Last week at the State House, early education was in the spotlight.

The Joint Committee on Education held a hearing and heard testimony on “bills related to Early Education and Care, Kindergarten, and Literacy.”

“During a virtual hearing of the Joint Committee on Education, child-care providers and advocates joined lawmakers in calling for systemic changes to an industry known for its harsh economic imbalance,” the Boston Globe reports. “Massachusetts has some of the highest child-care costs in the nation, yet the state’s child-care workers earn a median salary of $37,000 a year, barely a living wage for someone with children.”

Video of the hearing and a list of the bills is posted here.

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Among the bills that were discussed is the Common Start legislation (H.605, S.362), which “would establish a system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, over a 5-year timeline,” according to a fact sheet. Strategies for Children serves on the Common Start steering committee, and our executive director Amy O’Leary was one of more than 70 individuals who submitted written testimony in support of the bill.

Another supporter of Common Start is Kristen Guichard, a parent who “told lawmakers she pays $47,000 to send her two kids to day care four days a week, providing them with a supportive environment she feels lucky to have,” the State House News reports, adding, “It’s a price tag she knows not everyone can afford and that can come with challenges that go beyond strictly financial…”

The article continues:

“ ‘While my kids were attending the day care of our choice and I went off to work each day knowing my kids were happy, safe and nurtured, another person close to me in my community was struggling with a very difficult choice,’ Guichard said at an Education Committee hearing Tuesday. ‘She was in an abusive relationship, but her partner watched her children and she could not afford other child care. As a result, she felt she had to stay in that abusive relationship just so that the children could be watched during the day and she could work.’ ”

Also testifying on behalf of the Common Start legislation was Representative Kenneth Gordon (D-Bedford), who said:

“This bill takes a whole new approach on how families in this commonwealth can access safe and affordable early childhood education and care.” 

Access, Gordon noted, is a problem that Massachusetts must address – and the time to do so is now, when the Build Back Better Bill could make a historic investment in child care.

Gordon also told the story of a deli owner he recently spoke to who was downsizing and selling his meat slicing machine. When Gordon asked why, the deli owner said he couldn’t find an employee he could hire to run the machine. So now the owner sells pre-sliced meat. This was one of five jobs at the deli that went unfilled.

The deli owner had talked to young parents about working for him. Some parents said they couldn’t find child care. Others said they couldn’t afford it. And the deli owner, who has been skeptical about government solutions, was interested in the ways that Common Start could help put parents back to work. The deli owner even admitted that five years earlier, he’d been paying $22,000 a year for child care himself.

Early educator and teacher educator Megina Baker also testified in support of the Common Start bill, and she pointed out that salaries must rise. Early education has to pay a living wage, otherwise, dedicated and talented young people in college who would love to teach young children will forgo careers in the field because they can earn more as public school teachers or by working in careers outside of education.

Tom Weber, the executive director of the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education, shared testimony on behalf of the coalition. 

“The Massachusetts ECE sector, like those across the nation, has been battered and beleaguered for many years, making it too difficult for parents with young children to engage in the labor market to their full potential and contributing to a worker shortage that serves as a drag on the entire Massachusetts economy,” the coalition testimony says in part.

Among the coalition’s recommendations: “Sustain the Child Care Stabilization Grant through Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) and study its underlying Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) formula for potential expansion.”

As we’ve blogged, these federally funded stabilization grants are helping programs cope with pandemic challenges and costs.

Another recommendation is to, “Enhance transparency and promote flexibility in ECE state budgeting,” so that parents, providers, and advocates can clearly see how the often-entwined state and federal funding streams are being used.

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Titus DosRemedios, Strategies for Children’s deputy director, shared testimony on An Act Ensuring High Quality Pre-Kindergarten Education (S.319). The bill would require community collaboration between school districts and early childhood programs to create a shared vision of high-quality preschool.

This bill would build on the Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative (CPPI), a state-funded program that invested in preschool expansion in nine communities across the state.

“This coordination – a true community-wide vision for early education – is unique to S.319, and not included in the other bills before you today,” the testimony says. 

“S.319 would help expand this successful approach to preschool expansion statewide, phasing in over time based on community readiness and need.” 

In addition to Strategies, this testimony has the support of 22 local leaders in the nine CPPI grantee communities.

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We were also happy to see Ryan Telingator testify in support of a bill on preschool suspensions and expulsions, An Act to support healthy development among preschoolers (H.544). Telingator is a former Strategies for Children intern who is currently participating in Jumpstart’s fellowship program.

As Telingator testified, “Exclusionary, harsh discipline practices detrimentally affect children across the nation. It is estimated that 67,000 students were suspended and expelled in 2016 alone. The effects are particularly invidious for black students who are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. That statistic is staggering.”

It is essential, Telingator said, to disrupt what he called the “preschool-to-prison pipeline.”

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To learn more, please check out the video. 

And be sure to tell you state legislators to support the bills that support early education and care!