Four-year-old Bertie Davis often runs away from her parents and other caregivers. Last winter, she started missing school because of her behavior.
“We could not get her from the car to the classroom,” said her mom, Grindl McMahon. “She would kick, scream, run away and just completely refuse.”
Her preschool teacher suggested they try the Parent Empowerment Program (PEP). Since November 2023, it’s given families in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District the tools they need to overcome behaviors like tantrums, aggression and separation anxiety.
Twice a week, Bertie — who is on the autism spectrum — and other three- to six-year-olds gather in a small classroom in Spring Valley. There’s story time, puzzles and recess. Parents and caregivers are in the room, too, taking notes on kids’ progress and where they need help.
Before the program, McMahon said, activities like grocery shopping or taking a walk had become nearly impossible. It was isolating, and it was affecting Bertie’s older siblings.
“You really do lose ‘the village’ or a community when you have a special needs child,” McMahon said.
In February, McMahon found a community at PEP.
“It's totally changed my life,” she said. “We can take her out, and we don't feel like we're prisoners in our own home, because that's kind of how it was before.”
Before a parent and child start the program, staff meet with their teachers to discuss the student’s needs. For example, a child might struggle with sharing toys.
“We talk to the school team and what they've tried and what challenges they're seeing,” said Chelsea Gould, who leads the program. “From there, we're able to mimic those scenarios here at PEP in a small, controlled, safe setting with trained adults.”
One strategy that started working right away for Bertie is called specific positive attention. It involves describing and praising a certain behavior.
“One of the first days that we were here, one of the other boys was outside and Bertie was trying to run away from me in the parking lot, which she loves to do,” McMahon said. “I said, ‘Oh, wow, Danny's holding his mom's hand,’ and she grabbed my hand.”
Parents collect data at home, too. Before PEP, McMahon would have to ask Bertie several times to come inside after playing. The requests would often end with tantrums. Now, McMahon has strategies like having another activity prepared or using a timer to count down.
“She went from, like, seven to 10 asks or incidents and she got down to one,” McMahon said. “‘Okay, Bertie, one minute, it's time to come inside.’ And she's like, ‘I'm inside,’ which is huge, huge.”
Along with teaching parents about tools to use at home, the program shares information with kids’ teachers.
“When we're able to bridge that gap between home and school, to make sure everyone in that child's life are all on the same page, doing the same things with the same words, we really start to see powerful change across settings, which is really, really exciting,” Gould said.
PEP is an expansion of the Regional Intervention Program, which has served families in Tennessee since 1969. The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District’s program is one of just three outside of Tennessee.
Federal funding for the program comes from school-based mental health grants. The grants were part of a bill passed after a gunman killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
The Department of Education awarded the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District more than $12 million over the course of five years. Along with the Parent Empowerment Program, the grant has paid for full-time mental health staff at each of the district’s schools.
The Lemon Grove School District also got a grant through the program and used it to fund six staff positions.
In May, the Trump administration told school districts it would stop funding the grant program two years early. It means the La Mesa-Spring Valley School district will get $6 million less than expected.
“To have nobody come in to even look at the work that we were doing, to talk about what we were doing or to see what we were doing and how it's changing lives and have that just be stripped from us, it was shocking,” said Deann Ragsdale, the district’s deputy superintendent of educational services. “It was sad. It made me angry.”
Madi Biedermann, the U.S. Department of Education’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, said grant recipients were using the funds to “implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help.”
The district’s grant proposal included offering $2,000 sign-on bonuses for bilingual social workers. More than half of the district’s students are Hispanic or Latino.
“We were going to hire bilingual social workers so that we could communicate better with our families and our communities where we had bilingual families,” Ragsdale said. “To me, that's about partnering with families. It's not about excluding anyone.”
Some school districts have started to bill Medi-Cal and private insurance for behavioral health services for the first time, thanks to a statewide initiative meant to increase students’ access to mental health services. Ragsdale said her district planned to spend the final two years of the grant period figuring out how to do that.
“Setting up the infrastructure for that planning has been in process for us this whole year, so that next year we could begin doing that, seeing what are we recouping, and then what's sustainable,” she said.
The grant funding will end in December. Ragsdale said the district has enough funding to keep staff on through the end of next school year, but they’ll need to find another funding source after that.
Without the Parent Empowerment Program, McMahon said she and her family would miss out on life-changing help.
“If we didn't have this program, I feel like we would be really excluded from, you know, daily life,” she said. “This program has really made it possible for Bertie to attend a public school.”
The district is appealing the Department of Education’s decision. They’re not sure when — or if — they’ll hear back.
