Building Trust, One Visit at a Time: Three Community Stories Using the Parent Teacher Home Visits Model

September 15, 2026
Building Trust, One Visit at a Time: Three Community Stories Using the Parent Teacher Home Visits Model

This week’s webinar focused on what happens when educators intentionally cultivate a relationship of trust with families and what it takes to sustain this work at scale. Panelists from Elk Grove Unified School District in Sacramento, California; Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Pasco County Schools in Land O’Lakes, Florida, shared practical examples of implementing the Parent Teacher Home Visits (PTHV) model in their communities. A panel discussion led by PTHV’s Rachel Brice followed each of the community stories.

Parent Teacher Home Visits 
“We believe every student deserves to have the adults in their life, at home and at school, working together on their behalf, and that every family has strengths, knowledge, and experiences that educators can learn from.”  
– Rachel Brice, PTHV

The webinar began with Rachel Brice of Parent Teacher Home Visits sharing the organization’s origin story. PTHV grew out of community organizing in Sacramento in the 1990s, when families and educators worked through nearly two years of focus groups and conversations to move past mutual blame and discover their shared hopes for children. That listening process led to an eight-school pilot in 1998, and the model has since grown into a network reaching more than 700 communities across 32 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada.

Brice outlined the five “non-negotiable” core practices that stay consistent no matter how a community adapts the model to local context:

• Educators are trained and compensated for the time and emotional labor the work requires.
• Visits are voluntary for families and educators alike, because trust can’t be mandated.
• Educators don’t target families and visits aren’t tied to attendance problems or a deficit to fix.
• Educators go in pairs and reflect together afterwards.
• The conversation centers on hopes and dreams for the child, not grades, attendance, or behavior.

Brice also shared the process from start to finish of how an educator conducts a home visit. She emphasized that follow-up is just as important as the visit. Findings from a trio of national studies by Johns Hopkins University and RTI International revealed that students whose families received a home visit were 21% less likely to be chronically absent and, at schools where PTHV was implemented systematically, students were 22% less likely to be chronically absent and 35% more likely to score proficient on ELA assessments, regardless of whether that individual student was visited. After learning about the PTHV model, the webinar transitioned to hearing from each pair of community representatives in the PTHV network.

Elk Grove Unified School District 
“I always say those 30 minutes in the home are the best professional development we can receive, learning about our families and our students, not just for that year or that visit, but for our entire career.” 
— Nancy López, Resource Teacher, Family & Community Engagement,
Elk Grove Unified School District

Lysette Lemay and Nancy López shared how PTHV has taken root across Elk Grove Unified School District. This district is the fourth largest in California and one of its most diverse, spanning 320 square miles and over 120 languages. They started with a few pilot sites roughly a decade ago and are now an accredited PTHV training partner, running visits at 70 school sites with funding available to any staff member who completes training. Notably, two different superintendents have gone out on home visits themselves, a visible signal of leadership support. This year, the district also began surveying families directly about the impact of home visits, adding their voice to the data the team already tracks.

Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association 
“When we walked in, we kind of felt like we were Santa Claus, because the kids welcomed us like it was Christmas, having us in their space. It was one of the most powerful things I’ve experienced since I’ve been in the classroom.” 
— Annette Williams, PTHV Lead, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association

Luz Hernandez and Annette Williams described bringing PTHV to Milwaukee Public Schools, a minority-majority district where roughly 65%–75% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 90 languages are spoken. The primary organization coordinating the program for the district is Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA), the local teachers’ union. After a February training drew 33 educators, including teachers, paraprofessionals, and children’s health staff, the group logged more than 150 visits in a single semester. Early results are anecdotal but consistent. Educators reported improved student behavior, classroom participation, and attendance, along with more open communication from parents. Most of that first cohort has already signed on to continue, and MTEA’s long-range goal is to expand the program throughout the district to more sites.

Pasco County Schools 
“What excites me most isn’t the number of 700 visits itself, but what those visits represent. Every visit is a relationship and an opportunity to build trust between families and schools. Those relationships create shifts in attitudes and beliefs, help families see schools as partners, and help educators recognize the strengths families bring.”   
— Abby May, Title I Program Specialist, Pasco County Schools

Abby May and Brian Borruso walked through PTHV’s growth across Pasco County Schools, an 86,000-student district that earned an “A” district rating last year for the first time in more than 15 years. May shared that the journey with PTHV began in 2018 with a search for an evidence-based family engagement strategy. During her research, she found a case study in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family/School Partnerships, which led her to PTHV. The program is now funded through Title I across all 40 of the district’s Title I schools, with over 700 visits completed last year alone. Borruso shared how his school built a visiting team that spans guidance counselors, graduation coaches, classroom teachers, and even the principal’s secretary. The duo shared a short video depicting the real-world impact and a peek at a home visit with a student who had been considering dropping out of high school just a couple of classes short of graduating. After the visit, the student reconsidered and decided to stay. He is now on track to graduate.

Cross-Cutting Themes and Key Takeaways 
Across all three communities, panelists returned to a few common threads about what makes a home visit culture take root and last:

1. Protect the five core practices, even as everything else — site, format, or schedule — flexes to fit local context.
2. Compensate and train educators. Home visits ask staff to unlearn deficit-based habits of family engagement, and that time and effort should be valued.
3. Keep it voluntary for families and educators alike — as Rachel Brice put it, trust can’t be mandated.
4. Expect slow, steady growth. Several panelists noted that patience with gradual growth, rather than pushing for immediate scale, is what allowed the program to take root.
5. Follow up after every visit. The relationship-building doesn’t end when the visit does — a thank-you note and follow-through on any commitment made helps build and maintain trust.
6. Let peer-to-peer testimonials drive growth. Educators telling other educators what the program has meant for them was repeatedly cited as the most effective way to bring new staff on board.
7. Collect data, including directly from families, to track impact and know where to adjust.

“Life is about connections. We have connections with our families, our loved ones, even our pets, and we can make these connections with kids that can also be life changing.”  — Brian Borruso, Teacher Resource, Graduation Enhancement, Pasco County Schools