>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:06 [ Music ] ^M00:00:17 >> Sarah Walzer: The Parent-Child Home Program is a national home visiting model that focuses on bringing literacy and language into the homes of underserved and underresourced families across the country. I think the most critical way to understand what we do is to think about the very particular problem we're trying to address, and that is the fact that 40 percent of children across this country walk into a classroom on their first day of school completely unprepared to be there. What we find is that low income kids have heard 30 million fewer words than other children when they walk into a classroom. They are on average have two books in their homes compared to over 50 books for higher income kids, and they've been read to in a one-on-one setting at most 25 hours before they start school compared to over 1000 hours for higher income kids. So the Parent-Child Home Program was actually developed in 1965 as a high school dropout prevention program by a brilliant woman, Dr. Phyllis Levenstein who identified this issue of helping kids walk into a school prepared as the key to making sure that they walked out of a school at the other end successful and prepared. And the way we do that preparation is by working one on one with families twice a week for a two-year period, the year the child is 2 and the year the child is 3, with the goal of transitioning every one of those families to pre-K when they've finished our program. The home visitor brings a gift of a book or a toy each week. Most of the homes that we're going into, these are the first books in the home, not just the first children books. They're often the first reading material for anybody in the home. And the home visitor uses that book or educational toy to model for the parent reading, play, and conversation activities that are focused on building language and literacy skills. We do the program in 50 different languages across the country. As long as we can find a home visitor who speaks the language of the family we're working with, we can train them to do that work with that family. The focus is on disconnected families, families who don't have access to the knowledge, skills, and material that they need to get their child ready for school. And we take those families in when their children are around the two-year-old year. They can be as young as 16 months. They enter the program. They receive two home visits a week over a two-year period, and many of them go on to become home visitors in our program themselves, about 25 percent of our home visitors nationally. One of our most remarkable stories is a young man who was in our program over 30 years ago with his immigrant mother from Columbia living in a housing project in New York. He recently just finished a term on our national Board of Directors. He's now corporate counsel for actually a Japanese-based firm and was just transferred to their headquarters in Tokyo. And he tells the story of starting school the first day of school, still from a Spanish-speaking home, having been through two years of Parent-Child Home Program. And the first day of school, the teacher had the class sing London Bridge is Falling Down. He was the only Spanish-speaking child in the classroom who knew the words and motions to that song, and he felt like he belonged in the classroom at that moment. And, in fact, and at the end of the day when his mother came to pick him up, the teacher said to him, Julian sang so loud and so strong in the course of doing London Bridge. I can really tell that he's going to be engaged in this classroom. And part of our role in that home, that one-on-one relationship that develops between the home visitor and the parent is really to empower that parent to be their child's academic advocate all the way through school. And one of the reasons we have the outcomes we do is not because the home visitor helped read that child a story when they were 2 and 3; it's because the home visitor imparted to the parent the skills that parent needs not only to read those stories and be their child's first teacher but to be their academic advocate all the way through. The Parent-Child Home Program is all about relationships, and it's about the relationship between the parent and the child and giving the parent the tools to -- we don't call it instruction but to learn, share, and grow with their child, giving the early literacy specialist, the home visitor the tools to work one on one with that parent and prepare the parent to do the wonderful work with their child. And then, as you move sort of over in the sequence, preparing the site coordinators who are the supervisors of the home visitors to do that work with their home visitors to prepare the home visitors to go into the homes and do that work. Children learn the best, particularly young children, before they enter school in the context of a loving, respectful relationship with a caring adult. And, in many children's lives, that caring adult doesn't necessarily have the tools to do -- to help them with their learning. And so what we're doing is, in that relationship between the home visitor, the parent, and the child, we're modeling that respectful, rich relationship that can build up around language and literacy. And that home visitor is spending every one of those home visits modeling for the parent how to read, play, and talk with their child so that, when they're not in the home -- they're only there a half hour twice a week -- that reading, playing, talking that's what learning for a young child is about is going to start to get embedded in that home environment. There are hundreds and thousands of families across this country who need access to programs like this. As I said at the beginning, 40 percent of the children in this country enter school not ready to be in the classroom. Whether they're entering at pre-K or kindergarten, they need the language, literacy, social emotional skills to function in that classroom; and they get that from learning, conversation, and play that they experience at home before they walk into a classroom. So our goal is to reach as many of those families as we possibly can, particularly to focus on expanding in communities where there are large nonnative English-speaking populations because we know from educational data across the country that those are the children most likely to enter school unprepared to be in a classroom. They're also the children most likely to access pre-K, and we see the Parent-Child Home Program as a key step in the continuum of services that makes sure children get a pre-K experience and then enter a kindergarten classroom ready to be a successful student all the way through school. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.