Screenshot: The Boston Foundation website

A new report from The Boston Foundation – “When the Bough Breaks Why Now Is the Moment to Invest in Massachusetts’ Fragile Child Care System” — sounds an important alarm.

“The early education and care system in Massachusetts is at a breaking point. The Commonwealth has the second most expensive child care market in the United States. Families routinely pay upwards of $20,000 a year for care for their young children,” the report says.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has made an already very challenging situation worse.”

“Without public investment in early education and care, the Massachusetts economy will be unable to fully recover from the coronavirus pandemic.”

The report is based on interviews with local stakeholders who are parents, providers, and advocates, including Amy O’Leary, executive director of Strategies for Children.

“The directors I talk to are panicked,” O’Leary says in the report. “They are in their classroom from morning until night because they can’t find enough staff.”

“When programs are not able to open, when child care centers close their doors, people are going to be mad,” O’Leary adds. “And they are going to say, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell us that this was about to collapse?’”

One of the parents the report spotlights is Louise Jeffy-Dennis who “lives in Sturbridge and works in Boston and the Metrowest area. She and her husband have a toddler and an infant, born during the pandemic. Before COVID-19, the family was paying $600 a week for child care for her one son. Jeffy-Dennis is a psychologist. Her husband works for the state, and they make a good living—too much to be eligible for child care subsidies yet not enough to be able to afford the $600 a week easily.”

The report also shares insights from Laura Perille the CEO of Nurtury, “one of the largest providers of early education and care in Boston. She told the Boston Globe this summer that she cannot find enough workers to maintain her classrooms. Child care workers in Massachusetts, most of whom are women of color, make a median wage of $14 an hour. Throughout New England these workers experience high rates of poverty and often lack any benefits. Early educators with a bachelor’s degree are paid 35 percent less than their colleagues in the K–8 system, essentially paying a penalty for working with younger children.”

Also featured is Tom Weber, the former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care and the current executive director of the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education.

“Weber says that members of his coalition increasingly see the way the child care problem is negatively impacting their own employees and particularly women within their offices.

 “ ‘Women are communicating clearly to us about their untenable circumstances through their actions,’ Weber says. ‘They’ve fled the labor market in record numbers.’ Surveys by the business coalition show 91 percent of Massachusetts employers have significant concerns about child care and school issues affecting their employee’s ability to show up to work and to be productive once they get there.”

 “ ‘This is a real moment of awakening for our employer community,’ Weber says. ‘The employer community has now come to understand this as an urgent priority, instead of just a long-term concern.’ ”

As the report concludes:

“Massachusetts cannot have a working economy post-COVID without investments in early education and care.”

The report points to the importance of the proposed Common Start Legislation as a step forward. Common Start would, as O’Leary explains, “establish a system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, over a five-year timeline.”

And as Turahn Dorsey, a Foundation Fellow at Eastern Bank Foundation and “a longtime educational leader in the state, says this moment in time presents an opportunity for historic investment in the future of the state, its children and its workers: ‘This is something that the community can do together,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do what we know works, then shame on all of us.’ ”

To learn more, check out the report, and please share it with your professional networks.