PACOIMA — It began with a 10-year-old child expelled from school for ditching.

When school officials turned down the frantic mother's pleas for another chance, she knew where to turn for help.

At the Family Center on campus, she told her story to a parent advocate who agreed to intercede. The deal he made was that to get back in school, her son would have to take counseling and she would have to join a parenting class.

In the sessions that followed, other tensions surfaced. The woman's 16-year-old daughter was abusing her own 2-year-old. And a disciplinarian father was demoralizing his two sons, contributing to their problems in school.

Now, the daughter is in parenting classes, too, and has started working part time at the family center. The father and mother are receiving counseling. The boy is doing better in school.

This fantastic-sounding story happened at Vaughn Street Elementary School. It is a prime example arising from an experiment there to show that the delivery of comprehensive health and social services through a school-based program can improve students' performance and even lift a community up by its own bootstraps.

The Vaughn Family Center is a one-stop resource for the predominantly Latino and poor families whose children attend Vaughn.

Occupying a two-room bungalow on campus, the center distributes food and clothing, connects children and parents to benefits such as Medi-Cal and welfare, enlists the help of other community agencies for child care and health care and involves parents in helping their children in school.

If the services parents need don't exist, the Family Center tries to create them, using resources at hand, including the parents. When the center opened, there were no licensed day-care providers in the Vaughn attendance area. So the center formed a partnership with the Child Care Resources Center to train families how to set up day care in their homes. So far 20 families have been licensed, providing 102 new spaces for Vaughn families. A new training session is held every two months.

Other Vaughn parents worked with a health educator from Olive View Medical Center to develop a curriculum for prenatal care. Now parents are being trained as lay health educators to teach pregnant women in the community.

The hope is that this focused investment in one of the Valley's most poverty-impacted schools will break cycles of failure, saving money in the future.