The Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) has been recognized as a 2025 AWS Champions Award winner for its transformative modernization of two statewide digital platforms that support Texas’s early childhood education (ECE) ecosystem. Through its strategic migration to AWS, the institute improved system scalability, reduced operational overhead, and introduced intelligent automation that empowers more than 166,000 educators and administrators.

This move positions CLI as a leader in technology-enhanced education access and professional development for the ECE community, ensuring more efficient service delivery for thousands of users across the state.

Project Overview
CLI Engage and the Texas Early Childhood Professional Development System (TECPDS) system are foundational platforms that serve Texas’s early childhood community from birth through elementary school. CLI Engage provides educators and families with research-based tools such as developmental screenings, classroom activities, professional development, and quality improvement resources. TECPDS functions as the state’s ECE workforce registry, enabling professionals to track certifications, access career advancement tools, and manage workforce data.

Recognizing the limitations of legacy infrastructure, CLI undertook a full cloud migration to AWS, modernizing its backend to support scalable, resilient operations. In parallel, the team implemented an intelligent document processing solution, replacing manual, multi-step workflows with streamlined automation that dramatically improves user experience.

Challenges Addressed: Growing Demand and Manual Burden
Before the migration, CLI Engage and TECPDS were grappling with multiple challenges:

• Scalability constraints, especially during peak usage when more than 10,000 ECE professionals logged in daily 
• High infrastructure maintenance overhead, limiting the capacity to focus on innovation 
• Manual business processes, such as record submission and data entry, that consumed significant time and resources for both users and staff 

These limitations risked slowing down platform responsiveness and undermining support for Texas’s expanding early education workforce.

Results: Improved Performance, Lower Costs, and Happier Users
The modernization produced several tangible business benefits:

• $10,000 in annual infrastructure savings  
• Elastic scalability to meet high-volume usage periods without performance degradation 
• Intelligent automation that reduced multi-step processes to just two steps, now processing over 1,800 records per week 
• Significant time savings for users, empowering educators to focus more on student success and less on paperwork 

Empowering the Educators Who Shape Tomorrow
Through its cloud transformation, the Children’s Learning Institute at UTHealth Houston has built a future-ready foundation for supporting and scaling early childhood education services. By leveraging AWS to simplify operations, automate workflows, and enhance user experience, CLI is enabling Texas educators to do what they do best — nurture the next generation.