in there and get hurt, so cleaning around the school where our kids were attending.

And then the other big thing that we wanted to work on was on the nonexistent relationships between the community and the elementary school where our children were attending. There was no communication, there was no relationships, no trust. We were both sides doing the minimum, so we really wanted to work on those relationships and see how we could be able to connect with each other more. I was listening to Cynthia and I felt so identified with what she was saying when we were doing all this work, because I had six little girls back then, they’re all women now, adults, but I did feel overwhelmed. I didn’t know how to help my child. My oldest was in fifth grade and she was reading at a first-grade level. For me, the disconnection or the barrier was not the language, I knew how to speak English. For me, the disconnection and the barrier was the way school talked about education and what I understood about education and I didn’t know how to help my child.

I became involved because I needed the other side. I needed my educators, my children’s teachers, I needed their help and I didn’t know how to ask for that help, so I became involved. I worked for two years, there was three of us parents, then it became two of us, and we started doing focus groups. We started knocking on doors and our community and really doing a listening campaign. The idea of home visits came from an amazing, incredible group of educators that were also leaders in this specific community organization and the only one thing that they were doing to engage their families was that they were visiting them. They knew about them, they knew their story, they had been in their home, they were like family. We wanted to see if we could expand that more, were there more educators that were willing to do this?

We started working with them and again, knocking on doors in our community and really doing a listening campaign. We did that for two years. We came together, we did 150 one-on-ones or home visits. When we came together, we developed some core practices that I’ll share with you in a minute. But once we knew what that would look like, what our training would look like, we had a three-hour introductory training. We have a hybrid training now because we had to adapt our training to the virtual world because of the pandemic, but back in 1996, when we were ready to launch, we had eight schools that were willing to be part of this project and we launched it with six elementary and two middle schools.

The very first entity that we approached was our local teachers union, because we needed their support. They loved the idea, they were on board. From day one, they have been our biggest supporter, our local union, our state union, and now, we work with all our national unions, as well, and of course, we needed our school district. These three circles that you see, or these three entities that you see on this slide are still part of our governing board. That’s a little bit of the history. The reason we like to share our history at every training, at every presentation, is because we really want people to know that we are a grassroots organization. This model was created by parents and teachers working together and we did this in thinking about the benefit of our children being able to be successful in a community that was considered a throwaway community, a very low income community. I still live in the same community, but we knew that our kids could be whatever they wanted and we wanted that to happen.

On the next slide, you are going to see a map. I can share with you that I never in a million years imagined that this would get out of my little district here in Sacramento, but people started hearing what we were doing and they wanted us to come and train them, so we expanded throughout California. And then one day, Denver, Colorado, or Denver Public Schools, knocked on our door and said, “Hey, can you come and train us on what you’re doing in Sacramento?” That’s how it all started, we became a national organization by word of mouth. People started hearing what we were doing and they called us and said, “Can you come and train us?” We are really excited to share that we are in Canada now. We expanded to Saskatchewan, Canada, so we are international. We’re really, really proud of that. In this past school year, we expanded to 28 states plus Washington DC, we are in over 500 sites and trained over 8,000 educators across the country, and all of us together conducted over 26,000 relational home visits.

While the numbers of home visits were going down due to the pandemic, we actually saw a record number of educators being trained, which really points to what, again, Cynthia was talking about, the importance of those relationships between parents and families. It is very critical for the success of moving forward and for the success of our children. That’s, again, a little bit of who we are and where we’re at today. On the next slide, really quickly, I am going to share with you our core practices. In those 28 states plus Washington DC, we are all following these core practices. These core practices are the ones that came out of those 150 one-on-ones that we both did together, our educators, our founding teachers, and myself and our other founding parent. These core practices are what keeps the fidelity of our model and what keeps the success of our model. As you can see, our number one core practice is that our home visits are voluntary.

They’re voluntary for all, they’re voluntary for our families and they’re also voluntary for our educators. If our families feel like, “No, this is not something that I’m ready to do right now,” they’re still an amazing family. If our educators come to our three hour or three and a half hour introductory training and decide by the end of it that it’s not something they want to do, they’re still an amazing educator. But under our model, our home visits are voluntary and they’re voluntary for all. Our number two core practice is that our educators are trained under, again, the model that we created, and they’re compensated. The compensation piece came from us, the parents. When we started learning about how hard our educators were working and how they were doing way beyond what they were supposed to be doing and a lot of the times, they were not being compensated, we really wanted them to get compensated if they were going to do home visits under this model, so under our model, our educators are trained and they get compensated for their time, as well.

Our third core practice is that under our model, what are we going to do when we’re at the home visit? Well, we’re going to do exactly again, and I keep referring back to Cynthia because it just impacted me so much what she said, but that’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re getting to learn about our families. We’re there to learn about their story, we’re there to share our hopes and dreams for our students, and we’re there to ask our families, “What are your hopes and dreams for your students? What are your goals for them? What can we learn?” We’re there to listen, to listen, to find out what motivates this child, because we all know that what motivates our kids is not happening at the school or in the classroom, it’s happening outside, so this is a real powerful opportunity to really get to know what can I learn from their home, their assets? What can they show me and help me and how can I link all of that back into the classroom?

Because at the end of the day, that’s what this is all about, we want to get to learn what are some of the things that we can learn together, how can we co-educate our students together? That’s what we do, we share hopes and dreams, we talk about goals, and we listen. We listen to our families. We get to know who they are, where they come from, what is their story. Our fourth core practice is that under our model, we do not target our students. Under our model, everybody, every child has an opportunity to have an educator and a colleague come and sit and share their hopes and dreams and be part of their families. The way that we talk about not targeting our students in our training, and just know that in our training, we go really in-depth into every single one of our core practices. For the sake of time, we’re doing it really fast right now, but just know that we will go very deep into each one of these when we do our training.

The way we talk about them is that we ask our participants to really think about three students. Think about a student that lights up your day, who’s that student that you might already have a rapport with their family, you might already have a relationship with their family? And then think about a second student that’s right in the middle, they’re compliant, they do everything you ask them to do, but you might not know a lot about that he or she. And then we ask them to think about a student that is a challenge for them. We’re not giving them a challenge, because a challenge can mean different things for different people. We ask them to do them in that order. We ask them to go visit their student that they already have a relationship, we ask them to go see that one in the middle, and we ask them to go and visit their challenge student. We want them to have a good experience before they get to the student that might be a challenge.

Those three families are having the exact same experience. We’re not focusing on our student that’s a challenge, whatever that challenge is. They’re having the same experience. We’re still talking about hopes and dreams, we’re still getting to know them, we’re still listening to their family. And then our fifth core practice is that under our model, our educators go in pairs. They never, ever, ever go by themselves, they always go in pairs and they reflect. When we started our home visits back in 1997, yes, the going in pairs was because of safety. Now, with time, it has become this other beautiful thing. We learned it because our educators share with us all the time, our families share with us all the time, and it became such a beautiful thing that our families, back at the school, had two contact people. Maybe if their teacher wasn’t available, the other person that came and they got to meet was available.

And then the other thing is that our educators started reflecting with each other what they learned together in this home. The other beautiful thing that Nancy shares a lot when we do our training is how she got to connect with her colleagues and really build that connection at the school, because she was in kinder and she didn’t have that opportunity to maybe go meet or have a conversation with the fifth or sixth or fourth grade teacher, so it builds community. It builds the community inside the school with the colleagues and it builds the community outside with the families. These are our core practices. Again, anybody that’s trained under our model, this is what we’re asking them to do, we’re asking them to follow these five core practices and it will be a success. It be successful as long as you are following our non-negotiables, or our core practices. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Nancy and she’s going to walk us through the next slide. Nancy.

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you. Yes, so if we can go on to the next slide. I’m going to talk a little bit about the research findings because, of course, we want to make sure that this is something that’s research-based. When we do want to get that support from our principles, from our district leaders, this is important for them, as well, to invest and to make sure that there’s funding for home visits. Parent Teacher Home Visits actually has, there’s lots of research out there that has been done with this particular model of home visits. Those five non-negotiables that Yesenia talked about, this is what I’m referring to with these home visits, because as you all know, there’s lots of other home visits out there, but I’m going to specifically talk about Parent Teacher Home Visits.

Johns Hopkins University did an extensive, rigorous research with Parent Teacher Home Visits. It meets the ESSA Tier 2 criteria for evidence-based practice. As you see here on your screen, these were the findings that resulted in this research, is the shifting of the mindsets, strengthening relationships, improved attendance, and improved academic outcomes. This was across the country, this isn’t just in one particular district or in Sac City Unified School District, this was across the country. One of the things that I do want to point out is that one of the non-negotiables is that we do not target students. We want this to be a cross section of students because we want to make sure that all are included. But with that said, one of the things that we found out was that it improved attendance even for students that did not receive a home visit and without, it’s because it just improves the whole culture of the school.

I know that for some of the stories that I hear, the personal stories from educators, is that when students feel connected and cared for by an educator at that school site, they tend to see those and seek those educators out. For many teachers and educators, they say that, in high school, especially, friends will say, “Oh, you should go talk to Mr. Bua. He’s awesome, he came to my home, he will understand what you’re going through,” and so then now those students go to this teacher because they know that they can trust the teacher. Again, it just builds that community within the school and the attendance improves for them, because they now feel connected to someone at that school site, even if they did not get that visit personally. Students feel welcomed, families feel welcomed.

I also hear many stories of, in high school, where it’s the first time that families attend a back to school night, because those educators went out over the summer to visit the families, and so they say, “Oh, I just never felt connected to a teacher, and because these teachers came out to our home, we want to make sure that we’re there for them.” Now, they have built this connection with the educators at the school site. Again, it’s not just with the students that have been visited, it’s just in general with everyone. Once that it’s part of the school or a part of the district, it’s almost like it’s expected out of educators to go and do these visits. Even though that first non-negotiable is that it is voluntary for all, it’s just one of those things where once everyone starts doing this, I say it’s almost like a domino effect. You start hearing about it and then you want to do it because you see all the great impact it has on other educators and on other families.

I know for myself, too, during the school year, I would invite families to academic parent-teacher team meetings that I would have, and so we would talk about data and how to help students at home with some of these skills. I would have my room full of families and other teachers would ask, “Well, how do you get families to come?” It wasn’t just the home visit itself, I did do a lot of other things, but I do feel that when those home visits were established or conducted, the relationship was built, and so it was a little bit less challenging to invite families and for them to say yes to come to these events or these meetings that we would have back at our school site. Again, there’s so much research out there and personal data that we have collected, but if you are interested in reading the, I don’t know how many pages it is, but it’s a lot of pages. It is in the John Hopkins University research that you can read all about this.

On the next slide here, we do have some actual numbers of some percentages of the research findings. Again, as you see, there’s that 35% increase also in test scores, in the ELA tests. The decrease in chronic absent, 21%, and those are for students that did receive visits. Decrease in the likelihood of being chronically absent, 22% among all students at the school site. That’s what I was talking about a little bit, where even if the student did not directly receive that home visit, they just by default of being at the school site where home visits are being conducted, there’s improvement there. One of the other things, too, that I do want to point out that is really not on this, but I know personally in our district, we have been collecting data, is the job satisfaction, of reminding ourselves on why we got into education in the first place. I understand and I know.

I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years now and so I understand that every year, it’s something different, especially after the pandemic, where we’re carrying plates full of just things that we need to get done. I understand it’s exhausting, it’s draining. I know that we’ve lost a lot of educators because of just all the demands. But I will tell you that home visits is one of the things where we hear often, daily, I hear that just going out on these home visits has really, really just shifted their mindset on like, “Yes, this is why I got into education, because I feel connected to families, we are on the same level, we are helping and supporting.” The same thing with administrators. I encourage educators to always invite an administrator out on home visits, because it’s really hard trying to balance all of the different things that are going on at our school sites and so by inviting an administrator out on visits, it also just brings them back to why they got into education. I love encouraging admin, board members, superintendents, too.

Again, at these board meetings, I don’t know if anybody has attended or heard board meetings, but they can get pretty challenging and things are said and it’s, again, exhausting and draining. Inviting board members out on home visits to really connect them and really hear from families and students what is really their hopes and dreams, it’s just so impactful and like I said, it really improves with job satisfaction, just being more just happy about what we are doing and that we are making a difference for families and students. Again, these are just some of the research with this particular model we have found, and so that’s there on the research. I’m going to go ahead and move on to the next slide here. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take a moment here to do a little action planning.

On your screen here, you have three questions. I’m going to have you actually write this down for yourself, so we’ll give you a few minutes to just think about these questions, and then you are going to go into a breakout room to discuss the learning reflection and how it relates back to your school community, but for right now, I just want to take the time to do this silently and write a couple things down. The first question is three things that you learned or were reminded of today, two is what are two things that you want to do with today’s lessons or reminders, and then one, what is the lingering question that you have about Parent Teacher Home Visits? I’m going to give you about four minutes. I believe we can write this on our own or I’m not sure if we have a template that we can use, Jessica?

Nikevia Thomas:

Oh, this is Nikevia.

Nancy Lopez:

Oh, sorry.

Nikevia Thomas:

We have a template that we can use and it will be uploaded to the Padlet.

Nancy Lopez:

Okay.

Nikevia Thomas:

Okay, perfect.

Nancy Lopez:

You can use that. I’ll go ahead and mute myself here and we’ll have four minutes of independent journaling time and then I’ll call you back with maybe about 30 seconds to get us moving into a breakout room?

Nikevia Thomas:

Sounds good.

Nancy Lopez:

Can you share that late to the Padlet again, please?

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes, I can. Hold on one second.

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you.

Nikevia Thomas:

Uh-oh. Let me stop sharing. It’s better if I stop sharing. One second. Here we go.

Nancy Lopez:

Perfect. Thank you.

Nikevia Thomas:

Thank you for your patience, everybody.

Nancy Lopez:

I believe the password there is mochalatte.

Nikevia Thomas:

It’s mochalatte password. Perfect. You should see the Parent Teacher Home Visit action planning handout in the handout section of the Padlet and to access it, you can download it. You can click there and there’s a download button. Download attachment.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Nancy, just let me know when you’re ready for rooms.

Nancy Lopez:

Thank you. Maybe about another minute. About 30 more seconds. If you can finish up your last thoughts there, we are going to have you go into a breakout room and to just have a discussion on whether it is a learning reflection, how it relates to your school community, if you want to share what your questions are that you wrote down there, that’d be fine, too. We’ll give you nine minutes, if you come on back to your screen so that you can go ahead and go into your breakout rooms. Again, we’ll see you in nine minutes.

I see many of you are coming on back. I’ll give everyone a few seconds to make sure everyone’s back. At this point, what we’re going to do before we move on to next steps and to our Q&A is we’re going to give you one minute to write anything else down that maybe you heard during your breakout room that you want to write down, any other reflections that, again, might have popped in your head while you were listening to others speak on this. I’ll give you about a minute to do that and then we’ll move on to next steps and to our Q&A. Another 15 seconds here. We’re going to go ahead and move on. I want to thank everyone for having those discussions in your breakout rooms and writing that last little reflection there. I’ll go ahead and pass it on over to Yesenia and she’ll talk about next steps and then we’ll open it up to a Q&A.

Yesenia Ramirez:

Thank you, Nancy. If we can go to our next slide. We want to ask you to stay connected with us, we want to invite you to reach out to us, continue the conversation. If you want to learn more about how to schedule a training, you can reach out to us on our website that is on this slide, as well. There’s tons of information on our website. The evaluations that Nancy was talking about, you can find those in there. We invite you to also explore how the implementation for Parent Teacher Home Visit happens. We have tons of tools and resources on our website, as well. We have videos of testimonials from parents, teachers, students that are just very, very touching and great to watch, as well, so tons of information on our website. Again, we just want to thank you all before we go into our Q&A and answer any of your questions.

But stay connected with us also through our social media, you can find us on that, as well. But visit our website, there’s tons of resources so you don’t have to recreate the wheel. There is a lot on there that might be useful for you. Again, if you’re interested in a training, you can also reach out to us through our website and we will get back to you with that information, as well. On our next slide is going to be our Q&A and we will open it for any questions that you might have for Nancy, myself. I’ll turn it over to you, Jessica, to walk us through that.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Excellent. Thank you so much. Our first question, really, showed up in the Padlet and someone requested information to learn more about evidence-based data of the pilot home visiting program in the Washington DC schools that started in 2015. They said that at the IEL 2016 conference, there was a presentation with information on the pilot program and they just wondered if there was follow-up data from their years of the program.

Yesenia Ramirez:

There is, and that was created or was done by the Flamboyan Foundation, who is leading the Parent Teacher Home Visit work in the schools in Washington DC area. Actually, the Mark Hopkins research that was done was done by Flamboyan. You go to our website, there’s more information on it there. You can also reach out to Flamboyan if you want specifically about the DC area, they have all of that data, as well.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Excellent. Thank you. I think Jackie has her hand up, so feel free to come off mute.

Jackie:

I do. I didn’t get to type it in, so I thought I’d just ask it out loud. I think I’ve been in a couple of different sessions that, whether you guys are running them or someone else, about the family home visit. I’ll stress that I am not at the school level or at the family level, I’m a state training level. But is there a correlation, so the frequency of parents that might decline home visits and the frequency of school staff that decline home visits, that once you get an established pattern of home visits, do you have less and less people decline the visits? Does that make sense?

Yesenia Ramirez:

Nancy, do you want to speak to that?

Nancy Lopez:

Yes, you do. I know that from experience, what we tend to see is either school sites where it starts small, maybe a grade-level team or maybe they do welcome back to school summer visits, and then that’s what gets people going with that, they hear about it. Same thing with families, at first, yes, there’s a lot of nos, because from past experience, they’re not really sure what’s going on or they’re like, “Hey, we come to the school all the time, we’ll see you there. Why do you want to come to our home?”

But I know even for myself, one of the things that started happening is maybe about after the first two years, I would have a kinder roundup before the school year would be begin and at that roundup, one of the first things that families would ask me is, “When are you coming to visit us?” It wasn’t even I was even calling yet, it was like, “Oh, we’re ready, just let us know when you’re coming over and you don’t even need to call.” But of course, I would call because that’s one of the protocols that we follow is to make that phone call. It just becomes a school-wide once it starts going and people start hearing about it and then families starts to wonder, “Well, why haven’t I gotten called yet? All these other families are getting visits.” It does take a little time and we have to be patient with this to have it roll out and be successful.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Thank you. Great question. I found, too, when I was leading schools that when you have something really great that you’re doing and the teachers buy into it because they see the value in it, they talk to each other about it, as you were saying, so it really does become a snowball effect. The same thing happens with parents because they are hearing from their peers like, “I had this really great experience and it really helped,” so I think it probably does take time to build those communities up.

Nancy Lopez:

Yes. It also does take a good, supportive admin, also. I will say that it does require that admin be supportive, maybe at staff meetings, allow five minutes for others to talk about home visits, including it in newsletters from the principal saying, “Hey, don’t forget home visits.” Allowing the time for that, as well, just giving them a little more wiggle room, just because that does speak volumes on that our admin is also supportive of this.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Wonderful, thank you. The next question is, what are some sources of funding that schools use to fund the Parent Teacher Home Visit program? Are any schools using Title I family engagement funding for this work? That’s a great question.

Yesenia Ramirez:

Nancy, do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Nancy Lopez:

Yes. I want to say most, I’m just going to speak for where I’m at, though, we started off with Title funding, so it was only schools that were receiving Title funds were funding home visits, which obviously to us, we wanted all of our 68 school sites to have funding. And then, as I mentioned, having a principal, as admin that knew about this strategy and really wanted the strategy at their school site, we talked to them about looking in their LCAP on where those funds could possibly be pulled out from or with family engagement dollars, that would be another way.

Right now, because of all the federal money that we’re getting, obviously, that’s a good, also. I know that that will end, but now that we have it and people are seeing the impact, our district is all for finding the money to fund all of our school sites. There are other ways. I know that at other school sites, where it’s maybe a smaller district, I know that I’ve heard of even gift cards or time being able to flex time. It just depends on your site, I feel like, but that would be a conversation to have on where these funds could pull funds to compensate educators going out on visits.

Yesenia Ramirez:

Just so you know, we do have something on our website that talks about how to pay for our specific model of home visits. I can put that in the chat box, as well, that link to that takes you directly to it.

Nancy Lopez:

Also, our unions, they are very supportive. You heard Yesenia talk about it’s a collaborative effort and our unions are really huge advocates for that. Here in California, one of the things that I was actually able to do, along with another colleague of mine, is with our CTA, our California Teachers Association, we wrote up a grant and we received $20,000 just for our district to be able to provide funding for home visits. Actually, it was home visits but also family engagement strategies, and so we were able to get that. I’m sure in other states, other local unions would be more than willing if there’s a way to write up a grant for funding for that, as well.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

Excellent. Thank you so much. I don’t see any other questions in the chat and I think we’re good on time, so Nikevia, if you don’t mind putting back up our slide deck. Such an informative session. I cannot echo enough how wonderful it was to see you in Charlotte and hear your stories and hear this and then hear it again today. I think it gives us practitioners, it gives us a lot to think about and it’s a wonderful resource, so thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us today. We’d also like to ask everyone to mark your calendars, our next session is in a month. This one, we’re doing in the morning. We try to go back and forth so that we can reach more people, depending on your schedules. But the next one is about engaging families with children with special needs and that’ll be on March 13th from 9:30 to 11:00. We’ll place the registration link in the chat for you. You can register for all of them at the same time or you can register session by session, whichever you’re more comfortable with, so I’ll put that in.

These are all East Coast times for those of you. Sorry, I know that probably 9:30 is not a good time for those of you in California, but you do receive the recording. You can access the recordings if you register, so if you’re unable to join us for this one, we can still send you the recordings for that. You’ll still have the resources on the Padlet because we just keep adding to it with each session. Next slide, please. We just want to make sure that you have our contact information, as well. You could follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on Facebook, our website with a number of resources, both publications, recorded webinars and trainings that we’ve done are all on there. Nikevia and I are both available to answer any questions. The last thing we’d like to you to do is to please make sure that you fill out our evaluation, which I think is the QR code, correct, Nikevia, so that we get feedback from you?

Nikevia Thomas:

Yep, that’s correct.

Jessica Grotevant Webster:

I was like, “Wait, I think it is.” Yes, please use the QR code and provide us with feedback on this session, it does help inform following sessions that come up. We hope that you really enjoyed today’s session, so thank you so much and have a wonderful afternoon.