This article originally appeared in the March-April 2004 issue of the Children's Advocate, published by Action Alliance for Children.

Peaceful partnership

A community-wide collaborative in Salinas struggles to continue violence prevention programs in hard times

By Meg Hamill

When her son Rolando was four months old, Salinas mom Perla Rea noticed that he was often irritable and not gaining enough weight. She sought help from the local Parents as Teachers (PAT) organization, a national parent education program. In the three years since, Rea and her husband have been receiving bi-monthly visits from PAT social worker Mayola Rodriguez.

Because of her own health problems, Rea couldn't breastfeed-the best nutrition for infants-and didn't eat much herself. So Rodriguez helped Rea set up a table stocked with healthy snacks so Rolando had easy access to food.

Rodriguez also talked with Rea about the importance of social interaction as Rolando's brain developed, so Rea began inviting neighbors with kids to come over. Sometimes the moms sat in on Rod-riguez's visits, while Rolando and the other kids learned to share and get along. With Rodriguez's encouragement, Rea's family has also cut down on TV and made room for children's music and books.

Now Rolando's earlier temper tantrums have been replaced with new skills. "Now that he has started spending time with other kids, he talks a lot more," says Rea. "He used to grab things and say, 'This is mine.' Sometimes when he got frustrated he would hit me. Now he knows how to share and he doesn't get frustrated that often."

Community-wide effort

Parents as Teachers is part of a community-wide program launched in Sali-nas four years ago, aiming to prevent violence by providing care and services to children from birth to 18. The federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative funded the effort for three years. Now community and business leaders are scrambling to find funds to continue the programs.

A local nonprofit, Partners for Peace, has worked to continue collaborative efforts and bring new grants, while local governments funds are keeping some programs alive. But "around the time local organizations were trying to pick up the cost," says Anna Caballero, mayor of Salinas and director of Partners for Peace, "the state decided to balance its budget on the backs of the cities and counties," by cutting vehicle license fees that provided needed funds.

Focus on prevention

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative is based on a growing recognition that school violence is not an isolated problem, but a public health issue affecting entire communities-and heal-thy child development is key.

Four years ago Attorney General Bill Lockyer launched his Safe from the Start initiative, highlighting the importance of programs for children in preventing violence. Prevention Institute, which helped Partners for Peace map its strategy, published First Steps: Taking Action Early to Prevent Violence, summarizing research on the link between healthy child development and violence prevention.

The Salinas Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative brought together programs including:

• Parents as Teachers, a child de-velopment and parenting program that provides home visits to parents of children from birth to five

• The Buddies/Amiguitos program, which helps children reduce behavior problems and do better in the first years of school by allowing them to play in a supportive environment with trained staff

• Law enforcement officers placed in some middle and high schools to deal with issues such as truancy and bullying before they escalate

• Counselors at each middle and high school, working one-on-one with high-risk students

• After-school programs, jointly designed by librarians and collaborative leaders

• A Policy Makers' Advisory Committee, working to find sustainable funding for this effort.

Parents As Teachers

In bi-monthly home visits, Parents as Teachers social workers teach parents what to expect from their children at different stages of development. "Child abuse often happens because parents have unrealistic expectations," says Carol Singley, parent education coordinator at Salinas Adult School. "They think their child should be able to do something that he/she is developmentally incapable of."

Parents as Teachers also teaches parents how to prepare their kids for school and connects non-literate parents with adult literacy programs. National studies have shown that children whose parents participated in PAT do better in language, problem-solving, and social development. When they get to school, they score higher on achievement tests, and their parents participate more in their education.

Buddies/Amiguitos

Two years ago, as a second grader in Jaime Pastoriza's classroom at the Alisal Community School, Sarita Diaz (not her real name) was painfully shy and having a hard time making friends.

Then she started getting together once a week with a trained paraprofessional for a half-hour of play in the Buddies/ Amiguitos program, another part of the violence prevention initiative. In five Salinas schools, the program worked with at-risk primary grade students to help them overcome early challenges so they could succeed in school.

Sometimes kids in the program played with the adult, says school psychologist Hank Phelps, but often "children would come into a room filled with games and play by themselves. Play helps children to reduce the stress of a difficult daily situation."

After two years in the program, Pastoriza says, Sarita "seems more whole. She's friendly. She plays tetherball with kids on the playground and she can look people in the eye."

In teacher evaluations of students participating in the program, Phelps says, children showed social and academic improvement. "Teachers would say things like: 'He never used to talk and now he raises his hand all the time.' Or 'she used to miss a lot of school and now she's here every single day.'"

Public Policy

To sustain these programs in the long run, says Ken Feske, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Salinas and director of the local initiative, "it's important to realize that if we put resources in the front end to create an effective violence prevention program, ultimately it will be more cost-effective for the entire community."

The initiative's Policy Makers Ad-visory Council (PMAC) educates school and local government officials and business leaders about the importance of prevention. "The biggest challenge," Caba-llero says, "was that everybody came to the table with different information and interests. The first task was bringing us all together on the same page."

But eventually the policy makers developed a list of violence prevention principles to work for in their own organizations, including:

• community commitment to foster children's mental health

• investment in prevention-based programs

• priority to programs with specific, measurable outcomes

• a focus on student attendance and graduation.

Then the federal grant ended, and state funds were slashed. But the policy makers are still meeting and looking for ways to support violence prevention programs. "We need to come up with a revenue source that's more stable," Caballero says-a sales or hotel tax or a guaranteed percentage of the budget.

Partners for Peace is getting ready to build community support by launching a major public-education project to "sell prevention to the community," Caballero says. "Now when there's violence, people say 'we want more police officers.'" The project, she says, will try to convince them that early childhood and after-school programs are more effective in the long run.

Meanwhile, though, public officials like Caballero have been "forced to slash our budgets," she says. "It's unbelievable. We all agreed on how important it was to fund this program, but now no one has any money to do it."

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For more information:

• Partners for Peace, 831-751-7310,
  www.partners-for-peace.org

• Prevention Institute, 510-444-7738, www.preventioninstitute.org
  • Cultivating Peace in Salinas: A Framework for Violence Prevention
  • First Steps: Taking Action Early To Prevent Violence

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