Erica Meadows doesn’t wait until aspiring teachers have graduated from college to inspire a love of working with little kids.

She starts while they’re still in braces.

Meadows runs the preschool program at The Loyola School in Mount Vernon, where a handful of high school interns act as assistant teachers, helping to clean up toys, play with the kids and manage meltdowns. The hands-on experience, she hopes, will inspire careers working with small children and perhaps help combat the statewide shortage of child care professionals.

Recruiting early childhood educators isn’t easy. They start earlier and work later than other teachers. They’re with kids for their first classroom experience, which means navigating emotional outbursts and teaching preschoolers how to share, line up and follow directions. And for all of that, they tend to make just minimum wage.

“You can get people to come in for a year or two, but then they don’t see a career path, so they’re like, ‘OK, this is a lot of hard work,’” Meadows said. “How do you encourage people to want to work with young children?”

For Meadows, the answer is to get them in the door early.

Loyola has three interns from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, where all students work one day a week at job placement sites in different industries.

By Maryland State Department of Education standards, volunteers can only work with kids ages 2 years old or older, can’t be left alone with them and don’t count toward the child-to-staff ratios child care centers are required to follow.

But those over age 16 can be hired as aides and count toward ratios once they complete background checks and training, the education department said.

High schoolers can also earn a credential that qualifies them to work in child care after graduation, as some Montgomery County students do.

Since 1970, a county program has allowed high schoolers to apply their skills in a real preschool. They teach and design most of the lessons under teacher supervision.

“The program’s mission is to cultivate future educators who understand how to support the cognitive, social, and emotional growth of young children,” district spokesperson Liliana López said in an email.

This year, 2,076 Montgomery County high schoolers are teaching kids between 3 and 5 years old, López said. Eventually, that could help with staffing needs as the state expands its public pre-K options.

Though there’s no certificate waiting for them at the end, the Cristo Rey interns say they love their jobs. They light up when talking about their weekly visits and the antics of their favorite kids.

Amari Cheeks, a 16-year-old sophomore, delights over one funny little boy who dances on his way back from the bathroom. She also likes to teach kids that it’s OK to show your emotions and cry.

Though only 15, Nayeli Galvez-Hernandez jokes about having a hard time understanding the younger generation’s humor. “Brain rot” jokes like “six seven” and “tung tung tung sahur” have infiltrated preschool classrooms.

“I might as well try to get in touch with the kids, like older people say,” Galvez-Hernandez said.

Mirairi “Mimi” Carter interned at Loyola during all four years of high school at Cristo Rey. Now, she’s on the roster as a substitute teacher while pursuing a psychology degree at Towson University. She wants to open her own practice in another industry facing a severe workforce shortage and hopes her studies will help her understand how young kids’ brains work.

“Being here for these last four years, it has really helped me understand my passion, understand myself more and understand children as a whole,” Carter said.

Not all interns fall in love with teaching toddlers. When Dakel Elliott was at Loyola, he found himself thinking maybe it wasn’t for him, even though he’d always wanted to be a teacher. But once he started working with first graders, he realized he was where he belonged.

Elliott is now a sophomore at Towson University, pursuing a secondary education degree. Volunteering at Loyola inspired his passion for education and his dream of becoming a high school principal.

It is the kind of outcome Meadows hopes for.

“We try to build them up, nurture them, make them realize like that really might be what their gift is,” Meadows said.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.