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.
She applied for Head Start and Early Head Start, securing the funding and landing a partnership with local early childhood organization AVANCE-San Antonio, which operates Head Start and Early Head Start at about 10 other locations.
With AVANCE’s support, Cavazos said the family center was able to add more seats to help low-income families on the South Side, as well as student parents.
The Ray Ellison Family Center at PAC is also the first “Kids on Campus” Head Start program in Texas, a national initiative designed to open more Head Start classrooms on college campuses.
It’s not the first time Cavazos had had to revive child care services at PAC, however. Hired in 2023, she was tasked with reopening the school’s family center after it shut down in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Until the center reopened in 2024 with drop-in service, Cavazos said the building was used for storage and needed a lot of maintenance work. She got the center in good enough shape to get the required licensing to offer child care and early education services, which eventually helped her secure Head Start licensing too.
Now, PAC’s family center serves more than 30 students across three classrooms divided by age: 18-24 months, 24-36 months and 3- to 4-year olds. Currently relying on a steady supply of substitutes, Cavazos is looking to hire on at least three more teachers.
PAC and AVANCE-SA share the cost of operating the program. Both have their own employees at the center, PAC provides the space, and AVANCE provides student meals and curriculum. Partnering with PAC also came at an opportune time for AVANCE-SA, giving some of its clients a place to go after one of its Head Start locations closed.
“This is more than child care, it is about breaking barriers for families,” said Yesenia Alvarez-Gonzalez, executive director of AVANCE-San Antonio, about partnering with PAC. The organization hopes the program leads to more Head Start classrooms on San Antonio’s college campuses.
But some student parents might not be able to qualify for services because of the federal program’s strict requirements.
To be eligible for Head Start, families with young children must meet federal poverty guidelines, be on welfare or be homeless. Children with disabilities and children in foster care are also eligible.
More than 18% of PAC students are also parents. Before being revamped through Head Start, the family center served about 20 young children at no cost and did not require student parents and staff to meet any income requirements.
Now, only about a fifth of the center’s Head Start students have parents enrolled at PAC, including Salinas with her son Amiro.
Had Salinas lost access to child care on campus, she would’ve had one of two options: take fully online classes and be constantly distracted by Amiro’s toddler energy or drop out of school entirely.
“It’s too much to do the studies and then to prep meals and to get him ready and to focus on him. I can’t do both,” she said.
With access to on-campus child care, Salinas can take classes full time with time to study without many distractions.
And while Salinas sits in lectures taking notes, Amiro is also learning. Salinas said she sees Amiro grow each week under the Head Start program at PAC: he can trace his name, loves coloring and is eager to learn.
After getting her associate degree, she plans to enroll in a nursing program. Amiro is her motivation.
“I want him to see I’m going to school to better myself that way,” she said. “It’s just me and him.”
