We brought together all of the adults in a child’s life, including parents, educators, and health care professionals.

We know that there are many reasons why children come to school not ready to learn. Children and their families may be experiencing poverty, housing insecurity, racism, and other stressful and traumatic situations; they may not have had access to an early childhood program, so might be entering school already behind in language and cognitive development; or they may have untreated physical health barriers — like cavities, asthma, or hunger — that make it difficult to concentrate. We not only accounted for these barriers to learning, but actively worked in partnership with families to overcome them.

Our work with children and families was informed by an understanding of how trauma can impact the brain and a child’s ability to learn. We promoted resilience and mitigated the effects of trauma throughout our child and family programming, while providing support services that directly addressed trauma. Additionally, we strove to ensure that our curricula and programming was culturally responsive: we provided opportunities for children and families to learn about other cultures and ways of thinking, and to explore and share their own cultural identity.

THEORY OF CHANGE

Read our Theory of Change to see how our comprehensive approach leads to whole child outcomes.
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Core Strategies

Start Early.

For TPS, starting early meant working with families during the critical window of child development around 12 months of age. Over the decade we were operating, our Early Family Foundations program served approximately 300 families across both sites. Early Family Foundations supported families and enrolled children as early as 12 months through the transition to preschool at age three. Early Family Foundations had two main components:

Developmental screenings, including referrals with follow-ups to connect children to early intervention services.
Group sessions to build early language and social-emotional skills.

The Connections parent group aimed to help caregivers strengthen language-rich interactions with their children, while Bridge to Preschool worked to prepare children and families for the transition to the classroom and build social-emotional skills. A two-year preschool program followed, designed to build on what families had experienced in Early Family Foundations.

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Partner with Parents.

We developed our Parent Wellness Coaching program on a simple but meaningful premise: that children do better when their parents are doing better. Rather than treating families only as partners in their child’s education, TPS invested in parents as individuals, supporting their well-being, their goals, and their ability to navigate the challenges that make parenting harder. We assigned a dedicated Parent Wellness Coach who provided individual and group-based support to each family. Our Coaches worked with parents to identify strengths, set personal goals, and connect to community resources. Coaches did not tell parents what to do, but built relationships with them and asked what they wanted for themselves and their children.

Group programming included a 10-week Foundations series and monthly Parent Circles, which gave parents a consistent community of peers to learn from, share with, and lean on. Coaches also worked alongside teachers and school staff on child-centered planning, including through bi-annual Children’s Circle30 meetings, helping families understand and strengthen their role in their child’s learning and development.

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Integrate Services

Children’s learning is compromised when they have unrecognized or untreated medical issues, when untreated asthma keeps them home, or when a dental infection makes it difficult to concentrate. We built our health integration model with recognition that schools are often the most consistent and trusted touchpoint in a family’s life, and a family’s relationship with their school can be a powerful lever for improving their child’s health. In traditional systems, a significant gap exists between referral and completed care: access to referrals alone does not ensure that children actually receive needed services. That gap widens further for the families where language barriers, limited familiarity with the health care system, low trust, and systemic biases all make navigation harder. A school that has already earned family’s trust is uniquely positioned to bridge that gap in ways that a clinic or referral line cannot.

Rather than building a separate school-based health center, which requires significant funding and can duplicate existing services, we partnered with community pediatric medical homes to extend their reach into the school. School staff and health providers worked jointly, shared information, and followed through on identified needs. This started with establishing communication pathways and privacy agreements between the school and its partners. From there, we embedded screenings for the most common health barriers to learning, including vision, hearing, dental, asthma, and developmental delays. We then built in the follow-up support needed to ensure that identified needs were resolved, not just referred.

At the center of the model sat a part-time nurse, shared with the Ravenswood Family Health Network in East Palo Alto and Kaiser Permanente in the East Bay. The nurse worked in close partnership with our dedicated health staff at each site to coordinate preventative care, support annual well-child visits and immunizations, and ensure families could access on-site dental services. For children with more complex health needs, the integrated team met regularly for care coordination, with health partners providing clinical staff for program oversight and periodic on-site support. Finally, we also invested in promoting healthy behaviors at school and at home in areas such as oral health, nutrition, physical activity, and hand and sleep hygiene.