“Uno, dos, tres!” cries the teacher, tossing a handful of brightly colored rubber balls in the air. Squealing in excitement at this familiar game, the gaggle of preschoolers chases after them as the balls bounce across the play yard. Tolo runs, too, zeroing in on a bright yellow ball: running, then kneeling and stretching out his arms to retrieve the ball from behind the play structure. Success! Another ordinary accomplishment in the life of a preschooler.

But look a little more closely, and Tolo will tell you another story. As he runs, his right foot turns in just a little, hesitates just a bit with each step. As he reaches for the ball, it’s the left hand that does most of the work, while his right hand stays a bit clenched. Standing up, getting ready to run, takes him just a little more effort than you might have first realized, and when the teacher tosses the balls again, delighting the children once more, it takes him just a little more time to begin again. But begin again he does; this time, in pursuit of the red and white striped ball.

Not bad, for a little boy not yet three years old, born four months premature weighing under a pound, says his mother, Fai. The consequences of his prematurity were multiple. Enduring life-threatening problems with his lungs, his heart, bleeding in his brain, Tolo spent his first five months in the hospital.

Throughout his infancy, the doctors were not encouraging, recalls Fai. “I didn’t want to believe them. So I kept taking him to all the specialists. Every week, it was the physical therapist, the occupational therapist, the neurologist. They all helped, but after a while, the doctors’ words were starting to sound true to me. Tolo seemed like this helpless baby. He still wasn’t lifting his head, moving around. He wouldn’t play. He just seemed kind of shut away.”

But when Tolo was about eighteen months old, Fai was referred to Family Developmental Center, where she enrolled Tolo in the daily program. “It made all the difference, to both of us,” continues Fai. “Before, we went to the appointments with all the different specialists, but then at home Tolo would have just me to play with. What he needed was to be around other kids: he needed to see what they could do so he could learn to want to do it himself. Here, he’s got everything in one place: the staff is here, and the specialists come to him, and he’s with kids every day.”

She continues, “When he started here, he seemed so far behind all the other kids his age. He wasn’t even crawling. But watching all the kids, and working with the staff and his physical therapist, he started finding out how to get up on his knees. Then he had to figure out how to crawl. And then he started walking, and now he rides the bikes, and plays with the balls, and goes down the slide, just like everybody else. Being here for six hours every day, with the staff paying so much attention, he started to understand how to play.”

Fai is especially pleased that FDC’s “inclusionary” model includes both typically-developing and exceptional-needs children. “He’s with a lot of kids who don’t have his challenges, and that was important to me. That’s one thing I said to everybody: ‘Do not make my son feel different.’ Even if he’s doing things more slowly, I want him in the classroom doing all the same things with all the other kids. I want him to know what’s possible, and I want him to find out that he can do everything they can.”

Smiling broadly, Fai looks back at the challenges Tolo has already surmounted in his first three years. “With the help of everybody here—the therapists, the teachers—I've started to see that we can expect more. When Tolo graduates from FDC in a year, I want him to go to a regular, mainstream preschool. And I know he’ll be ready.”

“Uno, dos, tres!” Again, the balls bounce through the yard. And again, there’s Tolo — running.