Advancing equitable access to high quality early childhood education through a trauma- and resilience-informed community schools approach

Abstract

Enhancing access to high-quality early childhood education (ECE) represents one promising pathway toward reducing the disparities in school-related outcomes for children from under-resourced and minoritized communities. In this paper we describe the Trauma- and Resilience-informed Early Enrichment (TRiEE) initiative, an innovative community schools (CS) approach to ECE that was designed to bolster the capacity of public pre-K programs to provide holistic, family-centered, and trauma-informed services. As such, TRiEE features the integration of trained psychiatric social workers (PSWs) into one public school district's set of early education centers (EECs). We hypothesized that this approach to ECE could be positively associated with the acquisition of key skills that are foundational to children's school readiness. Student-level de-identified administrative data, drawn from the Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP), was obtained from twenty-four TRiEE-affiliated EECs in a large, urban public school district over the course of three academic years. Results from mixed-effects models showed that students at sites actively implementing TRiEE demonstrated significantly greater rates of improvement in socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical outcomes (all p < 0.05) in comparison to children participating in sites which were not yet actively implementing TRiEE.