Preschool teacher Dora Gonzalez works with children Thursday at the Bilingual Montessori School in White Rock. The child care center plans to open a Los Alamos location with room for 180 students. It already has more than 400 students on its waitlist. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican
Preschool teacher Dora Gonzalez works with children Thursday at the Bilingual Montessori School in White Rock. The child care center plans to open a Los Alamos location with room for 180 students. It already has more than 400 students on its waitlist. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican
WHITE ROCK — When the Bilingual Montessori School, a White Rock-based child care center, opens its Los Alamos facility this spring, it will have about 180 new child care slots for children ages 6 weeks to 6 years.
The problem is, more than 400 children are already on the new center’s waitlist — months before it even opens — said Rebekah Seitz, the school’s office manager, who will serve as the Los Alamos center’s director.
“People are basically desperate for child care here because there’s so many young families. ... They come here and they’re realizing: There’s quite a few day cares here, [but] the majority of them are full,” Seitz said.
A new program at the University of New Mexico’s Los Alamos campus is looking to assuage some of the area’s child care woes, allowing interested students to earn a certificate in early childhood education in one semester — for free.
Piloted last fall, the program has yielded 13 newly trained early childhood educators; 11 already are employed at child care centers in the Los Alamos area, said Audrey Marroquin, UNM Los Alamos’ community and workforce partnerships manager.
It’s one piece of a broader push — backed by Triad National Security LLC, which operates and manages Los Alamos National Laboratory — to expand child care capacity in the region.
“That was something that we heard loud and clear: It’s really hard to find staff ... but it’s so critically important as well,” said lab staff director Frances Chadwick of the area’s early childhood education landscape.
There’s a shared reality in Northern New Mexico’s child care centers, Seitz said: “Like everyone else, we are looking for staff.”
“It is absolutely difficult,” she said. “Especially with kids, you can’t just hire anybody. It has to be someone who really enjoys working with kids; they have to be background checked.”
And in the early childhood sphere, program capacity is closely tied to staffing, with state law dictating appropriate student-to-staff ratios.
That’s where UNM Los Alamos’ early childhood education certificate comes in. Adapted from five UNM courses in the subject, the program equips would-be early childhood educators with the knowledge and skills they need to serve children from birth to 8 years old, Marroquin said.
During the last two weeks of the program, students worked in child care centers in the Los Alamos area, receiving hands-on experience and individualized training in how best to serve young children. Seitz noted four UNM Los Alamos students completed their practicum hours at the Bilingual Montessori School in White Rock.
“The students are learning about themselves. They become best friends. They share with each other. It’s a very supportive environment, just like what we want to model for the students to provide in their classrooms,” UNM Los Alamos instructor Madeline Brown-Hernandez said of the early childhood education certification classes.
During the 2023 fall semester, students completed the certificate program without receiving college credits. By fall 2024, the college plans to offer an associate’s degree — and ensure past students can apply the certification’s 12 units toward their degree — said Paul Allen, UNM-Los Alamos’ dean of instruction.
“The classes that we’re offering are in perfect alignment with those classes that students would normally take through a degree program, so that it will be a seamless issue of awarding them credit for this prior learning,” Allen said.
Funding from LANL allowed students to attend the no-credit certificate program for free. It’s one piece of a broader initiative to ensure parents working at the lab have access to reliable and high quality child care, Chadwick said.
In May, the lab announced plans to expand both child care infrastructure and training for early childhood professionals. Per the lab’s plans, a $2 million investment from the University of California — one of the member organizations of Triad National Security — would go toward construction of a new child care facility, the Bilingual Montessori School’s Los Alamos campus. Priority — though not exclusive — enrollment will be afforded to children of Triad employees.
Meanwhile, the lab partnered with UNM-Los Alamos to tackle the worker shortage. The batch of students seeking early childhood education certificates — selected from more than 30 students expressing their interest in the course, Marroquin said — is slated to start classes this month.
Chadwick added those connected to LANL won’t be the only ones benefitting from the growing number of early childhood teachers in Los Alamos.
The training program, she said, will “increase the availability of talent in that area, of employees or potential employees who can then be available not just for the day care center that we’re investing in, but for all organizations.”
