Meet a Roadrunner: Earlene Gonzales is a tireless advocate for early childhood education

Earlene Gonzales

Earlene Gonzales

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(Mar. 4, 2015) -- Meet Earlene Gonzales. As director of the UTSA Child Development Center (CDC), she ensures that in every situation, the child’s needs come first.

Gonzales has more than 20 years of experience leading accredited child development centers. Her life goal is to improve the care and education of preschool-age children and she advocates for early childhood education in her volunteer role as president of the Texas Association for the Education of Young Children.

Her eyes light up when she’s asked about the best part of her job. She shares the story of a four-year-old child with severe disabilities who wasn’t speaking and had other developmental delays when the child started at the CDC. In just a few days, the child was playing outside and interacting with the other children.

"Those are the kinds of things that you just can’t measure," she said. "It's so rewarding to see the good we can do for one child each day. Put all those days together and eventually there’s an adult that we’ve helped succeed."

One could argue that UTSA’s recruitment process begins with infants.

I'm grateful that UTSA recognizes that a quality childcare education program is a good recruitment and retention tool for its students and employees," stated Gonzales. "We focus on fun and the joy of learning so that the children develop a love of learning and want to go to college."

Research shows that children who get even one year of a high quality early education by age three will have increased chances of going to college and earning more money.

The CDC provides exceptional childcare services for UTSA students, staff and faculty. Accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the top accreditor in this field, its programs are designed to enhance children’s emotional, social, creative, physical, language and cognition development through creativity and play-based education. Roughly 70 percent of the children the CDC serves are those of UTSA students.

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