Watching her four-year-old son, Vincent, dance and laugh over the wooden stove of a toy kitchen set, Marcela Iacobucci held up her phone to take video. She pinched the zoom to get a closer look from afar.

It was Vincent’s pediatrician who recommended that Iacobucci start coming to the Concord Family Center. He had delays in his speech, and she worried he wasn’t spending enough time with other kids.

“He used to only spend time with me, and now he’s actually interacting with other kids,” Iacobucci said. “I see him being more open, more sociable. Things he needed to learn, like sharing, he’s become a lot better at that.”

She’s gained confidence during his three days a week at the center, too.

Iacobucci moved to Concord during the pandemic. That’s also when her son was born. When Iacobucci needed most to reach out, everyone else was social distancing.

“I’m a first-time mom, and I was feeling really overwhelmed about that,” she said. “Interacting and seeing like other parents go through the same problems, the same difficulties, socializing with other people — it’s actually been pretty helpful.”

Vincent and Marcela will be regular attendees at the new Concord Family Center location on Jennings Drive, whose opening on Monday marked its expansion into the affordable neighborhood.

Operating under the umbrella of the Concord School District, the Family Center works to ensure that children and their parents arrive at Kindergarten with a strong network of social support and an existing relationship with the district. For families with kids younger than age six, this means everything from early childhood education and screening to parenting workshops, help accessing support organizations, like Riverbend and Waypoint, and connections to food or clothing assistance.

Each morning of the week, the Family Center operates out of a different facility, rotating between different district schools, the City Wide Community Center and, now, Jennings Drive. The hours, from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m., are drop-in, and as children learn and participate in age-appropriate play, parents can lean on staff for answers to their questions and support. Staff also work with individual families during home visits.

“It’s really a family resource center disguised as a play group,” said Erin Cayer, the coordinator of early supports and district homelessness with the Concord School District, which oversees the program.

In the foreground, the center provides kids with playtime and parents with helpful strategies, like how to read to their child and how to handle, for example, a Play-Dough mess.

“Then in the background,” Cayer said, “we’re also giving them that bridge to where they need to go, helping them to call an agency, taking off that anxiety of ‘oh my God, I don’t even know where to start.’”

Funded through a mix of grants and district dollars, the program is an early-stage, proactive investment in special education, said John Fabrizio, the assistant superintendent for student services.

“We have both family supports coming in and academic supports coming in at three years old, so the path of success is much greater,” Fabrizio said. “If I can support the family and support them with city-wide resources, they’re less likely to need to access a lot of those things, [occupational therapy], [physical therapy], speech [therapy].”

The program is also, Fabrizio continued, “a little wraparound for our youngest families,” developing a relationship between parents, children and their future schools from an early age.

“I don’t know the daily struggles that a lot of our families are experiencing, whether it’s socioeconomic or other things,” Cayer said. “This is an opportunity for us to be that soft hand, to welcome them to the district and walk them through and be that connection long term. So, it’s really a great investment in Concord’s youngest learners.”

The Family Center has been in operation for more than 30 years, getting its start at the Dame School in 1994 not long after the district added a pre-school there.

“It really started out as just come and play with your kids and get your questions answered,” said then-preschool coordinator Barbara Hemingway. Over time, the center grew more formalized and robust, adding field trips and storytime events with Principal Ed Barnwell. As it expanded across the city alongside district preschools, it also grew its pool of connections to social service organizations.

From the beginning, though, one of the program’s priorities was forming a bond between parents, kids and the school district before the pressures of Kindergarten arrived, creating a seamless transition.

“We wanted parents to be able to — in a very relaxed environment — have their questions answered,” Hemingway said. “Many of the parents at the Dame School had had very poor experiences in school themselves, so they were hesitant to come into a school, they didn’t necessarily feel welcome.”

That became increasingly important as Concord’s New American community grew with more parents coming to the city as refugees, some of them with little to no experience with formal schools.

“It’s about building relationships, relationships with families helping them understand they’re a key partner in their child’s education,” said Laurie Hart, who oversaw the Family Center for decades, both in its initial connection with Waypoint and later as it was folded into the district. “The important thing was they developed the confidence to support their children.”

The expansion to Jennings Drive, through a partnership with the Concord Housing Authority, is somewhat of a homecoming. The building once housed a daycare in the neighborhood where the center did its outreach. As Concord Housing sought to reopen the building with more services, the family center was folded in. Through partnerships with the Capital Area Food Access Network, the Children’s Place, Granite United Way and Waypoint, the center now includes clothing, diapers and a food pantry.

Hart, Hemingway and Barnwell see success stories from their time with the Family Center everywhere — for example, they’re on the pages of a news story about Concord High track and field record-setters, students who attended the ribbon cutting on Monday. Some parents that Cayer works with are second-generation family center attendees.

“For me, that’s one of the things I most enjoyed,” Hemingway said. “Seeing how the families have flourished, not just the kids but the parents.”

Julie Day is one of those parents. She was among the first to use the center thirty years ago.

“I was just a mom,” she said. “I was a struggling mom.”

Over coffee with other parents and home visits from “Miss Dinah,” she found her footing — and her courage.

The program was a chance to meet other parents in the same place, to gab about the previous night’s episode of the show “24” and to get help.

“We would talk about what we were struggling with, whether it be potty training or sleeping,” Day recalled. “And another mom would be like ‘Oh, I had that problem, this is what I did.’”

Since then, Day’s children have grown up and had kids of their own. Growing in her own right, she has since become a voice for parents like her on the boards of local, state and national children’s support organizations.

At the ribbon cutting on Jennings Drive on Monday, she reflected on what she gained from the program. It brought tears to her eyes. The Family Center, too, had blossomed.

“I wouldn’t have ever done it without the support and love that these guys all gave us,” she said. “I’d be like, ‘I can’t do that,’ and they would say ‘yes, you can.’”