Four years ago, Amy Schulting, a 2006-07 Sulzberger Fellow at the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke, began a new kindergarten readiness project in one Durham elementary school. Since then, it has grown to 21 of 28 elementary schools in Durham . The premise of the project is simple: encourage kindergarten teachers to visit the home of each of his/her students during the first five weeks of the school year to become acquainted with the family, and it will help ease the transition to school for children and families.

Schulting expects to find that the home visits improve communication between parents and teachers and help the two groups build positive and collaborative relationships. Another important goal of the project is to increase parent involvement to benefit the child throughout the kindergarten year.

“Kindergarten is a critical time to set the academic path for a child,” explained Schulting. “In today's educational environment, society is placing higher expectations on the students and teachers as well. But children come from very diverse skill levels and backgrounds, and that means success for them must be tailor-made.”

The 30-minute home visits help teachers familiarize themselves with the student's family and to identify the needs of each student. It also gives teachers the perspective to understand situations at home that affect the child in school, or barriers that parents might experience when trying to become involved, such as a lack of transportation or challenging work schedules. Home visiting also provides the unique opportunity for the teacher to learn about the child with the parent as the expert in a location where the parent feels comfortable. This is in stark contrast to most parent-teacher meetings that take place at school and center around the teacher's expertise.

Home visiting also means that the parents' first meeting with the teacher can be a positive one. Rather than meeting for the first time to discuss difficult issues such as behavioral or academic problems the child might be having, parents and teachers can get to know and trust each other before having to tackle difficult issues.

“The kids just love the visits,” Schulting said. “They wait in the yard, jumping up and down when the teacher arrives. We had a comment from one teacher who said, ‘I felt like a rock star!'

The three-year pilot study helped Schulting determine the feasibility of the program – would teachers have enough time to make these visits at the beginning of the school year – especially with so many other deadlines to meet? During the first year of the pilot study, 53 percent of the children in the school received a home visit. In the second year, after hiring a person to schedule the visits, 92 percent of the children received a home visit from their teacher. Last year, 96 percent of children received a visit from his/her kindergarten teacher.

“We have recorded a lot of positive, anecdotal feedback from the pilot study,” Schulting said. “Teachers noticed an increase in the number of parents stopping by the classroom. They were able to put the children at ease by integrating knowledge from the visits into the classroom lessons. For instance, a teacher might talk about the types of pets the children have at home or how many brothers and sisters they have. Parents have had positive comments across the board, and the children keep asking when the teacher is going to visit again.”

The goal of the study this year is to compare the outcomes of children, parents and teachers participating in the study to those who are not participating. Schulting's long-term goal is to use the results of the study to influence school policies, specifically kindergarten transition policies and other school-based efforts to prevent the early school failure of high-risk children.

Schulting is using first-hand experience to guide her research. Prior to beginning her graduate work at Duke, she was a teacher for six years with Teach for America , a program that places high-performing recent college graduates in urban and rural public schools in the nation's lowest-income communities.

“When I was a teacher, I did home visits and saw a lot of success in increasing parent involvement,” Schulting noted. “And as the summer-school director at a low-performing, urban school, I was told not to expect much parent participation, but we had standing-room-only crowds for our Parent's Day. I believe the home visits contributed to that success.”

Schulting had very specific criteria when choosing a university for her doctoral work. “As a former teacher, I was very committed to combining a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with training in education and social policy. I wanted to examine the impact of school policies on high-risk children and conduct an intervention study in the schools. It was a tough combination to find in a graduate school. Schulting also completed the Spencer Foundation Education Policy and Research Training Program, led by Center Associate Director Philip Costanzo.

“I wanted to be part of the translation of intervention research to policy,” she added, “which is critical if you want lasting change. The Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke was the only place that had it all: education and social policy, early childhood development, clinical psychology and school-based interventions. Being a part of the Center has given me the chance to merge all of my interests.”

Amy Schulting received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from Northwestern University , and her Master's degree in education administration from the University of Virginia . She and her husband live in Raleigh with their sons, Milo and Burke, and four dogs.