Teacher Certification

The Front Range Community College and The Family Center/La Familia are partnering to offer students across Colorado the option to take the full Early Childhood Director Certificate in Spanish by Fall of 2025. This is a project that offers an innovative contribution to creating equitable access to educational opportunities.

The Family Center/La Familia is one of 32 family resource centers across the state that offers an early childhood education program and bilingual family support. The organization has prioritized cultural relevance, diversity, equity, and inclusion for a linguistically diverse population that has been pushed to join the workforce taking lower paid jobs. Currently, near 65% of the center’s staff is bilingual or their first language is Spanish and has not been exempt of the shortage of qualified early childhood teachers.

“This is a milestone in the Early Childhood Education field, if we want to ensure qualified teachers fill the positions in the early childhood sector, we must increase educational opportunities for a fast-growing population of dual language learners and remove the barriers to achieving a professional degree.” 

– Gloria Kat the Executive Director of The Family Center/La Familia  

As of today, the College’s Early Childhood Education department has developed five early childhood courses offered in Spanish, all online and will add two more during Spring 2025. The early childhood field has high numbers of Latinx professionals whose primary language is Spanish. There is a need for higher education options for these students to obtain their ECE certificates and degrees, ultimately strengthening the quality and education of the ECE workforce. Long-term the development of the full Early Childhood Teaching Certificate (6 ECE courses) and/or Early Childhood Director’s Certificate (10 courses) would allow these students to obtain higher levels of pay at their places of employment, own/run their own childcare centers, and strengthen the quality of our ECE workforce.  

“The ECE Department at FRCC recognizes the necessity of providing learning opportunities for Spanish-speaking students to support the growing population of Latinx families in our area. With the development of these courses we hope to remove the barriers students face when obtaining their ECE credentials and foster a diverse and highly-qualified ECE workforce in Colorado.”

– Leah Morley the Lead Faculty of the Early Childhood Department at Front Range Community College.