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For children who enter school behind, catching up is very difficult. Sarah Walzer ’82, the CEO of the Parent-Child Home Program, is working to eliminate this “preparation gap.” The intensive home visiting program gives families skills and materials to get their child ready for school and helps create a robust learning environment at home. For families who confront the challenges of poverty — isolation, lack of educational opportunities, lack of transportation to participate early childhood education — the program is often a first exposure to this access of knowledge and learning tools.

Walzer, a Woodrow Wilson School major at Princeton, worked on domestic public policy issues on Capitol Hill after graduation before going to law school and clerking. She returned to D.C. to work in public policy again and was soon connected to Parent-Child Home Program while working on a consulting project with one of the organization’s key funders.

When she joined the program, which began in 1965 as a research experiment in low-income communities on Long Island, Walzer was tasked with broadening the organization’s scope and creating a national center. Today, the program has 105 local partner agencies in the U.S. and four other countries. “Every five years it’s been a new job,” Walzer said.

How the program operates today is nearly identical to what it looked like in 1965: After connecting with families in the neighborhood, a community-based home visitor is sent to homes twice a week over a two-year period. Each week, they bring learning tool gifts — educational toys or books — which are often are the first reading material brought into the home. Visitors work with the parents, showing them how to read a story to build their child’s vocabularies and imaginative skills. “When they walk into the classroom, whether it’s a pre-K classroom or a kindergarten classroom, they are as ready as their middle-class peers,” Walzer said.

Please click here to read the full article in Princeton Alumni Weekly.