Sarah Mills

How do you go from being a preschool teacher to working as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House? 

For Sarah Mills, it’s all about loving the work of interacting with young children. 

In elementary and middle school, Mills enjoyed helping out with infants and toddlers who were enrolled in her public school’s preschool program. 

As a Syracuse University college student, Mills got a work-study job at her campus’ early education center. 

And when she came to Boston to attend graduate school at Simmons University, she needed to work full-time, so she found a job at KinderCare in downtown Boston where she spent half her time working with infants and half her time working in the afterschool program. 

“When I was younger, I just loved kids; they were so much fun to hang out with,” Mills recalls. “It’s really exciting being with kids who are ages zero to five because you get to watch them go through so many significant milestones, whether it’s their first steps or their first words. Being with kids at this age is truly joyful.” 

“Another wonderful thing is that you get to know the families. I had a lot of families with first-time babies, and so I had the responsibility of helping to educate them and helping them to feel comfortable, because it’s scary to drop your child off for the first time with people you’ve just met. And I was working before the paid family leave law. So I saw parents who had no choice but to bring children who were six weeks or 12 weeks old to our program.” 

For Mills, graduate school added more layers of awareness. 

“I was earning a master’s degree in public health, and I started focusing on health equity and racial justice. Going through this program and simultaneously working in early education, I started to understand more about the inequities in early education: the lack of support and resources given to teachers, the large financial discrepancies between how much families were paying for care and how much my coworkers and I were getting paid in an expensive city like Boston. 

“It became critically clear how important the quality of early education programs are for kids, for families, and for women. I also saw that families of color were more likely to have child care vouchers than white families, and that’s not a coincidence. That’s the result of much deeper issues in our country and in our society. We know there’s structural racism and income inequality.” 

Mills has also thought a lot about the needs of the early education workforce. 

“Teachers and providers in the field don’t make a lot of money, and their benefits aren’t great either. They don’t get a lot of sick time off, even though they’re exposed to germs all day. There are no mental health days, even though teachers deserve them. 

“Sometimes in the infant room, it’s just a hard day. Sometimes there’s just so much work. Maybe children’s schedules are off or there’s crying or there’s an upset parent. And if you have a number of days like that in a row, you might need to recharge. It shouldn’t be that the only way that you can take a day off is if you’re sick or your own children are sick. But mental health days aren’t allotted, and teachers don’t take time off because they want to be there for the children and for their colleagues.” 

After working in early education as well as with children who have disabilities, Mills decided that she wanted to have a larger impact. 

“I asked myself how I could have an effect on more than just seven babies at a time, more than just seven families at a time. For me, the answer is policy, which affects entire communities. I was curious about the State House, and I wanted to learn about how the legislative process works.” 

Mills got advice from one of the parents whose children she cared for and that led to an internship with the Joint Committee on Public Health. And when the legislative aide position opened up in the office of Representative Jay Livingstone (D-Boston), Mills applied and got the job. She started at the end of 2019, so she got to spend a few months at the State House before she had to leave because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

During the pandemic, Mills has been providing constituent services, including helping people who have never had to do so apply for public benefits. There’s also the work of meeting with community members to discuss legislative issues such as early education and care. And there’s the hard work of working through state budget issues in the middle of a global pandemic. 

Normally, when we blog about early childhood leaders, we ask each leader what they would want policymakers to know about their work. But since Mills is in the policy arena, we asked where she’d like to see public policy in Massachusetts go. 

“I would like to see universal child care, from infants on. The federal government defines affordable child care as being no more than 7 percent of families’ income, and I’d like to understand how we can work toward that. 

“Now that we’ve gotten through this busy year of pandemic response and police reform, I really hope to see more support for early educators because I think this pandemic has shown how absolutely critical early education providers are. When the entire country was shutting down, we still needed people to watch essential workers’ children so that those workers could go and save people’s lives. So I hope to see more acknowledgement of how important early educators’ work is.”