Rochelle Wilcox: Choosing to Teach Children

August 20, 2024
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Rochelle’s mom scoffed when Rochelle said she wanted to teach children. “My mom wanted me to be a doctor so I wouldn’t struggle like she did, and I started college as a pre-med major,” Rochelle recalls. “I was part of a work-study program and had a job at my college’s child care program, where I fell in love with the kids. But when I told my mom that I planned to work in the early childhood field, she wondered what you could possibly teach babies and told me you don’t go to college for that.”

Rochelle would come to change her mom’s mind about the value and the purpose of the early childhood profession by founding Wilcox Academy of Early Learning, where she serves over 300 children in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has been nurturing young minds there since 2006, and her path to success began when she learned about the Child Development Associate® (CDA) Credential™. “I had dropped out of school,” Rochelle says, “got married and was working part time in child care centers when I met Olga Jackson, this great woman at our local resource and referral agency. She urged me to get my CDA®, and I took all the CDA coursework, which inspired me to go on for my associate degree in early childhood education.”

By 2004, Rochelle had the competence and confidence to open her own family child care home. “Then Hurricane Katrina hit, so my family and I moved to Houston for a year. When we returned to New Orleans we had lost everything like many other families.” But New Orleans rose again, and so did Rochelle. “While looking for an apartment,” she recalls, “we came across this building that used to be an early learning center. And two months later, my husband told me that he had used his 401(k) to lease the building for me. When he did, he said, ‘I know you believe in child care, and this is a reminder that I believe in you. So, I’m ready to support you in whatever you want to do.’”

That was the start of Wilcox Academy, and it’s rapidly grown thanks to grants from public agencies and private groups. “We opened our first building with 34 children. We serve 84 children in our second building, 60 in our third site, 125 in our fourth site. And in 2025, we’ll be opening yet another site.” But when you’re talking about expansion, that’s only a drop in the vast bucket of need for child care, as Rochelle admits. “There are 9,000 children in New Orleans who are waiting for child care.” Some of them are on her long waiting list, and Rochelle is fighting for children in her city and across the state to receive the child care that they need.

She is convinced she can make an impact by speaking out and telling her stories of challenges in the early childhood field. She has also inspired other educators to join her by starting For Providers By Providers (4PXP) to build a wave of empowered leaders in early care and education. She draws her strength and sense of conviction by recalling this phrase from author Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

At 4PXP, Rochelle has acted on these words by building a collective, independent policy voice for educators serving Louisiana’s low-income children of color. 4PXP provides Let’s Talk Advocacy Calls and a podcast to help lead the discussion on how to increase access to high-quality early care and education that meets the needs of working families. And her group has used its collective voice to increase public funding for the early childhood field, as Rochelle is proud to say.

“We talked to members of the New Orleans City Council and convinced them to come to centers in their districts,” she says. “By opening their doors to public officials, providers helped city officials realize that early childhood education matters. As a result, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu put an extra $750,00 for early learning in the 2018 city budget. The next mayor doubled that in 2019, and over three years, the additional funding for early childhood education reached $3 million.”

That was a fine achievement, Rochelle says, but it didn’t go far enough. So, she and her team members at 4PXP galvanized their base in their early learning field to support the passage of a law that would provide early learning with steady funding. “We had 500 people going door to door and making phone calls to drum up votes for the law,” she says. “Parents took their children out to knock on doors and carry signs. Folks at early learning centers cooked and handed out plates of food, then urged people to advance our field at the voting booth. As a result, the city of New Orleans allocated $21 million in property taxes to child care for the next 20 years and the state matched that through the Child Care and Development Block Grant.”

Still, funding for child care won’t make a full impact without enough skilled teachers to serve young learners. So, last year, 4PXP worked with AmeriCorps Louisiana to launch the Early Childhood Teacher Corps, a program to recruit, train and place future early childhood educators in high-quality classrooms across New Orleans. Rochelle also started the Elite Teacher Institute to provide educators with high-quality CDA training and coaching to help ensure they would succeed. “The candidates we serve include many retirees who are trying to get back into the workforce and high school students who are trying to figure out their next steps in life,” Rochelle says. And she encourages them by providing $1,000 scholarships that they can use for college or for their CDA.

Last year, Rochelle gave two scholarships to young women who she had taught at Wilcox Academy when they were children, she recalls. “Now they’re both recent high school graduates, and they’re both working for me while earning their CDA.” And being with them takes Rochelle back to the days when the CDA launched her into success in the early childhood field.

Rochelle’s mom is now proud of what Rochelle has achieved and even worked with her at Wilcox Academy until she retired a few years back during COVID. She’s come to see the value of early learning and realized you can teach something to babies, as Rochelle explains. She also sees that Rochelle made the right choice when she chose to follow her heart into the early childhood field, Rochelle says. “Now she tells me, ‘I’m glad you didn’t take my advice.’”

 

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