There’s a phrase Dr. Therese Baca-Radler keeps coming back to this year: “Keep going.” It’s the tagline behind Central New Mexico Community College’s (CNM) new marketing campaign, and it also carries her up tough climbs as a competitive mountain biker.
Her own story starts at 19, working at All Seasons Day School in Albuquerque’s International District with no clear sense of where the path would lead. The school invested in her before she’d earned anything: they gave her a hot lunch, a bike, and a reason to ride it to CNM.
Decades and a Ph.D. later, she sees CNM helping students bring their education and hands-on experience together:
“You don’t always put the books and the degrees with the work until later. And sometimes, once those things come together, you get this beautiful thing that’s early childhood education in the state of New Mexico.”
CNM’s Early Childhood Multicultural Education (ECME) program is built around people who are already doing the work, giving them a way to formalize it into a degree or certificate without stepping away from the kids and families relying on them.
Students can earn a Child Development Certificate or an associate degree, with a fully Spanish-language track that lets bilingual educators complete nearly all their coursework in Spanish. Specialized cohorts including a fast-track pre-K pipeline and partnerships with Albuquerque Public Schools and Los Alamos National Laboratory apply that same foundation to the needs of different communities. A three-phase field experience model moves students from an initial job shadow through capstone practicum hours, with their progress tracked in CNM’s “Field Experience Passport.”
Support runs alongside all of it: evening and online classes, Thursday-night Spanish-speaking tutoring, and CNM’s Wellness Center, which offers free counseling, a food pantry, and basic-needs support.
Dr. Baca-Radler describes the field less as a career ladder than as a network of mentors, classmates, and colleagues who hold each other accountable and don’t let anyone fall behind. Her advice to anyone considering the field or thinking about going back to school: “Do it. We are a community, and there are people who are going to help you all along the way. Keep going.”