Laura has been formally involved in social change work for 18 years. Working both directly with trauma on a front line basis and with the fields of education related to liberation and anti-oppression theory, her first paid job in social work was as a teacher for preschool children who were homeless. She currently is the Director of Prescolar, does trainings locally, nationally and internationally on trauma and its impact, is a community volunteer, and is a mother of two children.
Here's an article written by Laura about her children attending public school in Mexico.


Claudia is an early childhood educator who has been studying and teaching languages for over thirteen years. Fluent in Spanish, French and English she has worked with children as young as one year old in teaching languages. She has lived and worked internationally and was the lead teacher in an English language preschool in Mexico. An artist as well she incorporates scrapbook making into her work with children as a way to support them in documenting their learning and to encourage them exploring a variety of artistic mediums. Born and raised in Mexico she lived in Boston before moving to Seattle where she cared for children and tutored undergrads in Spanish and French. Incorporating in dance, music and art, Claudia has expertise in developing age appropriate curriculum for children with an emphasis on multi-lingual and multi-cultural development. Additionally, Claudia is a community volunteer.


Sonia Velázquez is an educator who has been working with children for over ten years. Fluent in Spanish and English she has worked with children of all ages as a preschool teacher, a bilingual tutor, a school liaison and an assistant program supervisor. Sonia has a great deal of expertise in working inter-generationally both in designing and implementing curriculum. She has created and led multiple literacy programs. Born and raised in Guatemala, she has settled in Seattle. She is a mother and is a community volunteer.


Teresa has been a preschool teacher for 10 years both in Mexico and in the United States. Currently she teaches with the Highline school district helping kindergarten and first grade children with their homework and their understanding of the English language. Additionally she is a pre-k teacher at Sea Mar. She is a community volunteer and a mother of three children.


Alice Francis (1938–1983) is Laura’s mother. Coming from a long line of school teachers, she was fluent in both Spanish and French. She raised her children with the value of speaking multiple languages as a way of connecting with and honoring others. In her final years of life she worked with immigrants and refugees and her endless commitment to social justice was imparted on a daily basis to her children. It is in her honor that Prescolar Alice Francis was created.




This school is grateful for the large number of people and forces that have contributed so generously to its existence. Very deep appreciation goes to all the families who have been a part of our community; to our board of directors; to the other heads of schools near and far who have shared their wisdom and support; for all who have contributed financially to the school; to our visionaries Connie Burk, Ingrid Dankmeyer, Lisa Fitzhugh, Rivy Poupko Kletenik; to our Pipe Circle communities; for the practices of Reggio Emilia, Re-Evaluation Counseling, Marshall Rosenberg and Non-Violent Communication; to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Pema Chödrön, Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat Zinn, the Dalai Lama; and for each and every being who assists us in being the school we are.

“The process of becoming a competent member of society is realized through exchanges of language. A corollary argument, addressing evolutionary origins, suggests that language evolved to capitalize on preexisting general systems and then went beyond them. The characteristics that facilitate language acquisition in children may thus have influenced the nature of language itself, ensuring that language was learnable by infants in natural settings. Infants acquire language with remarkable speed, children are born ‘citizens of the world’ with the ability to distinguish among the sounds used in all languages.”

“People who are bilingual have an advantage over the rest of us, and not just in terms of communication skills. The bilingual brain develops more densely, giving it an advantage in various abilities and skills, according to new research. Brain imaging showed that bilingual speakers had denser gray matter compared with monolingual participants. being bilingual structurally changes the brain. Their study shows the effect was strongest in people who had learned a second language before age 5. ‘Our findings suggest that the structure of the human brain is altered by the experience of acquiring a second language,’ write the researchers in the October issue of the journal Nature. ‘it is clear that foreign language should be taught in the elementary school, if not before.’”



“Robinson summarized many of them in an article, concluding, ‘the picture that emerges is . . . a youngster whose experience with two language systems seems to have left him or her with a mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, and a more diversified set of mental abilities.’Research indicates that foreign language study provides both cognitive and sociocultural benefits. ‘Linguistic and cultural competence will be the mark of the well-educated citizen of the 21st century...’“

“Culture should be our message to students and language our medium ...people from different cultures weave their lives into an international fabric that is beginning to fray at the edges by virtue of miscommunication and propaganda. In order to foster empathy and understanding, teachers should ‘present students with a true picture or representation of another culture and language’ to help establish the foreign language classroom ‘not so much as a place where the language is taught, but as one where opportunities for learning of various kinds are provided through the interactions that take place between the participants’ it could be argued that culture never remains static, but is constantly changing. In this light, Robinson (1988) dismisses behaviourist, functionalist, and cognitive definitions of culture and posits a symbolic one which sees culture as a dynamic ‘system of symbols and meanings’ whereby ‘past experience influences meaning, which in turn affects future experience, which in turn affects subsequent meaning, and so on’. Culture is our social legacy as contrasted with our organic heredity. It regulates our lives at every turn. Wilhelm von Humboldt, an eminent diplomat and scholar, once wrote: The spiritual traits and the structure of the language of a people are so intimately blended that, given either of the two, one should be able to derive the other from it to the fullest extent...Language is the outward manifestation of the spirit of people: their language is their spirit, and their spirit is their language; it is difficult to imagine any two things more identical (Humboldt, 1907, cited in Salzmann, 1998: 39).”