Dr. Yolanda Garcia: On Systems Change and the CDA®

Dr. Garcia’s career has taken her from Santa Clara, CA, to Las Cruces, NM, in a long quest to build healthy communities for children and families. She has served as dean of Sonoma County Community College System, director of Excellence in Early Education Institute and director of the Children’s Services Department for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. She’s also a long-time member of the Council board of directors because she shares our commitment to high-quality teaching. “I want people to understand the crucial role the professional growth of our educators plays in delivering services to children,” she says. And Dr. Garcia has a ground-level view of what goes on in the early childhood classroom.

“I taught preschool children,” she recalls “as part of a work-study program while earning my bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I absolutely loved it.” But she would expand her role beyond the classroom walls as she advanced her education over time to earn an Ed.D. in organizational development and leadership. Along the way, she served as a Ford Fellow, who prepared reports on Head Start services for Spanish-speaking children, and a program officer with responsibility for evaluating teacher training in bilingual Head Start programs located in Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and California.

“That was my entry into Head Start programs,” Dr. Garcia recalls. “And I still think of Head Start as the premier program in early childhood education. Head Start is comprehensive enough that you can design programs that meet specific community needs. Besides, Head Start does a great job in serving diverse, multilingual populations.” And Dr. Garcia would enhance the impact of Head Start during the 22 years she spent with the County Office of Education in Santa Clara.

“I look on those years as my greatest contribution to the early learning field,” she says, “as I went from serving 600 to 3,000 Head Start children. We were able to run five national demonstration grant programs that included dental health, family support, transitions from preschool to kindergarten, immunizations, water quality and testing for toxic chemicals in playgrounds. Equipped with a $30 million budget, we were able to show what a high-quality early childhood program should look like and how it would function in public education.”

Quality programs require qualified teachers, as Dr. Garcia understood. “I came to fully understand the importance of professional growth when I served on the American Academy of Sciences’ Committee on the Integration of Sciences in Early Childhood Education. While there, I contributed to the seminal report From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. It was an experience that convinced me I could make more of a difference by focusing on professional growth of teachers than by providing direct service as an administrator,” she says.

So, Dr. Garcia worked with colleagues at the community college level to start the Excellence in Early Education (E3) Institute. As director from 2002 to 2014, she supported early educator professional development and supervised professional development systems in Santa Clara County for eight colleges in four community college districts, as she recalls. “Many educators in those districts were just taking random education classes at the colleges,” Dr. Garcia explains. “They weren’t earning teaching permits, and they weren’t advancing their careers. So, we put them on career paths and developed a system to track their progress. We also provided college faculty with stipends to advise the teachers. And as a result, more students remained in college to earn teaching permits or degrees.”

In addition, staff from E3 reached out into the community to recruit for the program “We would go to public and private centers,” Dr. Garcia says, “and rate the quality of each center. Then we would place their teachers on career paths in either the community college or state university system. And we enlisted community groups, like Latina Providers and United Latinas, in our efforts to develop a community of learners in Santa Clara’s large Latina population of early childhood teachers.”

E3 worked with these groups to encourage the educators to take advantage of chances to advance their professional growth, Dr. Garcia recalls. “We would arrange for them to take classes together so they could help one another. We would bring the educators together for potlucks and activities for their children. We would ask them what they needed to continue going to school and increase their level of education. And this led us to develop study groups, encourage students to take advantage of college writing centers, and provide them with mentors and tutors.”

In addition, Dr. Garcia had a big impact on defining the skills that educators should have to be effective in the classroom. She led a major body of work to develop Early Childhood Educator Competencies for the California State Department of Education. The competencies address knowledge, skills and dispositions that preschool teachers and care providers need to support the development and learning of young children and their families, she says. “My goal was to find ways to raise the quality of teaching through teachers’ professional growth.”

And she continued this quest as dean of the Sonoma County Community College District in Santa Rosa, California, from 2014 to 2018. In this role, she was responsible for curriculum design and development. She designed and managed a Teacher Fellows program and supervised staff at a state demonstration site for infants and toddlers serving as a teacher training site. She developed a Hispanic Serving Institution grant focused on English learning students and developed transition pathways for early education students to state universities in California.

Dr. Garcia also went through a transition herself after she received what she calls her “greatest promotion.” She became a grandmom and moved to Brooklyn, New York, to help her daughter raise the baby. “I retired as dean and spent five years pushing my grandson in a stroller,” she recalls. Sure, the busy streets of Brooklyn were a disconcerting change from the scenic landscape of Sonoma County, but Dr. Garcia felt she was needed and loved helping her daughter.

And Dr. Garcia is again surrounded by natural beauty and clear skies since moving to Las Cruces, NM, about a year and a half ago. “I’m teaching at New Mexico State University where I’m trying to get students excited about the early learning field, and I have some wonderful students. They include Julia, a 50-year-old doula, who wants to go from helping women give birth to being an early childhood teacher. I also have a male student named Bruce, who wants to build a career in education, either in middle school or preschool, after retiring from the armed forces. And helping students like these make a commitment to contribute to the world in a new way is the most exciting part of my current job.”

Dr. Garcia is also building career pathways for New Mexico students by supporting the Child Development Associate® (CDA) Credential™. “Granted, the state has supported candidates in going through the CDA® process,” she says, “but it has yet to pay some of the credentialing fees. So, I’m working with the Council and New Mexico state reps to make sure candidates have the funds they need to complete their CDAs. I’m also working to incentivize the integration of the CDA at the university level and promote CDA apprenticeship programs for high school students.”

Dr. Garcia is convinced a high school apprenticeship program could really benefit communities like Las Cruces, and she’s seen a perfect place where it would work. “There’s a beautiful, newly renovated high school just two or three block away from New Mexico State University,” she says, “and there is a community college right next door. So, you have these three systems, the high school, the community college and the university, within four or five blocks of each other. So, this could be a model to show how systems could align their curriculums and credit systems, open doors for students and recruit more young people into the field.”

Dr. Garcia brought up these ideas when the Council held its last board meeting in Las Cruces, she recalls. And serving on the Council board has been a constant for her during the past nine years as she moved to different places and filled different roles. On the board, she has provided guidance and support during the upheavals resulting from the COVID pandemic and the child care crisis, a rocky time as she admits. But now she feels the Council is on track, especially as the Council reimagines the CDA to make the credentialing process more accessible and efficient.

“There have been improvements in the services the Council provides,” Dr. Garcia says. And she sees her role as a board member to make the Council aware of even more chances to make systems changes that will improve the early childhood field. She has supported the board’s work as secretary and president over the years. She served on the nominating committee and now she’s involved in the Council’s strategic planning for moving ahead.

Over the years, Dr. Garcia has strived to provide continuity and a sense of purpose, based on a single goal. “Everything we do,” she says, “should focus on the importance of children. We should think in terms of a model with the child at the center, surrounded by concentric circles that stand for the family, the community and the larger systems. I know our country has a long way to go to put children at the center of what we do. Still, I’m hopeful that we can achieve excellence in early education, and I believe the Council can play a key role,” she says. With Dr. Garcia on the board, we’re closer to the goal we share with her: ensuring all children everywhere from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Brooklyn, New York, have the quality early learning they deserve.