Beyond Child Care: Inside Atlanta Technical College's Early Learning Center

For Brian Bowers, Director of the Early Learning Center at Atlanta Technical College, running a learning center starts with a belief: early education is not a service families pass through on the way to kindergarten, but the work that determines how a child arrives there.

That belief keeps Bowers out of his office and in the classrooms, meeting with students, meeting with parents, and pulling families directly into how the center runs.

“It’s me sitting at this desk answering emails,” explains Bowers, “but also living on that teaching floor, reading books to students, and every morning, greeting parents.”

For Bowers, those morning greetings are what he calls the “passing of the baton” because they help him foster connections with parents. Through the Coffee Loft, a dedicated space where parents can grab a morning cup of coffee, connect with peers, and share ideas, he’s given families a sense of true ownership over the center’s culture and service delivery, ensuring they recognize the high-stakes work happening in the classrooms.

Essential Early Learning

Ask Bowers about the word daycare and watch him wince. What his center provides, he maintains, is not just child care. It is essential early education, starting in infancy when teachers narrate a bottle or a diaper change to build the language a child will carry into kindergarten and beyond.

To Bowers, high-quality early learning centers are an indispensable community infrastructure that working families cannot live without. “We are making critical decisions about how these children will ultimately turn out, based on the three or four years we have them in our care,” Bowers said. “If we do not get this right, the elementary school system pays for it.”

Since 1968, Atlanta Technical College Early Learning Center, located just off Interstate 75, five minutes from downtown Atlanta, has operated as a lab school. Students earning their degrees in early childhood education at Atlanta Technical College complete their practicums and internships there, and many stay on as staff afterward.

In fact, more than half of the center’s teachers are graduates of the college’s own ECE program and it also is one of only a handful of technical colleges in Georgia with an active learning center on its campus. Because of its prime location along a major commuter thoroughfare, families well beyond the student body, commuting from Gwinnett, Clayton, Henry, and Fulton counties, enroll their children there on the way to work.

What was originally designed to serve students became, in practice, a community-based center for any family that meets the age requirement.

Guided Renovations

When Bowers arrived at the center six years ago, it looked like something out of an earlier decade: brown walls, green carpet, one open floor plan with no dividers. Infants, one-year-olds, and two-year-olds shared a single loud room, and the youngest children struggled to nap through the noise of toddlers at play. Fixing it meant construction expenses that Bowers did not have in his own budget.

That opportunity arrived through the PAACT Renovation Grant, a program of Promise All Atlanta Children Thrive (PAACT), the alliance Atlanta Technical College is already a member of. Bower decided to apply. Through the PAACT initiative, Reinvestment Fund had already vetted a pool of contractors and set cost parameters. The contractor Bowers selected built glass partitions that separated the infant, one-year-old, and two-year-old classrooms while keeping every room visible to staff walking the halls. The children finally had enough quiet to sleep.

Bowers credits much of that outcome to Lawrence Smith, Reinvestment Fund’s Senior Program Manager for the grant and technical assistance process.

“When I tell you Lawrence walked me through the whole process, hand in hand, I could not be more grateful,” Bowers said. “I would call him some days and say I can’t get the link to open, I can’t get this in, and he would say calmly, let me resend it, let me check on this, I’ve got you.”

Smith, Bowers said, became something like a translator and a partner, turning his broad vision into language a contractor could build from and turning the contractor’s scope of work back into something Bowers could picture clearly. “He took my broad vision and helped me narrow it down so it could make sense,” Bowers said. “If he hadn’t done that, I think I would still be spinning, saying I want that, no, that.”

Anchored by Community

Bowers sees the renovation as part of something larger than new walls and partitions.

If a neighborhood has affordable houses and no grocery store, he argues, it is missing something essential. An early learning center belongs on the same short list, alongside the grocery store and the drugstore, as infrastructure a community cannot do without. Extended families no longer live down the street as they once did.

A young parent buying a home in metro Atlanta, where housing costs keep climbing, needs somewhere safe and accessible child care to hold down the job that makes the mortgage possible. The center’s own graduates illustrate the same cycle: students earn their credentials, take jobs on staff, and become part of the workforce anchoring the neighborhood around the campus.

Bowers recently introduced a parent leadership team, built on the premise that the center’s direction should come from the families it serves, not be handed down.

The team starts from one question he asks every parent: what do you dream for your child? Their answers are shaping decisions well beyond the classroom. Bowers is also rethinking the center’s hours, since a traditional nine-to-five schedule no longer fits families working night shifts or taking online classes after their children are asleep.

Returning to the word (daycare) that makes him wince, Bowers put it plainly: “Ultimately, we are not taking care of the day,” he said. “We are educating children. The day takes care of itself.”