What Latino Families Have Taught Us About Early Learning

Latino children are among the fastest-growing groups in Louisiana’s schools. Yet in early learning, they are often missing. In Orleans Parish, Latino students make up 14% of public K–12 enrollment but just 5% of children in early childhood programs, and only 1% of infants in publicly funded care. Jefferson Parish showed a similar gap when we began working there in 2022.

Over the past four years, we’ve listened to Latino parents, providers, and community leaders across Jefferson, Orleans, and Lafayette parishes, and alongside home-based child care leaders from around the world. Here’s what they’ve taught us, and what we think systems across the South can do with it.

1. Trust travels through people, not flyers

Families don’t learn about early learning from a government website. They learn from their church, a community health worker, a neighbor, or the organization that helped them find housing. In every parish, our work started by mapping these trusted messengers and earning their partnership before we ever asked families a question.

That’s also how enrollment grows. In Jefferson Parish, families told us plainly: go where we already go. Co-locate enrollment events with the resource fairs families already attend. Train the people families already trust to explain their options.

2. Language justice is infrastructure, not translation

Translating a flyer is not the same as language access. Many families from Central America speak Spanish as a second language after an Indigenous language such as K’iche’ or Mam. Parents told us that information about care options, and often the services themselves, are only offered in English.

Real language justice means budgeting for interpretation in staff training as well as family outreach, hiring bilingual teachers and directors, and designing meetings where every participant can listen and speak in the language they feel strongest in. In our own facilitation, that means simultaneous interpretation and multilingual materials from the start, not as an afterthought.

3. Home-based care is often the preference, not a fallback

In much of Latin America, families rely on relatives for child care, and home-based options can feel more familiar and culturally right. But newcomer families often don’t have relatives nearby. The result is that families may lose access to the kind of care they prefer most, while Spanish-speaking caregivers in the community provide care that is unrecognized, unpaid, and disconnected from training and support.

This lesson echoed at the global level. When we facilitated the first global convening of home-based child care leaders for the National Association for Family Child Care, leaders from Ecuador, Colombia, Bangladesh, and beyond described the same tension: home-based care is everywhere, deeply rooted in culture, and largely invisible to the systems that fund care. Recognizing and supporting home-based providers is one of the most direct ways to reach Latino families.

4. The workforce is already in the community

The early childhood field is short on Spanish-speaking teachers. Meanwhile, 65% of the parents in our Orleans listening sessions said they were interested in working in an early learning center or caring for children at home. Many arrived with professional degrees that aren’t recognized here.

Jefferson Parish turned that insight into action. A two-generation apprenticeship now trains Latino parents as early childhood teachers while their children attend high-quality care. One graduate, a former HIV program manager in her home country, told us she never imagined she would have a professional career in the U.S.

5. Eligibility rules can quietly shut families out

Some barriers are written into the paperwork. Programs ask for Social Security numbers when they may not be required. Families in multi-family households may not appear on any document tied to their home, so they can’t prove residency. Parents doing informal or gig work struggle to prove employment. And conflicting information about who is eligible keeps families away, even from programs like Head Start, which serves asylum seekers and refugees who meet other requirements.

Reviewing intake forms and eligibility steps with families, not just for them, is a low-cost, high-impact place to start.

6. What isn’t counted can’t be improved

Most systems can’t tell you how many Latino children they serve, what languages families speak at home, or how many teachers are bilingual. Updating intake forms in English and Spanish, and breaking program data down by race, ethnicity, and language, gives leaders the baseline they need to track progress.

7. Families belong at the decision-making table

Latino parent leaders are already the go-to navigators for their families and neighbors. Systems can formalize that role by reserving seats on advisory boards and steering committees for Latino parents and the organizations that serve them.

Where to start

If you lead an early childhood system, program, or funder in the South, start with three questions:

Who are the trusted messengers for Latino families in your communities, and have you asked them to partner?
Can a Spanish-speaking or Indigenous-language-speaking parent enroll in your program from start to finish in their own language?
Do you know how many Latino children you serve today?

The answers will tell you where to begin. If you’d like a thought partner, we’d love to talk.