Rocio Perez

In June 2026, during Head Start WEST’s First 1,000 Days! Early Head Start Conference, we asked attendees to share a sixty second Head Start story.

This is Rocio Perez from LAEP

“My name is Rocio Perez, and I’m with Los Angeles Education Partnership. The person that I want to talk about is Aileen Basilio, and mom is Maria Tellez.

My story with them is that they have been in the program repeatedly, but mom is seeing the change in the child and in herself. She is now completing the goals that she is setting for herself. The challenge that they were facing is that she didn’t feel that she was doing enough with her child, and she did a lot of mistakes with her first child. I see the change in focus of setting goals and seeing that what she does is what the child is also seeing, that she’s accomplishing and copying what mom does.

The confidence in her parenting skills has improved, and she’s able to see a change in how her children are now with her daughter Eileen, how she is now showing a love for books, showing a confidence in her social skills with other children. And at first she saw that with her other child that she would scream a lot, hit at times, and use a lot of methods that were trauma from when she was younger and how her mother had educated her and she sees that a lot of those things were the trauma that she carried with her.

Now she realizes that she can shift that and she can begin to use the skills that she’s learning to change the way that her children are now seeing her so that her children don’t carry the same traumas. She knows that she is the reason why her children can have a different type of future and her children are able to… still learn and do differently, just as she learned and is doing differently.

So I was very proud of the goal that she accomplished and set for herself, which was to just continue to focus on her mental health, take the help from therapists, take the help from exercise, begin to take her life back. And now that has… turned into her also using that and making sure that she is able to show her children that whatever is set as a goal can be accomplished if you continue to try and move forward past any traumas that you can have.

And I see her teaching this to her oldest whom she thought she made many mistakes but now he’s going to go off to college. And she’s doing this now with her youngest who is also… now going off to third grade, so that’s another thing that she feels very proud of herself, too.”