Wichita West High porch visits connect school, students

Jazmin Flores wasn’t sure what was happening when three West High School teachers, including her algebra teacher, knocked on her front door Thursday afternoon.

“Hi, Jazmin,” said Kelli Glann, the girl’s algebra teacher. “We’re just here in the neighborhood making porch visits. Just wanted to say hi and bring you some goodies.”

“Ohhhhh, OK,” the freshman smiled and stepped outside. She stood on the porch in bare feet, wearing a Mead Middle School T-shirt, and thanked the teachers. “That’s cool.”

Every year teachers and staff members from West High, near Lincoln and McLean Boulevard, fan out into nearby neighborhoods on a mission to greet students, meet parents and see firsthand where their students come from.

They work in teams of three or four, wearing West High T-shirts with the school’s Pioneer mascot on the front and the word “BELIEVE” in all capital letters on the back. Each team has a list with the addresses of about a half-dozen freshmen whose parents did not attend parent-teacher conferences, which were held at the school last week.

“Sometimes families don’t come to school because they’ve had a bad experience, or the only news they get from school is bad news,” said Melissa Ross, an assessment coordinator and part of the school’s AVID program, which is designed to steer students toward college who otherwise may not consider it.

“We want to meet them on their turf and say, ‘Welcome. We’re here for you if you have any questions,’ ” Ross said.

West is one of the city’s poorest high schools. Nearly 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of poverty. Many houses around the school have boarded-up windows, dirt lawns, torn-up screen doors and crumbling porches.

Earlier this year, the United Way announced plans to invest $1 million a year in an attempt to improve graduation and literacy rates among children in the area served by West.

The teachers making porch visits know all this. They know many of their students’ families work low-paying jobs and struggle to pay bills.

Their porch-visit goodie bags include a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, a pen and a pencil along with a list of helpful phone numbers and a copy of the school schedule.

“Not being from the area, I get to see what the neighborhood is like,” said Glann, the algebra teacher, who lives in Newton.

“At (school) open houses, you see the people that maybe you don’t need to see. Here we see the people that choose not to come into the schools,” she said. “It’s about chipping away at those barriers.”

Ross, Glann and Patterson Gayden, a special-education English teacher, visited seven homes Thursday along three blocks near Broadway and Mount Vernon. At two houses, the person who answered the door told the teachers the student didn’t live there anymore, gone from the home address they provided during enrollment only a month ago.

That’s typical, Ross said. Their students tend to be transient, moving frequently in search of cheaper rent or to live with different family members or friends. The teachers made a note to try to update the students’ addresses and contact information.

In one yard, an empty laundry detergent bucket served as a makeshift flower box, planted with red and pink geraniums and hung over two rails of a wrought-iron fence beside a “Beware of Dog” sign.

Ross knocked on the door and waited, then knocked again. A young boy peeked out from behind a front window and called to his mother. She opened the door just a crack at first and looked suspiciously at the teachers.

“Hi, we’re from West High,” Ross said smiling. “Your daughter goes to West?”

Yes, the woman nodded, still wary.

“We’re just in the neighborhood to say hello and welcome you to our school,” Ross said. “We have a little bag of treats here with some numbers to call if you ever have any questions.”

The woman warmed, opened the door wider and stepped outside. She chatted briefly with the teachers and thanked them as they waved goodbye.

Walking toward another house, the trio heard a man yelling from his front porch across the street: “What are you doing?”

They gave the same spiel – here from West High, teachers, just in the neighborhood, just saying hello.

“Yo, you’re from West High?!” the young man yelled. “I was expelled from West High!”

“Expelled?” Ross shouted back.

“Yeah,” he said. “Where were you guys when I was at West? Why you didn’t visit me?”

The teachers looked at one another.

“Where are you going now?” Ross asked.

“I go to college now,” the man said. “It’s all good.”

“Well, that’s great!” Glann answered, hoping he was telling the truth.

Porch visits illuminate where and how students live, Gayden said. They meet parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. They pet dogs. They congratulate older siblings who graduated and tell younger ones they look forward to seeing them at West.

The outings also bring teachers closer together.

“As teachers and staff we don’t have time to hang out with each other in this kind of situation,” he said. “It’s kind of neat having a mission, working together. It’s really a team-building tool.

Joe Nelson, a West High social studies teacher who coordinates the annual porch visits, says the event doesn’t take a lot of time but makes a big difference.

“Students come to school the next day saying, ‘Oh, hey! You were at my home yesterday,’ ” Nelson said. “It may be a student you don’t have in class, maybe just a random student in the hall, but there you go: That’s the connection we’re looking for.”

This story was originally published September 19, 2014 at 10:16 AM with the headline "Wichita West High porch visits connect school, students."