With a seed grant of $100,000, the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, along with the university's M.I.N.D. Institute and St. HOPE Public Schools, are poised to establish a preschool with a focus on special needs -- rare in the country for the services it will provide.

The grant, awarded by the First 5 Sacramento Commission, will be used to hire a planning director for the preschool, targeted to open in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento in fall 2005.

The resulting program will be among just a handful of similar ones in the United States that combine preschool services with educational interventions based on brain research. The partnership will integrate diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, behavioral assessments, early childhood education research and family participation.

"We believe that by collaborating and sharing our resources and expertise," said Dean Harold Levine of the School of Education, "we can establish an exemplary urban preschool that brings research directly into the classroom and focuses on the unique intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development of children with special needs."

The preschool will serve about 100 children under age 6. At least 20 percent will have special needs (such as autism, and speech and language disorders), have emotional disturbances or be at risk for learning disabilities. Although the focus will be on serving the Oak Park neighborhood, children from throughout the region will attend.

"It's an exciting opportunity to translate what we're learning about brain development into a preschool setting to help children grow healthy brains," says Robert Hendren, executive director of the M.I.N.D. Institute at the UC Davis Medical Center.

He adds that the institute will assist in the development of programs and offer innovative interventions based on what has been learned about neurodevelopment.

"We know that nationally, about 2 percent of the 0 to 5 population are special-needs children," said Margaret Fortune, superintendent for St. HOPE Public Schools. "But in the inner city, the representation is far greater."

The higher levels of learning disabilities among urban preschoolers, she said, translate into far greater numbers of students in urban high schools with special education needs.

Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson, chair of First 5 Sacramento, said backing the project was a logical choice for the commission, which uses Proposition 10 tobacco taxes to fund projects that support the healthy development of children, empower families and strengthen communities.

"This proposal offers an extraordinary opportunity to combine several objectives of the commission, including advancing school readiness, particularly for special-needs children and children from disadvantaged circumstances, and laying the foundation for research that can assist children and families for generations to come," he said.

St. HOPE is a nonprofit public benefit organization dedicated to revitalizing underserved communities through public education, leadership training and economic development.

The collaboration of St. HOPE and UC Davis in this project builds on UC Davis' more than 20-year involvement in the Oak Park neighborhood, including partnerships with Sacramento High School, now a charter school run by St. HOPE, and Father Keith B. Kenny Elementary School.

Most recently, three campus units -- the School of Education, the Mondavi Center, and the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies -- forged a partnership with St. HOPE to support Sacramento High School's School of the Arts, and the UC Davis Medical Center did the same to help create a School of Health at the high school.

The UC Davis School of Education was established in 2002, signaling the university's revitalized commitment to K-12 education. The school plans to triple the size of its faculty and almost double student numbers by 2007-08.

The UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute was founded in 1998 as an interdisciplinary organization of parents, community leaders, researchers, clinicians and volunteers to study and treat autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.