A career in early childhood education didn’t just happen for Aubrey Floyd. She had to work hard at it. She got there in part by chance—on the first day of class, she sat next to the right person. That stranger told me about an apprenticeship opening at KLA Schools. Floyd looked at it. She eventually graduated from Joliet Junior College on May 15 with an associate degree in applied science in child development, all thanks to that small talk.
People talk about workforce development in a broad way, so this kind of detail is easy to miss. But it’s important because it shows how people really get jobs: not always through formal channels, but sometimes through word of mouth, chance meetings, and programs that are designed to catch them when they come along.
Floyd was one of the first students to finish JJC’s Early Childhood Education Apprenticeship Program. This is a fairly new program that the college worked hard to start up for years. Reports say that people became interested in the program in 2020, but they stopped almost right away when the pandemic shut down everything. In 2022, the faculty got back together, and by 2024, the Department of Labor had officially approved and registered the program. It took four years from idea to execution, which shows how seriously the college took it and how hard it is to make something like this from scratch.
It’s easy to see why they need to do it. A lot of teachers lost their jobs in early childhood education when childcare centers closed or cut back on staffing during COVID. A lot of them never came back. Since then, the industry has been quietly having a hard time, and families in Will County, like families everywhere, have felt it. There is a real need for this program, and JJC’s apprenticeship program fills it.
Simple as the model is, there are more moving parts than it might seem from the outside when it comes to construction. Students can work up to 28 hours a week at partner childcare centers like KinderCare Plainfield, KLA Schools, Kiddie Academy, and now several Catholic Charities Head Start sites across Will County. They can make $17 an hour. In the meantime, they go to JJC for classes. At each site, a “journey worker” acts as a mentor, keeping an eye on progress and giving advice on the ground. The work and school work go hand-in-hand, but they are still technically two different things. This way, students can quit their jobs if they decide that the field isn’t right for them.
That way out is more important than it might seem. Julie Brancaleon, who runs the apprenticeship program at JJC, talked about a student who changed her mind about early childhood education in the middle of the program and decided to become a nurse instead. That wasn’t seen as a failure; instead, the program caught someone before she wasted time and money going in the wrong direction. There is a quiet thoughtfulness to that design.
Floyd said that one of the most valuable parts of the experience was the mentoring part. “I had someone to help me reflect on my teaching and offer me guidance from the very beginning,” she replied. “I never had to ask for feedback.” Built-in help like that is often the difference between people who stay in a field and people who quietly quit when they get tired of it.
The program has a lot of different sources of funding, such as state grants from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the Early Care and Education Pathways to Success initiative, and consortium equity funding. The program will run until June 2027 on a budget of about $194,000. Its goal is to help 55 apprentices and 40 pre-apprentices. It’s not a huge business, but it’s organized and growing.
There’s also a diversity point of view that should be taken into account. Melissa Szymczak, who is in charge of child development at JJC, said that a lot of the students in the area are bilingual or people of color. She also said that the program wants students from those groups to work with young children, so that the kids can see students from the same backgrounds as the kids. Brancaleon also said that she wants to get more men to join the program. This will be hard to do in a field that has traditionally been dominated by women, but most early childhood educators will agree that it’s time.
The partnership with Catholic Charities’ Head Start program has grown. Now there are six partner sites and five centers in Will County that are part of the apprenticeship network. The communications director for Catholic Charities says that about 30% of their early childhood staff are already JJC graduates. That existing link made the new partnership possible, and it looks like the pipeline JJC is building isn’t just an idea. It has a place to go already.
As I watch something like this come together, I get the sense that it’s the kind of boring, low-level infrastructure for the workforce that doesn’t get much attention but is very important. When there are two-year-olds in the classroom, they don’t usually cause as much discussion as tech layoffs or economic policy debates. But those teachers are shaping something much more important than that, and it should get at least this much attention when we look for, train, and keep them.
