Los Angeles, CA –Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles (spcaLA) announces the return of its renowned youth violence-prevention program, Teaching Love & Compassion (TLC)™ to the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) this month. Students from Stephens Middle School will increase their knowledge and practice empathy towards animals, others, and self through social-emotional learning, animal welfare lessons, and hands-on positive reinforcement dog training. Since the program’s inception in 1994, more than 1,600 students have participated and graduated from the TLC program.

Students participate in a team-building exercise; TLC dog, Bear with student: an important lesson in animal neglect.

With the help of spcaLA shelter dogs, students practice patience, compassion, and empathy by working through the conflicts and challenges of performing as a group to train shelter animals. Anger identification, empathetic choices, anti-bullying, and other violence-prevention topics are the focus of TLC discussions and classroom activities. TLC culminates with a graduation where students give speeches on their experience and demonstrate what they’ve taught their “TLC dogs” (TLC has an added benefit of socializing and training spcaLA’s shelter dogs, equipping them to be ideal companions).

“We are thrilled to bring TLC back to the Long Beach Unified School District,” said Madeline Bernstein, President of spcaLA. “At spcaLA, we believe that fostering compassion and empathy from a young age is essential for creating a more humane society.” The last TLC program with LBUSD was in 2006.

A second TLC will take place at Lindbergh Middle School beginning April 29th. spcaLA and LBUSD will reconvene to identify additional schools in the district that would benefit from the TLC program.

Members of the press are invited to the graduation taking place on March 21st at 4:30pm at Stephen’s Middle School in Long Beach.