Tammie Vail Shoultz-McCole is passionate about educating young children in an environment that nurtures the mind, body and soul. She began fostering the development of young minds in 1992 as the founder of Tiger’s Treehouse Child Care in Grand Junction, Colorado, where she taught children between the ages of 2 and 6 for more than 14 years. During that time, she earned her BA in social and behavioral science from Colorado Mesa University.

In 2005, Shoultz-McCole began educating the next generation of early childhood professionals as an ECE instructor for CCC Online, a program designed to complement the on-campus experience of students in the Colorado Community Colleges system and increase access to educational opportunities for students juggling work and family responsibilities. In 2009, she began serving as an instructor and program director for the Early Childhood Education Department at Colorado Mesa University’s Western Colorado Community College campus—positions that she continues to hold today.

Since 2015, Shoultz-McCole has also drawn on her extensive experience and expertise in early childhood education to serve as a coach for the Partnership for Children and Families (PCF), which creates, coordinates and sustains a resource-rich community for all families, so that children from every culture and community can achieve their full potential in safe and nurturing settings.

Shoultz-McCole earned her master of arts degree in early childhood education from Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2012 and her master of arts degree in educational instructional design from the University of Colorado-Denver in 2016. She is currently a fellow in the University of Colorado-Denver’s Buell Early Childhood Leadership Program, which prepares existing and emerging Colorado leaders in the field of early care and education to become effective agents for change as they work to create equity, opportunity and educational excellence for all young children in Colorado.