Amiro, 3, squeals when his mom picks him up from day care, running to her, showing off acorns he found on the playground and a painting he worked on that day.
His mom Lorena Salinas is a pre-nursing student at Palo Alto College. She doesn’t have to go far to pick her son up after class — he’s on campus too.
This August, PAC opened up three Head Start classrooms at the Ray Ellison Family Center after losing a federal grant for campus-based child care services.
Head Start is a federally funded program that provides free early childhood education for low-income families and children with special needs. It’s also how PAC was able to keep offering early childhood services on campus.
Salinas, 27, enrolled at PAC during the spring, using a drop-in service the college offered to student parents and staff. When she learned the service would end in May, she “felt like the rug was pulled out from under her.”
“I didn’t know what to do honestly,” she told the Report. “I felt shocked and also sad, because that was the only way I was able to come here and attend my studies.”
For Isabel Cavazos, director for the family center, losing the federal grant was a “very hard pill to swallow.”
“If I felt like that… I could only imagine how the parents felt,” she said.
Cavazos got to work finding other funding sources and potential partners to help keep the family center going…