FILLMORE : Children Feel at Home in New Preschool

A few youngsters were so impressed by their new Head Start preschool outside Fillmore that they didn’t want to leave.

“I want to live here. I don’t want to go home,” a teacher heard a young boy tell his mother after the first day of school.

“He had never seen a place that was so new and so nice,” said Sandra Ferrer-Gaitan, head teacher at the preschool in the Rancho Sespe farm worker housing development along California 126 between Fillmore and Piru.

The bright and airy classrooms are filled with new pint-size desks and chairs and instructional games for the 60 children who spend either the morning or the afternoon at the school.

All of the children, ranging in ages from 2 to 5, come from low-income families. About half live at Rancho Sespe; the others reside in and around Fillmore. They start their day at the school with a hot meal and then spend time singing, learning arts and crafts and making friends with other children.

“Look at the robot I made,” 4-year-old Sean Roberts told classmate Nancy Luna, also 4. The two had just finished creating Christmas presents for their parents and were off playing with blocks in one corner of the classroom.

“All children benefit from going to preschool,” said Alicia Lewis, Head Start program manager for Child Development Resources, which administers the federal Head Start program in Ventura.

“You’re taking children that have a lot going against them and giving them a boost,” Lewis said. “These kids do better when they finally get into school. They have higher self-esteem and they’re ready for the public school system.”

The Head Start preschool at Rancho Sespe was planned for a long time, said Rodney Fernandez of the Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., which was instrumental in planning the housing development. The whole development took five years and $8.5 million to complete.

“Working with the people from Child Development Resources, we had the architect lay everything out at children’s height,” Fernandez said. “The natural light really adds a softness and beauty to the classrooms.”

On Friday morning, Ferrer-Gaitan’s class played in the sunshine filtering through the doors and windows of her classroom. A pile of gifts lay in the center of the room, each one neatly wrapped with holiday paper and bow and each bearing a tag saying “Merry Christmas from Head Start.”