Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project
April 5th, 2010 by Larry Ferlazzo
Each month, at my other blog, I interview people in the education world about whom I want to learn more. You can see read those past interviews here.
This month’s guest is Carrie Rose, Executive Director of the nationally acclaimed Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project. Our school works closely with Carrie and the Project, I’ve written a chapter about it in my book on parent engagement, and I also wrote an article about it last year for Teacher Magazine.
I posting this interview at both of my blogs.
Can you give a brief description of what the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project is and how it came into being?
The Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project is a unique partnership between a community organizing group (Sacramento Area Congregations Together), a local teachers union (Sacramento City Teachers Association) and a school district (Sacramento City Unified School District). The project developed through an effort to address the cycle of blame that existed between parents and site personnel at several south Sacramento schools where there was a pervasive history of low student achievement, high levels of poverty, and where high percentages of children entered school as English learners. Home visits were identified by teachers as one way to build trust and respect. Community organizers recognized the potential for leadership development through home visits given the similarity to their model of 1:1 interactions. Parents, educators and community organizers came together to develop a training and model for the visits and launched the project in the 1998-1999 school year.
How did you get involved in it, and where do you get the energy to continue being the Executive Director?
My background is in social service and law. In 1999, when my children were very young, I was looking for a more flexible job. The director of Sacramento ACT offered me a part time job as a fund developer and I had to quickly learned to do grant writing and fundraising in the nonprofit world. Luckily, one of my main responsibilities was to raise funds for a new parent engagement project- the parent/teacher home visit effort. As my understanding of community organizing grew, and my participation in the logistics of the home visit project evolved, I experienced a profound shift
