The Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI), a collaborative supporting families with children ages 9 and under in Santa Ana, California, aims to boost reading and math outcomes for students in kindergarten through third grade, but instead of using approaches traditionally employed by schools and districts to boost test scores, such as tutoring or data analytics, its model focuses on a different kind of essential ingredient for academic development: cultivating a sense of belonging.
Cultural connections make children and their families feel like they fully belong to a community, which is why SAELI aims to empower families and increase access to resources. Parent centers and advocacy efforts are among the strategies that enable the collaborative to involve families in the community.
Sandwiched between San Diego and Los Angeles, Santa Ana is the fourth most densely populated city in the U.S., among cities with more than 300,000 residents. More than 70% of its residents identify as Mexican, according to data from the 2020 Orange County Census Atlas. Rigo Rodriguez, founder of SAELI, these statistics stem from global immigration trends, as well as the heavy reliance on low-wage immigrant labor in the service and construction sectors in Orange County.
“Because of this density and reliance on immigrant labor as essential workers, Santa Ana became the epicenter of the COVID pandemic here in Orange County,” says Rodriguez, who also serves as Chair of the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Long Beach.
SAELI takes a comprehensive approach to working with first-generation immigrant families and low-income families with young children. Rodriguez, who is on the board of Santa Ana Unified School District, helps to maintain close ties between the district, the organization and the community.
In 2016, when SAELI was launched through a grant from First 5 Orange County, a public agency dedicated to the healthy development of young children, the school district only had 313 preschool slots in 8 of its 33 elementary schools, and most of the parent centers were located in the secondary schools. Today, the district has 1,560 preschool slots across 31 schools, covering nearly 70% of incoming kindergartners. Moreover, every elementary school has a wellness center open to the entire community with a full-time family and community engagement liaison connecting parents to resources and opportunities. SAELI also uses the Early Development Index (EDI), a tool developed in Canada in the 1990s and administered by UCLA, to track progress in kindergarten readiness across five domains: language and cognitive development; communication skills and general knowledge; emotional maturity; social competence; and physical health.
“This comprehensive approach,” Rodriguez explains, “requires an active alliance between city government, over 20 nonprofit agencies, the school district and over 250 active parents hailing from 24 elementary schools.”
As a grassroots coalition, the collaborative has exceptionally strong community ties, says Andres Bustamante, an associate professor at University of California, Irvine School of Education, who collaborated with SAELI on the design and implementation of Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, a project that brings together science of learning and urban design, through a grant from the National Science Foundation. The project has implemented a number of solutions to promote everyday opportunities for learning and development among young children and their caregivers. For example, they’ve installed signs inside local supermarkets to spark conversation while food shopping. And a giant abacus at a local bus stop was co-designed by SAELI caregivers to inspire caregivers and children to count together while they wait for the bus.
“I’ve seen groups beg for participation without getting much of a response,” he explains, “whereas our biggest problem with SAELI is, when we say we want 10 families, they get back to us and say, ‘Okay, we have 40 families.’”
A sign to promote conversation at a grocery store in Santa Ana, California. (Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network)These families aren’t afraid to express their opinions. Bustamante describes unveiling the mockup of a mural depicting people walking around Santa Ana. One of the moms raised her hand and said, “Something doesn’t feel right here. All these people are all facing different directions, but that’s not how we walk. We don’t walk alone. We walk together as a family.” Bustamante and his team set about revising the mural.
Wendy G. Gomez, the director of SAELI, embodies the collaborative’s commitment to parent leadership. She started as a parent volunteer with the initiative when the younger of her two sons was in first grade. Although she studied education in college, her career had gone in another direction, and she was working in the finance department of an insurance company. By her second SAELI meeting, she was hooked, and took advantage of the various ways families could get involved, from conducting job interviews to serving on committees. Soon she applied to be a promotora — a community health worker who helps SAELI with outreach in Spanish-speaking areas — a position she held for a year before becoming project coordinator.
Wendy G. Gomez with her son at a local bus stop, which has an abacus to promote counting. (Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network)In addition to trusting her own instincts as a leader, Gomez has gained confidence in valuing the voices of Santa Ana residents. “I had assumed that when a funder said, ‘jump,’ my response would be, ‘how high?’” she says. “But that’s not how we do things. We go back to the families and say, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity that we have. What do you think?’”
Gomez says that community members organize resource fairs, neighborhood workshops and often raise issues that, while not directly connected to academics, relate to children’s ability to thrive. Housing stability, accessible park space, food security and freedom from immigration harassment, for example, are priorities among Santa Ana families. In 2021, for example, SAELI joined forces with Tenants United Santa Ana to pass an ordinance for rent control requiring “just cause” for evictions. Families have also led the charge to turn vacant lots into green spaces, through a partnership with All Children Thrive and Adopt a Lot. Many parents remain involved even after their children enter high school and beyond.
“Families are now training [other] families in order to pass the baton,” Gomez says. “By building these strong networks, new parents and new arrivals have something to plug into, and their children benefit from the resources we have lined up for them.”
One of her big lessons has been learning how to give up power. “That’s hard,” she admits, “because we are all kind of in one way or another part of a system.”
Reflecting on her own parenting style, she now realizes she “didn’t always look at the whole child, and how that includes the extended family.” When parents work, grandmothers and other relatives might be providing care during the day. Big siblings might be picking younger ones up from child care. A survey conducted in partnership with Community Organizing and Family Issues, a nonprofit devoted to parent organizing, found that half of Santa Ana’s young children are in the care of someone other than parents.
While Rodriguez recognizes the ongoing challenges resulting from decades of rapid expansion of Santa Ana’s population of children as well as underinvestment in education, he sees progress toward SAELI’s ambitious goals. “We believe,” he says, “that if children are doing well in math and reading and are socially [and] emotionally resilient by the third grade, it’s hard to stop them afterwards.”
Mark Swartz writes for Early Learning Nation and the Stanford Center on Early Childhood about efforts to improve early care and education. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two children.
