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Pre-K - What We've Accomplished

Family Partner Services

In partnership with FIRST 5 Santa Clara County, SVEF provides Family Partner Services based on the Cornell University Family Development Model in the Franklin McKinley and San Jose Unified School Districts. Family Partners provide support and advocacy to identified families with children prenatal through five years of age; helping to identify the family's strengths and needs, and assisting in securing appropriate services.

The Family Partners program ensures that children and families living in the attendance areas of SJUSD and FMSD will have access to the necessary health, developmental, and social tools to assist the family in preparing their children for the start of their academic lives.

Within this program, SVEF Family Partners:

• Coordinate prevention, intervention, and intensive intervention services to children, prenatal to five and their families.
• Secure access to multiple programs, services, and activities identified by the families in the five essential elements of school readiness:

1. Early Care and Education
2. Parenting and Family Support
3. Health and Social Services
4. School Capacity
5. Program infrastructure and administration
   
   

• Identify and address gaps in needed services and the over and under utilization of existing services; and
• Foster community collaboration to enable the coordination and integration of existing services and infrastructures.

Stepping Stones to Kinder

Though in its relatively nascent state, SVEF’s Stepping Stones to Kinder (SSTK) program has been proliferated in the targeted communities of Santa Clara County. In a fairly short period of time since the launch of the program (February 2009), the SVEF staff has been able to reach out to over 200 families—mainly of low socio-economic and mono-lingual background—and educated the families on the building blocks to kinder-readiness.
The program acquaints and guides the families who otherwise remain ignorant of the dire needs of development of a kinder-ready child.

SVEF's intervention plays a key role in enabling the kind of early learning experiences that research shows are linked with academic achievement, reduced grade retention, higher graduation rates and enhanced productivity in adult life.