Once a civil service worker, Gwendolyn Crews never imagined entering the field of education.

But after her college sweetheart, with whom she had a child, was killed in an automobile accident, the Los Angeles native was forced to raise her toddler as single parent. It was then that Crews began working one-on-one with her daughter to increase the child’s developmental skills.

Having had what she described as her own “fantastic” childhood, Crews reflected on a few simple words spoken at the time by her chronically ill mother: “Water the flowers that are still here.”

And those words later took on more meaning. Roughly 17 years ago, a friend of Crews’ began working two jobs and needed care for her daughter. The woman asked if Crews would babysit her child for a while.

“That’s when I started keeping her kid, and from that point other people heard about me and I started keeping their children,” she said. “At some point I caught the bug.”

In 1994, she launched her home-based child care business, Little Lambs Training Center, which served infants to middle-school children. She began an early-readers education program for her preschoolers and introduced infants as young as three months to bilingual immersion. In addition, she added a component to train clients to become better parents.

As the number of children in her charge grew, Crews made sacrifices. She traded in her SUV for a 15-seat van; partnered with her new husband, Bobby Crews, to oversee the center; and hired her daughter, Sabra Smith, to run a nearby branch for middle-school children.

Crews also returned to college — first attending Harbor Community College — after the age of 30. She walked away from the then-Compton Community College in 2000 with an associates degree in child development.

By 2000, the business had outgrown Little Lambs, leading Crews to set her sights on a vacant, 7,200-square-foot commercial building just blocks away in Carson. Three years later — while working on her bachelor’s degree in childhood education at Union Institute University — she received a First 5 LA grant in the amount of $25,000, which she used to acquire and renovate the building. With the change came a new name: Juniorversity.

The name, Crews said, embodied her education-focused child care philosophy, which introduces young children to advanced concepts at an early age in order to prepare them for the road to college.

Juniorversity, which officially opened in 2006, is located at 2400 S. Central Ave. It has roughly 50 students ages three months to six years, though it can to accommodate up to 95 students.

During a recent visit to Juniorversity for the last interval of summer session, Crews demonstrated how much children are capable of absorbing. Bright-eyed, two-year-old Kesley Smith immediately grabbed the book Crews was holding, called “Your Baby Can Read.” Not only was the toddler able to read and recognize several words — such as gorilla, elephant, tiger, mouth, eyes, clap and wave — but she was able to pronounce them with very little difficulty, and even pointed to the images associated with them.

How was this accomplished? Crews said it’s simple: After analyzing a child’s learning style — kinesthetic, visual or auditory — an instructor can build a curriculum around his or her needs. With a low teacher-to-student ratio, one-on-one sessions foster added attention to detail.

Throw in some love and positive reinforcement, and “you’ve got a child that is excited about learning,” said Crews. “When you’ve taught them the sounds of their letters and they can read, you have to be creative and come up with more things to spark their interest.”

Infants are introduced to reading, which Crews said allows them to better communicate their needs — through pointing or gesturing — though they cannot speak. Toddlers, on the other hand, focus on language development, motor skills and learning with their senses — sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell.

Children, Crews added, are more eager to learn than most people think, and if given the right tools are capable of learning well beyond their grade level.
In the pre-kindergarten to first grade class, instructors utilize manipulatives and art projects to further develop motor skills. Students are also introduced to Spanish.

Some children during a recent visit to the school — mainly those ages four to six — were reading at a second grade level, recognizing such multi-syllable words as “whispering.” Most could say all of their letters in Spanish, knew all 50 states, recognized double-digit numbers and knew how to use sign language.

On a day-to-day basis, this particular class works on skill development, motor skills, habits, phonics, rhymes, language development, math, science, journaling, shape and color recognition, poetry, art, social skills and recognizing animals and parts of the human anatomy. They also learn the names of planets, days of the week, months of the year, continents and bodies of water.

But Juniorversity is not just about academics, “it’s also a journey of self-awareness, of discovering the world and of helping your child find his or her place within it,” according to its official website.

The curriculum is ever-developing, drawing from the latest academic research and child development discoveries that are both physically and mentally stimulating. With the help of her daughter, Sabra — who has five degrees in childhood development and education — the two collaborate on how to further improve their curriculum and expand the realm of what a child can learn in his or her preschool years.

With this unique philosophy, Crews was named Preschool Teacher of the Year, an award sponsored by Los Angeles County Universal Preschool, in July. She was further honored by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, which presented her with a certificate this summer.

Prior to this, she received awards from Higher Learning Solution and the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce. Through the latter, Crews has found mentors in Microsoft, Honda and AEG. Those parties are working with Crews to help expand the business, and will later financially assist her when she attends the University of Southern California, where she will take business classes. She is currently three courses shy of earning her master’s degree in child development from the University of La Verne.

“Our goal here is to give them a chance to compete for jobs in the international [market],” Crews said. “And I think this is a good place to start.”