Kidango

Kidango creates high-quality early education programs for children and families by offering comprehensive services and by using an intentional approach that honors the diversity and richness of our community. We prepare children for school by supporting their individual needs in classroom settings that are safe, home-like, warm, and enriching with caring and supportive teachers.

Our classrooms incorporate interest areas featuring materials that are attractive, inviting, and relevant to children’s experiences and culture. In each interest area, we advance well-rounded development including cognitive growth, aesthetic sensibility, self-expression, and cultural awareness.

Kidango’s preschool programs emphasize the development of social and emotional skills and children’s readiness for kindergarten as the basis for all learning, as well as the development of foundational skills in language, literacy, and mathematics. Kidango bases its education and child learning strategies on Creative Curriculum, a research-based approach to identifying topics of study and designing curriculum “investigations” that promote learning across all developmental domains: social/emotional, cognitive, and physical.

For literacy, we’ve adopted SEEDS of Learning: a relationship-based professional development and coaching program that provides teachers with the tools they need to foster social, emotional, language, and literacy skills in young children. In addition to language and literacy, we’re implementing “Math Shelf,” an experimentally proven early math curriculum that combines short, sequenced tablet based lessons with hands-on math activities. Math Shelf creates an individual profile for each child and tracks their play and learning on early math skills (i.e., counting, one to one correspondence).

Our Behavioral Health program serves over 700 children and their families through our Early Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) contracts with Alameda and Santa Clara counties, and our skilled team has vast experience of working with all types of behavioral expressions.

In addition to our center-based programs, we provide options for children and families who prefer care in a home environment. We’ve expanded the number of providers who care for children in their homes from 16 providers to 80 providers, increasing the program’s capacity to reach 800 additional children in quality child care environments.

Infant programs are full-day and create a homelike environment while incorporating sensory and motor experiences. Caregivers engage babies by talking, singing songs and reading to promote language development and sensory perception. Teachers spend quality time with each child to appreciate the uniqueness of each child’s personality, culture, and background.

Toddler programs are full-day and encourage toddlers to engage in a variety of indoor and outdoor activities to promote their individuality as well as their intellectual, social-emotional, sensory, and physical development. Classrooms are open learning spaces, full of engaging toys and materials that create an environment rich with learning experiences. Teachers in our toddler rooms encourage children to initiate conversation with a focus on language and social-emotional development.

Kidango’s partnerships with local government entities including the San Andreas Regional Center (Santa Clara County), Regional Center of the East Bay (Alameda County), Alameda County, and City of Fremont allow us to reach 425+ children with developmental delays and other physical, mental, and emotional challenges each year. During non-COVID operations, our EIS team provides home-based services and/or integrated into the classroom at selected Kidango centers.

Early childhood trauma creates vulnerabilities that can dim the potential of children without adequate buffering and nurturing by the community of adults who care for them. This adversity coupled with inadequately equipped early learning systems lead to a higher expulsion rate in preschool, which is three times higher than in the K-12 education system. We address these alarming inequities by providing culturally relevant early childhood mental health consultation (ECMHC) to promote healing with our teachers, families, and students. We create environments that support teachers and the young children and families they serve to realize their unique potential through ECMHC. Recognizing the adults in the child’s daily life are their most powerful influence, we place specially trained mental health consultants at our centers to support the teaching teams and families. The consultants work with these adults to create and sustain environments, interactions, and experiences that promote positive mental health, buffer the effects of toxic stress and trauma, and bring out the most optimal development and learning of each unique child in their care.

We create environments that support teachers and the young children and families they serve to realize their unique potential through early childhood mental health consultation (ECMHC). The consultants work with these adults to create and sustain environments, interactions, and experiences that promote positive mental health, buffer the effects of toxic stress and trauma, and bring out the optimal development and learning of each unique child in their care.

Meals are prepared fresh daily from our in-house central kitchen and tailored to the ages of the children for optimal development. Kidango is a participant (sponsor) of the federally-funded Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) meal reimbursement program as well as a meal vendor to local organizations and entities. We provide children enrolled in our centers and other community organizations with freshly prepared meals daily from our central, fully licensed kitchen. Between Kidango and our vendors, we provide meals to 4,000+ children per day. We strive to always provide meals that are both nutritious and delicious - making every bite count towards the growth of each child we serve

Kidango provides healthy meals and food for our children and families that are facing food insecurity. All children enrolled in our part-day and full-day centers receive a nutritious meal and snack during the school day (breakfast or lunch plus a snack) from our fully licensed Kidango kitchen, meeting and exceeding USDA Child Care standards. Providing nutritious meals and introducing new foods to children is the foundation of our nutrition education. Our nutrition staff prepares special meals to meet children’s dietary restrictions and incorporate multicultural meals to introduce the children to an array of tastes and textures.

Through our policy work, we take our expertise beyond the children and families that we serve, and drive change in early childhood education at the local, state, and federal levels.

We operate at the nexus of research, practice, and policy, each informing the other. Our goal is to bring about change at several levels: the individual child and family; the organization (school district or non-profit); and the system overall (local, state and federal). It is our firm belief that research-driven public policy, born from the experience of serving children and families, can drive a continuously learning and improving system.