Learning in Luxury : Development Center Says Expensive Touches Help Reach Needy Students
Classical music plays on the day-care center’s stereo system and a light orange-scented spray sweetens the air. An interior wall of French doors and windows filters the sunlight, and miniature silver teapots sit on a shelf waiting for little fingers to practice the skill of pouring water.
In the kitchen, a cook and his helper are preparing children’s meals selected from a menu that includes spinach lasagna and Waldorf salad. Only organically grown ingredients--and no red meat--are used. Lunch will be served on china, with lit candles and fresh flowers on the table.
If this sounds like Club Med for the under-6 set, guess again. This is the David Roberti Child Development Center in South-Central Los Angeles, a state-supported, taxpayer-funded Montessori preschool for the poorest of the poor.
And although the center may strike some people as being extravagant, there are those who say its luxuries are the keys to the early development of at-risk children--and the salvation of society in general.
“I’ve worked in social services so long that, to me, this is a miracle program. This is preventative. It’s at this age when children need to be nurtured, esteemed, validated and taught they can succeed,” said Esperanza Hernandez, the social services director for the Foundation Center for Phenomenological Research. “To me, if we have more centers like this, it will prevent crime in the long run.”
Children at the foundation’s preschool learn language, math, geography, zoology and practical life skills with the help of top-shelf quality toys and tools. They wash up at pint-size designer sinks, and brush their teeth with natural toothpaste valued at more than $6 a tube.
All these touches are part of a greater design to boost the children’s self-esteem, to teach them they do not have to settle for a lifetime of poverty.
“In this world of so much gloom, it’s just one shining example,” said Lily Wong Fillmore, a UC Berkeley researcher who has been a longtime supporter of the foundation, so much so that she has loaned the organization money in a time of need. “Don’t we value our children in our society enough so that every child can have something like this?”
The Roberti center was dedicated in 1989 and so named because “Sen. Roberti has a life history of working for children,” said Antonia Lopez, the foundation’s education director.
Over the years, Roberti’s staff has helped the foundation on occasion when it ran into funding snags. But today the organization has a far more serious threat hanging over it--a federal grand jury investigation for possible misuse of government funds.
The Roberti center is owned primarily by foundation Executive Director Marilyn K. Prosser of Sacramento and the FBI is examining her financial management of the organization.
Foundation officials deny any wrongdoing, but admit they are plagued by uncertainty as a result of the investigation.
“We need to have the opportunity to present our case and maybe be stronger as a result,” Lopez said.
Prosser, who holds a doctorate in human behavior, was a grants-writing consultant before she launched the foundation’s first child-care program in Winters, Calif., in 1980. It was not long before the organization she named after a branch of psychology began attracting more state and federal money.
The foundation draws praise for bringing migrant workers and others from the community into the classroom as specially trained Montessori teachers.
“What they’ve done is so exceptional, it just stands out,” said Jim Cummins, a professor at the University of Toronto, who has visited the organization’s centers, which most children attend for free. “The Foundation Center is one of the few good news stories about education in North America.”