Our Story

The mission of The Sammy Center is to provide inclusive, relationship based care for young children and their families, with a focus on connection, regulation, and belonging. We exist to ensure that all children, particularly those with diverse developmental, emotional, and sensory needs, have access to environments where they feel safe, understood, and supported.

Through intentional programming and individualized support, we partner closely with families to help children build foundational skills that support lifelong learning, emotional well-being, and healthy relationships. Our work is rooted in the belief that meaningful change happens through connection, consistency, and compassion.

In addition to serving children and families, The Sammy Center is committed to strengthening the broader community by mentoring educators, interns, and professionals in inclusive and trauma-informed practices. By modeling what thoughtful, responsive care can look like, we aim to expand access to high-quality, inclusive early childhood environments and create lasting impact for children, families, and the community as a whole.  

We are a strengths-focused center and meet every child right where they are. We do this by offering small classroom sizes and evidence-based social-emotional curricula and supporting children on how to navigate big feelings and emotions through play, awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and compassion.

The Sammy Center wants to help build children up at a young age to help mitigate and/or help them move through hardships so they can be successful adolescents and then adults. Our trauma-responsive environment supports resilience, self-care, and healing.

We celebrate diversity and embrace non traditional roles. 

As Early Childhood Professionals we have a unique opportunity to create early learning environments that equitably distribute learning opportunities by helping all children experience responsive interactions that nurture their full range of social, emotional, cognitive, physical and linguistic abilities; that reflect and model fundamental principles of fairness and justice; and that help them accomplish the goals of anti-bias education.  

• Demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities;
• Express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human connections across diverse backgrounds,
• Increasingly recognize and have language to describe unfairness (injustice) and understand that unfairness hurts,
• Have the will and skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.