STC Mid-Valley Child Center Celebrates 15 Years

Among the first parents to ever walk their children through the doors of South Texas College’s Mid-Valley Campus Child Development Center, Julio and Brenda Rodriguez say their time with the center created lifelong friendships with staff as well as the best opportunities for their family.  

Both career educators, the Rodriguez’s said they looked everywhere for a facility that could offer the right mix of education and care for both of their children, who began attending the center in 2008.

Now, nearly 15 years later, the family was among those who gathered at an event celebrating STC’s Child Development Center’s Quinceañera. Handing out a crate full of mementos for attendees to view, the Rodriguez’s say the facility assisted them from the first time they entered to their final day, which at the time was punctuated by their daughter performing Hanna Montana’s song, “The Climb” for graduation.      

“We have always recommended the center to our friends and family and we have never regretted our choice to send our kids here to the Mid-Valley Development Center,” Julio said. “The main thing we appreciated was the relationship that we had with the staff…we knew we wanted structure and curriculum as well as a safe place for our children and we found that here.”  

In attendance at the event was STC trustee Danny Guzman, president Dr. Ricardo J. Solis, Mid-Valley Campus administrator Danny Montez, faculty and staff along with parents.

Since 2007, STC’s Child Development Center has served over 800 families with children ranging in age from 12 months to 12 years of age.

“This is what South Texas College is all about. It’s about providing opportunities not just for students but citizens of the Mid-Valley and the entire Valley,” Solis told attendees at the event. “There is no other center that not only provides the system of support and of course the education and lab opportunities for students and adults to be able to learn and to continue their careers. There is remarkable support by everyone for this center.”

Among the faculty at the Center, Ana Castillo said she looks back fondly on her journey as an educator entrusted with developing the minds of young students in surrounding communities.

Shaped by years spent in a childcare setting and her own experience as a mother, Castillo said her interest working with children came at a young age as she was among the youngest in a family of seven who began assisting her mother, a single-parent, with the care of her siblings.

“My dad passed when I had just turned five and my mother had to work so a lot of times it was my sisters and my responsibility to take care of our siblings. My sister would do the house chores and then it was my responsibility to keep the kids entertained and make sure they were safe,” Castillo said. “I began noticing that I had the skill and the patience to observe them and make a difference in their behavior. I enjoyed that.”

Castillo’s story runs parallel with the creation of the Child Development Center as she began her career in the Center’s early years first as a child development student in 2009, field study student, pre-school teacher assistant, lead teacher, and then Child Development and Early Childhood instructor in 2017.

During that time, Castillo said she not only benefitted from the center giving her the experience she needed to fulfill her career goals; like many other students, it assisted her with her own son as she earned her degrees. 

“I hold a deep appreciation for them, for entrusting in me and allowing me to be creative as I began my work there and especially for the program as it helped me with my son’s development as an early student,” Castillo said. “I thank everyone who has been there because they helped me build a strong foundation as a student, as a parent and as a professional.”

Since its inception, the Child Development Center at STC has helped hundreds of parents like Castillo by making the facility available to all current STC students, staff, faculty and community members.  

At its core is a commitment to providing a program that meets the needs of children in the areas of cognitive, physical, social, emotional, creative and language development, according to Veronica Rodriguez, Assistant Professor and Program Chair of STC’s Child Development and Early Childhood Department.  

Rodriguez has overseen operations of the program for the last 13 years, and not only has she witnessed the continuation of the center living out both its vision and mission, but also an increase in the number of children being enrolled into the center every semester.

“Our center was established 15 years ago to support students who are parents,” Rodriguez said. “The student-parent component is very important because without access, parents wouldn’t come back to school or even start. It supports them by having their children at the center, providing the best educational opportunities.”

Over the course of nearly two decades, Rodriguez said the program has evolved into training early childhood professionals while serving as a catalyst for quality care and education for children and their families.

The Mid-Valley Center is still the only child care facility in the Rio Grande Valley to have the prestigious National Accreditation Commission (NAC) for Early Care and Education Programs designation. The other closest facility with such a distinction is in Corpus Christi.  

To earn the NAC accreditation, a center has to exceed state licensing requirements in many important areas, including health, safety, curriculum, student/teacher interaction and parental involvement.

The Center also brandishes a national accreditation as a 4-Star rated Texas Rising Star Program while serving as a global model for hands-on learning for adult students and a “living laboratory” for ongoing children’s research.

“When I talk to parents during orientation, I tell them that they will not see anything like our center anywhere else,” Rodriguez said. “We have security, and most importantly, the support from the college itself. Everyone pitches in and everybody is there to support our goal, which is to have services available to student parents, a great educational component for the kids, and that they will do very well when they go off to school.”