Home visit bridge

The charter system that I work for is big on home visits. Although the format changes depending on the school, the basics remain the same: a teacher or a group of teachers visits the student at his/her house in order to meet the family and start to build that crucial bridge between home and school.

Forging strong links between school and home is something everyone in education agrees on. It is nothing but good. It helps families feel comfortable with teachers and administrators, who are often seen as inaccessible authorities or representatives of an unwelcoming system (aka: The Man). It's also one of those things that the schools I work for have chosen to actually do something about rather than simply nodding a lot when the topic comes up. Cause who has time? Not us. But we do it anyway. Because it makes a huge difference, and we are unrepentantly in the making-a-difference business around here.

So, I spent the past week in the car driving around Austin to visit all 21 students in my advisory. I sat on their couches or at their kitchen tables. I met their parents, siblings, dogs, cats and turtles (lots of turtles, actually...). I toured their bedrooms and looked at their family photos. I checked homework and went over the school calendar. If the families forgot or moved (this happened just twice), I called back and rescheduled. Thanks to Google, I can tell you with certainty that I logged 206 miles on my car (not counting the four times I got lost, and the one time a mom had to drive out and lead me down her very unmarked country road).

I'm not telling you this to sound all noble. Like our (in)famous Saturday School program, home visits are HUGE pain, in theory. Calling! Scheduling! Driving! Calling back! Waiting! Scheduling! All when there are bulletin boards to be decorated, lessons to plan, curriculum to write, systems to learn! Not to mention the language barrier for those of us who don't speak Spanish. (I am remedying this starting on Sept. 18, but I have nothing but a million hours of French and some Latinate cognates to help me now.) A near-fluent colleague wrote out a dialogue to use, much like those guidebook scripts that tell you how to book a hotel room. And like those scripts, it worked brilliantly...as long as the person on the other end didn't start ad-libbing (or asking very reasonable questions that weren't on the script)!

No, home visits are black-hole-level time sucks when you are contemplating them after a morning of meetings and Mapquesting intricate directions. And yet...when the door opens and your student is standing right there in a summer t-shirt and shorts with a toddler or a dog peeking out from behind their legs and they've made you peach ice tea from scratch or tamarindo (yummy tamarind drink!) or laid out their homework on the table or just finished vacuuming; and their mom or dad (but usually mom) is asking you to sit down and has rearranged her schedule or just gotten home from work and she offers you some water or take-out Chinese and tells you that she hopes this year is better than last year because no matter how her child has done in 5th grade, she wants 6th grade to be better. And you agree because you do, too. For that moment, you are all on the same page: the kid, sweetly shy regardless of typical demeanor, the adults grinning because there is nothing but hope in the equation right now, and we are savoring it. We know that the whole school year stretches out before us, a trail, a road, a mountain. It doesn't matter the metaphor or future difficulty, only that anything is possible from the perspective of this August afternoon. Through the curves, bumps, cliffs and storms to come, we will take the smiles, the sweet taste of tamarindo and this dazzling hope on the journey with us. The home visit has made it possible, put it in our figurative pack along with the sharpened pencils and the homework folder. It will sit at the bottom, and it will never lose its glow. It will help light the way through difficult conversations, frustrations and misunderstandings. We, as adults, know this. The student knows only that his mother and one of his teachers have spent the past 30 minutes nodding, agreeing, even laughing, and looking at him with expectant affection and love.

And that is what transforms home visits from a theoretical pain into an unmitigated pleasure. At least until the door closes and the driving starts again...