Gladys Mariscal is a Bank-Fund Credit Union sponsored grantee.
Gladys Mariscal, a U.S. citizen, is completing a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education at Trinity Washington University. She has been in this field for more than a decade, supporting both children and their families. She is going to school full-time and excelling academically, while working two jobs closely related to her field.
Gladys encountered learning challenges during her early years of education, but through her work at a Montessori preschool job she recognized the barrier and took steps to overcome them. Her choice of career path has been influenced by mentoring from her teachers. Gladys, based on her own education and work experiences, wants to help families understand child development in a way that is digestible and applicable in their day-to-day home lives.
She is mindful of parents’ needs to learn about resources if their children have developmental issues. She is an activist, helping mothers learn how to understand such issues and access resources, and has started an outreach network for women who want community.
Gladys’s long-term plan is to open her own center, emphasizing the Montessori methods she has learned and believes in, either in the state of Maryland, whose standards she is familiar with, in Panama (where her family originally hailed from), or even another place abroad. Once she succeeds in that, she would like to try merging early childhood education with proximity to a senior citizens’ residential facility to provide interactions between generations.
