Our Story & Leadership
Our Vision
To nurture emotionally intelligent children who can understand themselves, express their feelings, connect with others, and lead with confidence, empathy, courage, and inner strength.
Our Objective
To provide schools with a structured, story-based Social Emotional Learning program that helps elementary students strengthen emotional awareness, communication, resilience, decision-making, leadership, and personal voice through meaningful classroom experiences.
Our Approach
Petalulette is a narrative-based SEL program that guides children through emotional growth using storytelling, creative expression, classroom discussion, and guided reflection.
Each learning experience follows a simple, classroom-friendly structure:
Story introduction
Creative activity
Guided reflection
Real-life connection
This approach helps students move beyond simply identifying emotions. It gives them opportunities to understand, discuss, and apply social-emotional skills in their everyday lives.
The Story Behind Petalulette
The Birth of Petalulette: A Journey of Emotional Courage
In the heart of a carefully tended garden lived Petalulette, a small rose petal surrounded by comfort and safety. Her silk mansion was peaceful, yet within her lived a curiosity greater than the garden itself.
One day, Petalulette realized that safety alone could not help her understand the world. With a gentle gust of wind and great courage, she left the comfort of her rose and began a journey into the unknown.
Along the way, she encountered storms, uncertainty, and challenges she had never experienced inside her sheltered home. Through each experience, Petalulette discovered the importance of emotional awareness, honesty, courage, empathy, resilience, and personal voice.
She learned that facing the world does not mean avoiding difficulty. It means recognizing what we feel, expressing it with integrity, and continuing forward with courage.
Petalulette LLC grew from that same idea. Children enter a complex world every day, and they need practical emotional tools to help them understand themselves, connect with others, make thoughtful decisions, and communicate with confidence.
The Petalulette SEL Program transforms those ideas into structured, story-based classroom experiences for elementary students.
Our goal is to help create learning environments where children feel seen, heard, supported, and empowered to grow.
Behind the Garden: Our Founders
Petalulette was created through the collaboration of two different professional worlds united by one shared vision: to strengthen the emotional foundation of the next generation.
Sandra Guerrero-Tobon
Co-Founder & Creative Director
Sandra is an experienced jewelry designer whose work has required creativity, precision, visual storytelling, and a deep appreciation for meaningful design.
Her artistic perspective shapes the visual and emotional identity of Petalulette. She brings sensitivity to color, symbolism, imagination, and the subtle ways children connect with stories and creative materials.
Sandra believes that emotional-learning resources should be created with the same care, intention, and attention to detail as a finely crafted work of art. Her creative direction helps ensure that Petalulette materials feel engaging, thoughtful, and emotionally meaningful for students.
Milagros Cruz-Otero, M.Eng.
Co-Founder, Managing Member, President & CEO
Milagros is a nuclear engineer, electrical engineer, senior program manager, and experienced federal program leader with more than 15 years of experience supporting defense, nuclear, aerospace, engineering, and technical programs.
Her background includes work connected to the U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program, U.S. Army DEVCOM C5ISR, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and aerospace and defense manufacturing environments. She has also supported mathematics and physics education at the university level.
Milagros applies the same discipline used in engineering and federal program management to Petalulette’s strategy, structure, documentation, implementation, vendor coordination, quality, and institutional growth.
As President and CEO, she leads Petalulette’s business strategy, program development, school engagement, contracting direction, operational execution, and long-term vision.
Together, Sandra and Milagros combine creativity, emotional insight, engineering discipline, and structured program leadership to create educational resources that are imaginative, practical, and classroom-ready.
Our Mission in Action
We are committed to helping schools create spaces where emotional intelligence is not presented only as a concept, but practiced through stories, reflection, communication, creativity, and meaningful classroom connection.
Start With a Pilot
Schools and qualified educational organizations are invited to experience the Petalulette SEL Program through a guided four-week classroom pilot.
Begin Your School’s Pilot Experience