By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Most of the 350 families whose children attend the Denise Louie Education Center (DLEC) are immigrants—and this means they face a host of challenges non-immigrant families do not, especially if they are Asian American or Pacific Islander.
One challenge facing the center’s AAPI families—who make up 30%-40% of the center’s immigrant families—is the anti-Asian hate that rapidly escalated during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has not significantly declined.
“We don’t really speak so loudly about it, because we try to stay under the radar to a degree, but some of our families, I think, do feel … uncertain about their place in our society,” said Susan Yang, the center’s executive director. She also pinpointed language as another hurdle, particularly for intergenerational families.
“We have a lot of grandparents you’ll see at drop off and pick up [who] come and support their grandchildren. … I think [the parents] have the biggest trouble because they are kind of in between. The parents are trying to figure out how to navigate this new world order with their parents here,” Yang said. “And they speak more English (than their parents). Their children speak even more English (than they do). So, there’s oftentimes an intergenerational pattern of, how do we preserve the language for the children? Or how do we help the families? And then how do we help the grandparents, too, who also need some support?”
The center has served area families since Uncle Bob Santos founded it in the late 1970s. The center was renamed the Denise Louie Education Center, in honor of 22-year-old community advocate Denise Louie, who died after getting caught in gunfire. Backed by the federal Head Start program, which provides funding for school readiness programs, the center offers comprehensive support for low-income families, including early childhood educational experiences that allow children to “learn more than just their ABCs and 1-2-3s.”
Head Start headwinds
But the 61-year-old Head Start is now facing an uncertain future. The Trump administration is in the midst of modifying Biden-era changes to the program that would bring Head Start teacher wages up to competitive rates and provide more benefits by 2031. While the administration says that this would retain 106,000 slots in the Head Start program, many have pointed out that this would reduce the quality of the program.
“I think that it’s important that we continue to advocate that these programs are really important for children and families,” Yang said.
In this spirit, the center hosted a Day of Play on June 5, in collaboration with the Smith-Njigba Family Foundation, a community service organization Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba launched in 2025. The Day of Play was meant for kids and families to play and relax, and included carnival-style games, storytime, and parachute play. Yang said that the day had been in the works since November 2025, when she and Jami Smith, Smith-Njigba’s mother, first connected.
Courtesy of Denise Louie Education Center
“Jaxon actually is a Head Start alum, and his mom is one of the principals of the foundation,” Yang said. “She really wanted to support a local Head Start program. She was referred to us, and so we started down a path. … She really wanted to support a group within Seattle. … This [Day of Play] is a testament to [the importance and impact of Head Start], [and] it’s also a testament to the fact that, again, our Head Start kids go on to do great things. And it’s important to highlight that.”
“Our goal has always been to partner with organizations that share our values and are intentional about their mission. Head Start embodies both. The program aligns with our passion for education, and holds a personal place in our family’s story,” Smith wrote in an email. “Both of my sons, Canaan and Jaxon, attended Head Start in Nacogdoches, Texas. It has been more than 20 years, but I have never forgotten the impact the program had on our family. Head Start didn’t just invest in my boys, it invested in me as a parent.”
Courtesy of Denise Louie Education Center
Smith said that she attended family classes that covered a number of topics, including the importance of reading with children, ensuring they were in school on time, and managing stress. She also said that social workers helped to connect her with resources that allowed her to be successful as she pursued her own education in college.
“Head Start was so much more than a school. It was a place of comfort, support, and opportunity. A nonjudgmental environment that recognized the needs of the entire family and responded with both compassion and accountability,” Smith recalled. After connecting with Yang and touring the DLEC, she knew that the center was the place to hold the foundation’s first Day of Play.
Courtesy of Denise Louie Education Center
“Susan invited me to tour the center, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the heart of Head Start has remained unchanged. Her energy and passion for the work were contagious. The walls were filled with children’s artwork, and even the familiar tooth-brushing stations brought back memories of my own boys brushing their teeth at those small classroom sinks,” Smith said. “What stood out most was that the core values I appreciated as a young parent are still very much alive today: high expectations for families, intentional and engaging curriculum, meaningful parent involvement, and a holistic approach to supporting children and caregivers.”
Intergenerational education
The challenges Smith had to navigate were different from the challenges most of the center’s families must work through, but her experiences attending Head Start-funded classes in Texas 20 years ago mirror the experiences the DLEC provides for families.
For 65%-70% of the families the center serves, English is not their first language. But the center doesn’t exactly treat this as a hurdle: Staff both respect the home language, and try to help parents and children navigate a predominantly English-language public space.
Courtesy of Denise Louie Education Center
“So we serve families particularly in our home-based, home-visiting program, and that’s actually more of almost like a parent-child model, where the parent and the child sit together,” Yang explained. “We have a 90-minute home visit, and in the home visit, the home visitor usually speaks the language of the family they’re supporting. But the Head Start mission has always been to try to help the families preserve the language in the children, so that they can get a strong foundation in their home language.”
When the children go to preschool, she continued, the center works to help transition the child from their home language to English, with the goal of preserving the child’s bilingualism.
“Our job is to help the children navigate those two worlds, particularly as they transition into center-based programs. The teachers all speak English in the classroom, but they do help support their home language in the classroom as well,” she continued. Activities to support the children’s bilingualism include showing them cards with pictures of activities or items and the different words for that activity or item.
But family support goes beyond just language. Center staff also try to match families up with needed resources and provide them the tools needed to navigate a different world.
“Oftentimes, many of our families come from oppressive political governments, so [we try] to explain to many of the families that the police—despite a lot of people’s very strong sentiments about them—are not here to arrest them. The police can be helpful to their safety,” Yang said. She also said that many immigrants are targets for fraud schemes, and that the center tries to help them steer clear of scams and people who would otherwise take advantage of them. “We [also] try to help them understand things like, ‘Is this good information or not?’ We’re facing an uphill battle on things like immunization, because there’s so much information out there about vaccination.”
Families who come in with their first child also often don’t know what to expect or what to do to help improve the quality of their child’s educational and development social experience, Yang said, and most children don’t understand the rules when going into a classroom. But kids rarely learn from memorization. They learn better from demonstration, practice, and play. So, one of the center’s goals is to teach by showing, and that includes establishing a routine. For instance, she said, if the yoga teacher comes in, the kids know they will be doing yoga, and have learned the routine through practice. This allows children agency within the structure of the classroom.
“There are things they just kind of know because of the setup. And a lot of that is based on the fact that the teachers have done a good job of setting up kind of a routine for them,” Yang said.
“They know the routine. They feel safe. They understand what’s going to happen. It’s really critical to their learning. … There’s a lot of effort to try to teach children things like math and things like science through experiential learning and playing, so a lot of the activities center around that.”
Navigating the educational system, especially as an immigrant, can be exhausting. So, while the Day of Play didn’t specifically focus on the more traditional methods of support, like resource connection or classes, it still supported the center’s overall mission by filling a much-needed hole: simple recreation and fun.
“This was a great opportunity to really sort of celebrate our community and families differently. We normally have a Day of Play just for the staff, and we decided this year we were going to build on this opportunity to really help support our children and families and community in a different way,” Yang said. “Our goal is always to ensure that families and children are at the center of our work. This was really a nice day for the families because we were off from school that day. It was an opportunity for the families to see what kind of activities are good for their children to do—so, kind of a co-partnership, if you will, with the families.”
In addition to Smith-Njigba, a few other Head Start alums also attended that day. Yang said that she hoped parents could also not only see that early childhood education is an important foundation, but that there is hope, even in difficult times.
“Our program is really intended to help children dream big and be hopeful that there are positive things in the future,” Yang said. “For Denise Louie, if she were alive today … I think she would … be very proud that her name and her legacy lives in that way.”
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