More Districts Sending Teachers Into Students' Homes

Buder Elementary teachers Kristen Buss, left, and Tracy Weider, right, meet with Laura Scoggin at her St. Louis home to discuss son Carter's work.

—Dilip Vishwanat

More districts dispatching educators

By Stephen Sawchuk

The expansion of a parent-involvement strategy in which teachers make scheduled visits to their students' homes promises to yield insights into how those visits might be used to improve outcomes for students and sustain engagement by parents in their children's academics.

Though the economic downturn has affected some of the expansion, districts, philanthropists, and teachers' unions have poured funding into a variety of new teacher home-visit projects over the past five years. Many of them are taking steps to track the results of their efforts, determine their impact on student behavior and academics, and make adjustments to the programs along the way.

Among them is the Denver district, where Superintendent Tom Boasberg this school year committed $100,000 from the general fund—supplemented by Title I dollars for disadvantaged students—to expand a teacher home-visit program from five to...