Our Story
The Primary School (TPS)’s foundation was the recognition by families, educators, and health providers of a common challenge: they could see what children needed, but they did not have a reliable way to connect across systems to meet those needs. A pediatrician might refer a child to a specialist without knowing whether the family could follow through for any variety of reasons. A teacher might recognize that a child struggled, but lacked understanding of, or access to, pathways to address underlying health or family challenges. Families carried the responsibility of navigating these disconnected systems on their own, and children faced barriers to being able to learn in school.
In response, our co-founders Meredith Liu and Priscilla Chan brought perspectives from health and education and worked with families, community leaders, and local partners to design a different approach. Rather than adding services onto a school, they reimagined the school itself as a place where education, health, and family supports could operate in coordination. From the beginning, TPS focused on starting earlier in children’s lives, building sustained relationships with families, and aligning supports across the systems that shape development.
The first TPS site opened in 2016 in East Palo Alto — a community shaped by long-standing inequities in access to education, health care, and economic opportunity — after more than two years of community engagement and co-design. Over time, the site grew to serve toddlers, preschoolers, elementary schoolers, middle schoolers, and their families. TPS opened its second site in Alameda County (“East Bay”) in 2020, offering toddler and preschool programming in addition to a similar set of integrated health and parent supports adapted in partnership with local community organizations.
Our East Palo Alto site operated for 10 years, from fall 2016 to its closure in June 2026, and our East Bay site operated for 6 years.
Our Approach
Research from multiple fields grounded our model’s design. Studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) shaped how we understood the long-term influence of early experiences and the importance of buffering adversity with strong supportive relationships. Recognizing the barriers that youth, particularly children of color, face due to systemic inequities such as racism and cultural marginalization, we focused on serving families who would benefit most from comprehensive services and offered a tuition free education to all enrolled.
We identified as a whole child and community school model, defining success in a holistic way that included measures of academics, social-emotional learning, and physical and mental health. We treated these outcomes as independently important and also interconnected, recognizing that children’s academic development is dependent on children being healthy, feeling safe, and developing social-emotional skills. Our model also recognized parent well-being as foundational for child outcomes.
Rather than layering services on top of a traditional school, the TPS model integrated supports into the daily work of the school itself. Schooling served as an anchor and a hub for coordinated support rather than a place focused solely on instruction. Daily contact with children and families created opportunities to build relationships, understand needs, and respond with timely and appropriate support. Early Family Foundations, health, and parent programs collaborated with school staff to build family capacity and reduce barriers to teaching and learning.
To support this work, our organizational values emphasized strengths-based and trauma-informed approaches to working with children and families. Our staff used shared frameworks such as Early Relational Health, highlighting the role of consistent, responsive relationships in supporting children’s development and family well-being. These foundations helped with alignment in both cross-program design and day-to-day interactions with families.
We set out to prove that children thrive when the systems around them work together. After a decade in operation, we learned that this approach made a real difference for our students and families. Children who moved through our early childhood programs developed stronger language skills, received developmental support earlier, and entered school more ready to learn. Families grew in resilience, built social connections, and navigated systems that had previously felt inaccessible. Students received health care at rates that exceeded state and national levels. Overall, families who stayed longest and engaged earliest showed the strongest outcomes.
We hope that sharing our learnings will seed and grow these approaches in different places alongside children and families for years to come.
The above material was adapted from The Primary School: A Decade of Integrated Support for Children and Families by the Stanford Center on Early Childhood's (SCEC) Continuous Improvement Rapid Cycle Learning and Evaluation (CIRCLE) team. Continue reading the report here, and click here to explore our model resources.