Program Overview


Staff: Director (Virginia Mann), Ph.D., Professor and Associate Dean
    Site Coordinator (Maricela Sandoval, Lorena Garcia, both PCHP trained) 
    25 home visitors (12 bilingual UCI students, 8 AmeriCorps members and  
    5 community members trained by the site coordinators and director)

Clients served to date: over 250 two-to-four year-olds from families with mean
    income $16,000 and mean parental educational level is 8th grade. 95% of 
    clients are ESL speakers of Spanish.  The majority live in Santa Ana, CA.

Funding: the Children and Families Commission provide primary funding 
    of Orange County, with leverage from the California Children and Families 
    Commission, AmeriCorps/VISTA, the National Institute of Health and Wells 
    Fargo Bank.  Total funds committed to date: $1,270,000.

Overview: HABLA is a broad-spectrum Latino-focused educational outreach program 
based in the School of Social Sciences at UCI and created by Dr. Virginia Mann 
in June 2000 with the support of the Orange County Children and Families 
Commission.  Its purpose is to increase the school readiness of disadvantaged 
children aged two-to-four years, by uniting faculty and students at UCI with the 
Santa Ana Unified School System, local Families Resource Center, Americorp/VISTA, 
FACT and the national Parent Child Home Program (PCHP).  The salient innovations 
of HALBA are: 1) its focus on very early, home-based intervention to promote 
school readiness for disadvantaged children prior to their preschool year 2) its 
employment of Latino college students and Latino community members who are 
compensated in various ways (course credit, salary, AmeriCorps membership) to be 
work-study home visitors who facilitate school readiness through helping parents 
learn how to provide optimal language play and shared reading, and 3) its use of 
a Spanish language adaptation of the proven PCHP curriculum.   HABLA engages 
families, community and the university in achieving a replicable, three-tiered 
goal of increased school readiness for young children, and increased college 
matriculation and public service career opportunities for home visitors.  Some of 
our newest home visitors are mothers who successfully graduated from HABLA and are 
now holding their first job.  

More specifically, HABLA’s service program offers low-income, low-SES families in 
Santa Ana a proven program for their 2 to 4 year-old children.  Bi-weekly visits to 
each child and parent (or caretaker) are conducted in the home by extensively 
trained, bilingual staff members chosen for their cultural competence, language 
skills, experience with preschool children and ability to be a positive role model 
for the children and families being served.  These home visitors use toys and books 
(Spanish and English are available) to model and ‘coach’ parenting techniques that 
will increase verbal interaction and promote child learning and expressive language.  
Some of these activities focus on health and hygiene, others focus on mental 
development and pre-school skills. All of the toys and books stay in the home for 
continued use and often become the only books that the family owns and the first 
books that the children learn to read.

Extensive evaluations of HABLA’s ability to achieve its goals are being conducted at 
intake and yearly intervals.  These show that the HABLA home visits increase school 
readiness and we hope that they, like the PCHP visits, will increase matriculation 
through the school system. To confirm our achievement of goals for school readiness, 
HABLA assesses children’s language skills and parental style of interaction at the 
onset of intervention and at yearly intervals during the intervention and beyond.  
To date, the results have shown significant impact in terms of benefits in child and 
parent behavior and growth in expressive and receptive language.  HABLA’s is reducing 
the sharp decline in primary language skills that is typical of untreated children 
from educationally and economically disadvantaged families. It is returning the 
trajectory of development to a more age-appropriate course. Where untreated peers in 
the community at large can average primary language scores significantly below the 
norm, HABLA-treated children score within normal ranges.  Parents who participate in 
HABLA are able to sustain verbal interactions with their children; they grow in 
perceived competence and in the quality of attention that they give to their children.  
Where parents in the community at large tend to have a passive view of their role in 
their children’s education, HABLA parents realize their role as their children’s first 
and most important teachers and are ready to form a responsive partnership with the 
educational system.

Contact:
    Dr. Virginia Mann
    Founder and Director
    UCI School of Social Sciences
    3151 Social Science Plaza 
    University of California, Irvine  92697-5100 
    e-mail: vmann@uci.edu

HABLA Office at UCI
    2510 Berkeley Place
    Irvine, CA 92697
    (949) 824-5296

HABLA Office in Santa Ana
    2101 E. 4th St. Suite 195
    Santa Ana, CA 92705
    (714) 541-9300