October 2002

In August 2002, dozens of Oakland pre-school teachers and childcare center staff were trained to teach a nationally renowned violence prevention curriculum to more than 5,000 children annually. Safe Passages is directing and funding this effort.

"This year we are training teachers in the Head Start and Oakland Unified School District Early Childhood Education sites," says Dana Inman, policy coordinator for Safe Passages. "Expansion in the future will be done in collaboration with Alameda County's Every Child Counts Child Development Corps, guided by lessons learned from the first year of implementation."

Designed by the Committee for Children, the Second Step Violence Prevention Curriculum teaches empathy, impulse control, problem solving and anger management.

Implementing this violence prevention curriculum is just one component of Safe Passages' comprehensive early childhood strategy to prevent young children exposed to violence from adopting violent behavior.

"We know that young children exposed to violence are 14 times more likely to become both victims and perpetrators of violence as they grow to be adolescents," says Laura Pinkney, executive director of Safe Passages. "Our youngest children, from birth to age five, are dependent on caring adults to provide emotional supports that become the basis for how they relate to the world and interact with others."

Identifying kids who may have been exposed to violence is a challenge because very young children do not often encounter public systems; they are "under the radar" of public and private agencies that could help. Therefore, identifying young kids exposed to violence is another key component of the early childhood strategy. Childcare staff and preschool teachers will receive, in addition to the Second Step curriculum training, consultations and assessment tools to help them identify these kids and provide referrals for those who may need more intensive therapy.

Another means of identifying young kids who need help is the Family Violence Intervention Unit, a collaboration of the Oakland Police Department and the Family Violence Law Center intended to cut down on the response time between when a domestic violence incident has been reported to the police and when assistance is offered to victims. Advocates from the unit provide the victims a variety of services that may include referrals to mental health providers. Also, the police will receive training on handling domestic violence cases and will use new tracking forms to report the number and ages of children witnessing domestic violence.

Identifying young kids in need of services is an important step; equally important is having a network of providers who can help them.

Safe Passages will seek funding to initiate a network of providers to provide mental health consultations at child care sites and take referrals for individual infant/child-parent psychotherapy. The goal for the first year is to fund community-based organizations to provide mental health consultations to 40-50 early childhood education classrooms and accept referrals for the infant/child-parent psychotherapy from the childcare sites and from the Family Violence Intervention Unit for 50-75 children.

In addition to its curriculum, identification and mental health components, Safe Passages' early childhood strategy also includes coordination of services. Safe Passages has developed an Early Childhood Policy Council, which is comprised of several representatives from within Alameda County, the City of Oakland, the Oakland Unified School District and several community-based organizations. The Policy Council will coordinate services within the city for children 0-5 exposed to violence and will bring recommendations on policy changes to the Safe Passages Board of Directors. A director of Safe Passages' early childhood initiative will be hired to oversee program development as advised by the Policy Council and Safe Passages Board. Also, the director will serve as the central link between the identification system and mental health services.

"It is heartbreaking that very young children's exposure to violence can lead to numerous negative mental health outcomes," says Pinkney. "But it is hopeful to know that this age group is also the most likely to respond to prevention and early intervention. That's the motivation behind our early childhood strategy."

The early childhood strategy is one of three broad strategies - the others are a middle school strategy and a youth offender strategy - Safe Passages' employs to reach its goal of reducing youth violence in Oakland.

For more information on this website about Oakland's Safe Passages, click here. For more information on this website about early childhood interventions, click here.