HIPPY home visitors helping parents build their skills


  • October 10, 2016
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

Books like these are used in the HIPPY program, a parent education program the Escambia School District uses to help boost parent skills.

Juanita Diggs and Belinda Mith are always on the lookout for moms.

In their neighborhoods, in the grocery store, at daycare centers, wherever they spot a mom with a child under 5, Diggs and Mith are on the case.

They are home visitors working on the HIPPY program, the Escambia School District’s early literacy program, now entering its third year. HIPPY uses home visits and one-on-one role modeling to help parents with children ages 3-4 embrace the power they have to build their children’s brains.

Diggs, whose area includes Montclair and Lincoln elementary schools, recruits by word of mouth, at open house, by visiting childcare centers in the neighborhood.

“The last couple of weeks, I had a couple parents come up and say, ‘Mrs. Diggs, do you remember you talked to me and my child wasn’t old enough? Well, we want to join now,’” she says.

Diggs walks the neighborhood near Montclair and goes door-to-door.

“I even ask my neighbors, ‘Have you seen any new people in here? Did they have children?’” she says. “They do a lot of recruiting for me.”

Mith, who also has years of experience in the child care and education worlds, says the curriculum is something she wishes she had been able to use when her own children were young.

“I had one parent tell me, ‘Miss Belinda, I really didn’t think I was going to be able to do it,’” she says. “But after she got into it, she said it even taught her some of the things that she didn’t know. She could see the work (her daughter) was bringing from preschool, how it improved.

“When my kids were little, I wish I had done with them, but they didn’t have it back then. They’re playing and while they’re playing they are learning.”

HIPPY is a parent education curriculum that targets parents of 3- and 4-year-olds. HIPPY is a curriculum, developed from a program that began in Israel in 1969. HIPPY’s Florida Training and Technical Assistance Center is opened at the University of South Florida.

Carrie Fralick, HIPPY coordinator for Escambia School District, says the parent educators work with parents separate from their child and during weekly home visits, role-play with parents how to go through the lesson with the children.

The lessons often include a new age-appropriate book along with a set of workbook activities that touch literacy, math, science, motor skills and language development. Each activity is meant to take 15 minutes.  

hippy_worksheets2

At a follow-up visit, the home visitor will “pull a page” from the lesson to see if the parent and child completed it. The pulled pages are used to track progress. Parents must agree to spend 15 minutes a day doing one of the lessons.

A lot of parents do not interact with their children,” Diggs says. “You can go there and say, ‘We want you to have this time. And they say, ‘Mrs. Diggs, I don’t have time.’ And I say,  “You don’t have 15 minutes a day to talk to your child, to read to your child?” And they say, “Well, I guess so.”

“You have to pull them in sometimes, but, nine times out of 10, once they’re in, they stay in, she says.”

Parents must commit to complete the 30 week program. In the program’s second year, HIPPY served 90-100 families; 80 families were served the first year. The School District spent $319,401 last school for the HIPPY program — a figure that includes salaries of the early childhood trained assistants, and supplies and materials for the parent lessons.

There are five home visitors on staff, Fralick says. Parents are recruited to the program through school-based voluntary prekindergarten programs at the following Title I schools: McMillan Prek, Weis, Montclair and Lincoln Park, Semmes, Global Learning and Warrington.

All of the local home visitors — including Mith and Diggs — have CDA training.

They serve Head Start, Attucks Court, Sunrise Apartment, Truman Arms, Forest Creek Apartments.  A mix of parents who work and those who don’t. The home visitor for Semmes, whose territory includes Pensacola Village, meets parents at a room at Woodland Heights Community Center.

University of South Florida is conducting a longitudinal study of HIPPY children, but parents must agree to participate. The children are tracked until third grade. Locally, Fralick will keep an eye on the VPK assessments of children in the program and those not to see if there is a difference.

Fralick says she has had requests from parents in the Ensley, Holm and West Pensacola elementary school areas for HIPPY.

Diggs says spreading the word about HIPPY and recruiting more families is always on her mind.

“If we go to schools and let principals know what’s going on, we can help them to make their school greater,” Diggs says. “We go to the Title I schools, but we could go farther because a lot of schools are not on Title I, but have kids who need help.

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“Some parents just don’t know what to do and how to do it,” Digg says. “I used to work with teen parents. When we had an activity, they were more interested in making things than the child was because they’ve never been there. If (they) don’t know, you have to teach (them).”

Mith began working with children though Florida First Start in 1991. She’s run a childcare center, and has been a home visitor with the school district since 2003. The district has used different programs for home visits in the past, but Mith says the HIPPY curriculum resonates with parents and kids alike.

“It’s helping them when they start Head Start and Pre-K, giving them the boost that they need, because you know with their (kindergarten readiness) scores, in Florida the Pre-K scores were low so that was the reason we changed the program to help out with (children ages 3-4). And I think it’s a good incentive to them. It helps the parents to know they’re their child’s first teacher.”

Diggs and Mith each had about 20-25 families they visited with last year, and hope to have a similar load this year.

Why do programs like HIPPY matter?

Diggs has done home visiting and parent education for 20 years, having previously worked with Head Start, and other programs.

“A lot of parents don’t know how to read to their children, they don’t know how to talk to them, to explain things to them or interact with them,” Diggs says. “With most of my parents, they’re learning now how to read to their children, how to introduce a book to their children.”

For example, with science, parents learn to make play dough and glue. The child gets to help mom with measuring, which touches math skills. It also shows how much learning can be done with things already around the house.

“You wouldn’t think about that as education, but it is,” Mith says. “And it’s right there at home. That’s what we show our parents.”

“When we recruit, we say, “wouldn’t you like to give your child a little boost so once they start in Pre-K, they’ll be right on top of things? You can have that with this. It’s free just 15 minutes a day with your child. We’ll bring you the package and the materials. They go for it.”

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