A tireless advocate for children

Joan Sheppard, the longtime director of the Rosa Lee Young Childhood Center, died in her sleep on Dec. 4. She was 84.

Sheppard, a longtime Rockville Centre resident, was one of the founders of the center, and served as its director from 1978 until her retirement in 2009.

Born to James and Clara Martin in the Bronx on June 1, 1931, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and a master’s in early childhood education from Queens College.

Joan met her husband, John Sheppard, after college. She was a teacher at a school in Babylon, and John’s sister invited both of them to a party. They were married soon after.

“She had a life-long passion for early-childhood development and education,” said her daughter, Alexandra Sheppard.

In 1972, Sheppard was part of a group of 10 women that went door to door in Rockville Centre to see if people needed child-care services. “In the ’60s and ’70s, women were really joining the workforce,” said Jeannine Rey, the center’s executive director and a longtime friend and colleague of Sheppard’s. “They walked around and knocked on doors with their questionnaires, and pushing their baby carriages with their own children.”

Seeing the need for a child-care center, the women opened the Rosa Lee Young Center in the basement of Shiloh Baptist Church in 1972. Sheppard worked with the center from the beginning, as a teacher. Its initial enrollment was seven children.

“They were really forward-thinkers,” Rey said, “and women who were going to try to make a difference for women and children and families.”

The center — which was named for Rosa Lee Young, a founder of Shiloh Baptist Church and an advocate for fair education in Rockville Centre in the 1940s — grew quickly. By 1976 it had moved into a space in the United Church building at the corner of Morris and Lakeview avenues, and had 45 children. Two years later, Sheppard was appointed director.

Under her leadership, the facility grew by leaps and bounds, and she helped it expand to its current home on North Village Avenue. Its range of programs grew as well.