Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Spring 2010. Michael Maclin, interim principal of Maplewood–Richmond Heights Middle School, and Tom Kulla-Abbott, the school’s dean of students, choose seats in the family’s dining room. After much scraping of chairs, throat-clearing, and pleasant small talk, Maclin leans forward.
“Dr. Tom and I want to ensure a successful rest of the school year,” he says. “We’re here to talk about some things we’re doing to be successful, some things we need to be doing with Luke”—not his real name, lest he be mortified—“to be successful.”
Luke squirms. Maclin looks down at his paperwork. “O-kay. We’ve got a couple A’s, three D’s, and from D– to D+”—you always try to find a positive—“in social studies. Second quarter, he had all A’s and B’s, so immediately what goes off in our head is ‘What’s happening third quarter?’”
Luke’s dad says, “I can almost tell you what happened,” and points eastward, beyond the dining room wall, in the direction of an Xbox console.
“Takin’ up your evenings?” Maclin asks Luke.
“Six to 8,” the boy says succinctly. Maclin hesitates, strategically, then says, “I will tell you, for Luke’s grades first and second quarter to be as good as they are…”
“Yeah, I went out and dropped $500 on it, thinking he was doing so good…” the dad says.
“Well, you can say, ‘Get this good grade and you get another 30 minutes,’” Kulla-Abbott offers.
“Thirty minutes on that game don’t do nothin’,” the dad objects.
“So, Luke, you got a D in science—what’s going on there?” Maclin asks.
“I missed the day when we did our isotherms,” Luke replies instantly.
“Ah, so it reverts back to attendance,” Maclin says.
“I guess just about everything on there reverts back to attendance,” the dad says, nodding toward the sheet of paper in front of the principal.
“So. Attendance,” Maclin says to Luke.
“Uh-oh, here he goes,” the dad says, to no one in particular. The mom gives a nervous laugh.
“First semester alone, Luke missed 25 days of school,” Maclin observes.
Luke grins, half abashed and half triumphant.
“But you had A’s and B’s,” Kulla-Abbott says. “But you didn’t have the game. So now we’re starting to see a connection.”
“What you also ought to check is his friends,” his dad says. “World of Warcraft.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” the mom says; they’ve just hit the true sore point. Maclin’s eyebrows lift.
“What else you got there?” the dad asks abruptly. “I know you got more.”
“Believe it or not, we even like to see how many hours of instruction a student misses,” Maclin says. “Six hours times 25 days…”
“It’s harsh,” Luke mutters.
“Well, you know, so’s life,” his mom retorts, her tone so suddenly sharp, Luke looks wounded.
“There you go,” his dad agrees.
Maclin and Kulla-Abbott genially unpack the gifts they’ve brought, including a mathematical dice game. “You already got this sticker with phone numbers, I think,” Kulla-Abbott says.
“Yeah, you’re hangin’ on my refrigerator,” Luke’s mom says. Which reminds her: She has an idea for a field trip for the kids. She’s been hearing how powerful an experience the Holocaust Museum & Learning Center is.
That’s the world of warcraft, and she wants her son to know it.
Karen Kalish calls herself a social entrepreneur; others call her a force of nature. Projects of the Estelle W. and Karen S. Kalish Foundation (which also bears her mother’s name) have never been passive, dull, or docile. In 2005, after learning that a school in Texas had begun teacher home visits and increased reading scores by 32 percent, Kalish founded The Teacher Home Visit Program here in St. Louis.
“Home visits decrease discipline problems, and they improve academic achievement, attendance, parental involvement, attitudes about school, and homework completion,” Kalish explains. “It’s not rocket science. It always works when schools and families work together. Many of these kids have never been read to by their parents, never had books in their homes. They arrive the first day of school knowing maybe 500 words, not the 6,000 they could have known. And that gap gets bigger, and they never catch up.”
The Teacher Home Visit Program takes a huge commitment—time, energy, patience, diplomacy. Quite a few schools (in the city, in Clayton, in Normandy) have tried it and bailed. But Valley Park School District uses it at the elementary level, as do four city schools, and the Maplewood–Richmond Heights (MRH) School District uses it at every level.
“I definitely think it makes a difference,” says MRH superintendent Linda Henke, “for the teachers to actually come to your home, sit down with you and your child, and talk about what you want for your child and how we can help support that. What do you know about your child that we need to know? Instead of the teacher starting out as ‘I’m the expert,’ it’s ‘Let’s do this together; I need your support.’
“There’s no time pressure,” she adds. “It’s a leisurely pace in a different environment, and the kids love it. I think it changes the relationship. It’s different, somehow, when you have sat in the house and had a cup of coffee.”
The St. Louis Public Schools did a survey after the home visits: 84 percent of the parents now felt “very comfortable” contacting their children’s teachers. Eighty-eight percent read to their children at least once a week, 94 percent set rules about homework, and 62 percent limited the time their children could watch TV or play video games.
Don Senti, interim superintendent of the Parkway School District, was superintendent of the School District of Clayton until this past July. He deeply regretted a new principal’s decision to discontinue the program: “It’s a lot of work,” he concedes, “and in this day and age of trying to keep your nose to the grindstone, almost everything is extra. But it makes all the difference in the world to the kids.’”
The first visit’s purely social, its only agenda relationship-building. “When the parent realizes this teacher cares,” Kalish says, “then we get somewhere.” The second visit looks at academics and related issues, “like nutrition, and getting them to bed before midnight.” Then teachers invite parents to a dinner at the school. “You can’t do the event first,” Kalish says. “Put a note in the book bag, and nobody comes.”
After home visits, she says, attendance consistently goes up even at regular parent-teacher meetings: “Some schools went from three parents to 200. There is something powerful about someone sitting in your living room, looking you in the eye, and saying, ‘We really want your help.’”
First, though, you have to get the parent to let you in.
After repeated knocks, Latitia’s older sister finally answers—through the door, warily. Her mom’s not home. Christie Clark, fourth-grade teacher at Dunbar Elementary School in the city, speaks with the mother by cellphone. It is decided that the two older daughters, high-schoolers who look a little bemused, will stand in for their mother.
“She’s doing great, overall, but she’s a little bit behind in reading,” Clark tells them. “I brought these books.”
Latitia (not her real name) has drifted over to the refrigerator.
“I want you to listen to this, babe, so you’ll know what to do,” Clark says. No response. “Whenever you have a chance,” Clark
adds gently.
Latitia closes the refrigerator door and comes to stand next to her teacher, then leans against her. “Maybe every night of the week read a different book,” Clark says, urging the older sisters to work with Latitia. “See if she gets faster each time.” Latitia has picked up one of the books, curious in spite of herself.
“By the third time, you should be able to close it and maybe tell someone what happened,” Clark tells her.
Next come flashcards for sight words, “words you should be able to know just by looking. After you read the book for that night, go through the sight-word flashcards.” By now the sisters are looking alarmed. Clark shows them how to play a math game of War with a deck of cards, adding and subtracting and multiplying: “And then when you are through with all your homework, you can just play cards!”
They look underwhelmed.
But Latitia’s eyes are sparkling.
As a rule, Kalish says, “You get approximately one-third of the parents on board right away. One-third are not sure, and one-third say, ‘No way, José. You just want to be nosy and see my house.’ Those are the families we most want to reach.”
A month after Clark’s attempted visit, she says she still hasn’t managed to get in touch with Latitia’s mom. “Latitia has told me, however, that she is continuing to read her stories at home,” Clark says. “It’s nice to have something concrete to ask her about at school: ‘Did you play the multiplication game? Did you read your Wednesday book?’ She’s been paying better attention in class, and she’s participating more. In math, she had scored only a 25 percent average on all the skills we’d covered. Since the home visit, we’ve retested, and she is now at a 50 percent average!”
“It’s kind of like a parent-teacher conference, only more in-depth, because I have a little more time,” Michelle Farrington, second-grade teacher at Buder Elementary School in south St. Louis, tells Fahira Mesinovic.
Mesinovic’s oldest daughter, Amina, is working hard on her reading skills. “We took this test today,” Farrington says, pulling a book out of her bag, “and she did really, really well on it, except she’s still reading a little too slowly, which means she’s having to stop and figure out the words.” Farrington turns toward the little girl. “We’ve been working on this all year, and she’s doing really well, so she just needs to keep practicing.”
Mesinovic beams, then excuses herself to get a chair—she has seated her guests and remained standing. Farrington apologizes profusely. “Tell your mom that’s how I am in class, too,” she mock-whispers to Amina.
“I talk and talk and talk!”
“But she loves you!” Mesinovic says impulsively. Farrington grins and gives Amina a brief hug. Together, they explain to Mesinovic how Amina “did a good job of going back and looking in the story,” but just missed one or two facts.
“And then here, what did you mix up?” Farrington asks Amina. “What does a city look like? You said, ‘Lots of buildings spread out,’ but that’s country.”
Unless, of course, it’s a city that’s been bombed.
Farrington hands Mesinovic the book the class will be reading by the end of the year: “This is our 28-level.”
“She’s still on the 18?”
“Probably 22. It’s going up.”
“That’s good!” the mother rejoices. “She makes big progress—she was on the sixth.”
“No, 4!” the little girl says, bubbling over with the import of her correction.
“I think you’re right!” Farrington says. “That is very amazing. You know what that tells me? That you and your mom have been working very hard.” She hands Mesinovic a list of figures of speech common in English. The Bosnian parent specialist who accompanied Farrington, Nidzara Burazerovic, has remained discreetly silent, but she leans over to peer at the phrases. “We don’t have this in Bosnian,” she tells Mesinovic.
“This helps me, too,” Mesinovic says eagerly. “When she does her spelling words, I check her, and then she says, ‘OK, Mom, now you!’” She scans the list. “Oh, this helps me a lot!”
Farrington moves on to math: “We’re working on tens and ones. It’s fun, isn’t it?” Amina giggles. She’s almost bouncing on the sofa.
Mesinovic smiles. “She’s doing all alone her math homework, da da da da, ‘Mom! I’m done!’ She asked me one question, and I’m like, ‘What I need to do with this box?’ and she says, ‘Let me try, Mom.’”
Farrington pulls out presents—Pink Piggie flashcards, Math Bingo, and her own daughter’s remembered favorite books. “We went shopping, and I asked her to show me which books she loved,” Farrington says.
Amina looks like she’s going to float up to the ceiling.
“Thank you so, so much!” Mesinovic says. Amina wriggles off the sofa with her presents and whispers something in the interpreter’s ear. Burazerovic grins. “She wants to hide them from her little brother.”
Mesinovic leaves the room, then returns with a tray of Bosnian juice (“Healthy, not too sweet!”) and whipped-cream pastries (“Too sweet!”). She tells Farrington and Burazerovic how sick Amina was as a toddler, how she almost died back in Bosnia. Overcome, she pulls Amina onto her lap and holds her tight for a few seconds, then lets her run and read her new book.
The leave-taking is slow, fond, grateful. Outside, Farrington and Burazerovic talk about what a success the home visits have been. Farrington’s visited her entire second-grade class not once, but twice.
Other teachers had a few families refuse, she says, “and now some of those kids are saying, ‘My mom says you can come now!’”
Jeannette Cooperman is SLM’s staff writer.
