Listen: A preschool lesson in sharing those post-election feelings

The World
World City Center Preschool

Late Tuesday night, as the election results seemed to clearly indicate a victory for Donald Trump, text messages between teachers at World City Center preschool in the West Adams area of Los Angeles were flying back and forth furiously.

"The teachers are Latinas, and they’re proud of their cultural heritage and their also proud and grateful to be in this country. ... It's a scary time, because what we value here is in direct threat," said the school's director, Rebecca Bernard, summing up the gist of teachers late-night messaging.

So how to talk about those feelings with their preschoolers? Should they?

"The thing that you can’t lie about is the fact that everybody is devastated this morning. That we’re all sad," Bernard said of her staff. 

She spent time searching around online for some help. "The thing that I read for the 3- to 4-year-olds was, 'Wow, they elected a president, and you know, some of us feel like that was a bad choice. It’s a silly country that we live in some times.' It just felt inauthentic to me."

So teachers at World City Preschool spent time talking about what it means to have emotions, and why they were upset. Listen to the audio above to see how it went.

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