Special needs center celebrating 60 years of spreading sunshine
The preschoolers piled on stage, girls wearing poodle skirts made of paper and wiggling their hips while the boys adjusted their sunglasses.
The performance was part of Wednesday’s festivities at Sunshine Early Childhood Center, a preschool for special needs children in Riverside that is celebrating 60 years in the community. When Sunshine opened in 1947, it had 12 pupils.
The public school now serves 250 children ages 3 to 5 in the Riverside Unified School District.
“I love this place,” said Dawn Mueller, 30, whose 5-year-old son, Gavin, is in his second year at Sunshine. “When my son started here, he had minimal speech capabilities. Now, he’s a regular chatterbox. They know what they’re doing here and they do it with patience and love.”
The school serves children with a wide range of disabilities. Most pupils attend morning or afternoon classes where they receive speech therapy, learn colors, numbers and their ABC’s.
For the celebration, students sang “You Are Our Sunshine” for about three dozen parents and administrators on a back patio festooned with a big yellow sun and larger-than-life paper daisies and tulips.
The children donned costumes taken from the six decades since the school’s opening. There were boys dressed as sailors and girls as Rosie the Riveter wearing knotted pink bandanas to represent the 1940s; poodle skirts and shades for the 1950s; tie-dyed T-shirts for the 1960s; yellow “Have a Nice Day” smiley faces for the 1970s; girls wearing rainbow-colored leg warmers to represent the 1980s; Hawaiian-shirts and nerdy glasses for the 1990s; and Sunshine logo T-shirts for the 2000s.
Christened by a student who submitted the name as part of a contest, Sunshine School opened April 1, 1947. Twelve pupils and five teachers took over a one-story stucco and brick building that had housed U.S. military offices.
The school was originally intended to serve school-age children in Riverside with cerebral palsy. School officials later added a medical therapy unit and began serving children with other disabilities.
In 1993, the school began focusing on pre-kindergarten children. A year later, the school changed its name to the Sunshine Early Childhood Center.
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