How a San Diego Preschool Serves Children After Trauma

from Adriana Heldiz and Adam AshtonCalMatters

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Almost 20 years ago, a San Diego nonprofit created a preschool to focus on “little boys” — children who have experienced domestic violence and other serious traumatic events before kindergarten.

Today, Mi Escuelita is still going strong and is something of a model that shows other schools how to deal with childhood trauma.

Mi Escuelita provides services for children in one place that for most other families would require complex coordination among multiple health care providers, educators and social programs.

Children learn in a classroom where there is always at least one therapist, participate in individual therapy and join group therapy sessions. Their parents also participate in special classes where they learn how to support their children.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have paid close attention to Mi Escuelta and tracked how its graduates fare after they leave preschool. The university also works with the school to assess the performance of each group of students. Here are four takeaways from those reports.

Children leave ready for kindergarten

Students who graduate from Mi Escuelia outperform or do at least as well as their peers in kindergarten, according to a UC San Diego analysis of their reading and math test scores.

It looked at kindergarten students in the Chula Vista Elementary School District from 2007 to 2013 and found a higher percentage of Mi Escuelitas meeting standards in math, reading and writing than the district’s general population.

This is not a given because research shows that children exposed to domestic violence have lower verbal ability than their peers, which can set them back in school.

And they’ve been doing well for years

The length of the UC San Diego study allowed his team to follow Mi Escuelita graduates through fifth grade. The results showed that their preschool experiences helped the children throughout their childhood.

Their average scores on several standardized tests exceeded those of the general population in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, especially in math.

“Taken together, the Mi Escuelita program demonstrates clear benefits for children who might otherwise quickly and relentlessly fall behind in their school readiness,” the UC San Diego researchers wrote.

Better relationships at home

Some families turn to Mi Escuelita in times of distress, such as after experiencing domestic violence. The preschool provides counseling for both parents and students, which can help improve behavior at home.

Over the past five years, 64% of families in the program reported feeling less conflict, and 83% of them noticed an increase in closeness.

“Families reported that children’s communication, behavior, and listening skills improved both at home and at school,” a UC San Diego team wrote in an evaluation of student and parent surveys spanning 2020 to 2024.

It takes a village

Mi Escuelita costs about $1.3 million a year to run, an amount that the nonprofit South Bay Community Services raises through a combination of donations and government funding. This cost—along with the challenge of recruiting trained educators and therapists—makes the program difficult to replicate.

But other schools and government agencies are watching Mi Escuelita to see what kind of services they can bring to other locations.

“Later on, we can spend less on intervention programs and alternative facilities,” said Hilaria Bauer, chief early learning services officer at Kidangoa Bay Area non-profit child care provider. “There will be less truancy, less rough behavior or expulsions or alternative programs and all these ‘remedial’ initiatives if we really focus on the time in a child’s life that really makes a difference.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.