Last Saturday morning, parents, advocates, and state legislators came together to participate in a virtual forum to discuss the importance of the Common Start legislation, a Massachusetts bill that calls for establishing “a system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, over a 5-year timeline.”

Hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Cape Cod Area and the Common Start Coalition, Cape Cod & Islands Chapter, the forum included:

• Senator Susan Moran, who filed Common Start in the Senate

• Representative Kip Diggs, a member of the Joint Committee on Education

• Janae Mendes, a parent

• Rafaela Fonseca, a family child care provider

• Lynda Allen-wan-N’Tani, executive director of the Crystal Garden Children’s Learning Center

• Noelle Pina, chief of staff of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce

• Debra Murphy, the early childhood coordinator at Cape Cod Community College, and

• Amy O’Leary, Strategies for Children’s executive director

Before the forum, Jane Mendes shared her experiences as a parent with the Cape Cod Times, which reports:

“In the summer of 2019, Janae Mendes was forced to leave her job at a Cape Cod bank because she couldn’t afford summer child care for her 7-year-old daughter.

“ ‘Every place that was available wanted $400 per week,’ said Mendes, now an outreach coordinator for the Cape & Islands chapter of Common Start Coalition. ‘I worked a stable job — it was the best job I ever had. It was very disheartening to have to leave.’

“Mendes, 27, is just one of many local, working parents facing hardships as a lack of affordable child care becomes more of a crisis. As part of the Common Start Coalition, a statewide partnership of organizations, providers, parents, early educators and advocates, Mendes now reaches out to parents and child care providers to raise awareness surrounding affordable child care.”

Mendes and other parents would benefit if the Common Start bill became law. As the Times explains:

“Fundamentally, the bill has two parts. The first is bedrock funding – grants provided to family-based and center-based providers… Those grants will go directly to facilities to pay for upgrades, materials, supplies and to increase educator pay to help infuse systems of funding that will help reflect the actual cost of care.”

“The second part of the bill is grants to families – subsidies based on income.”

The need is considerable. Even as the pandemic slowly wanes, the child care crisis continues.

“Almost two years since the dawn of the pandemic, [Lynda] Allen-wan-N’Tani, owner of Crystal Gardens Learning Center, said parents still come to her ‘in a panic,’ because they ‘finally found a job,’ but don’t have access to child care.

“ ‘For the majority of them, they were able to get a spot for their child or children. But it also begins the search for funding, which we help them with,’ she said. ‘We contact funding sources and if that parent can’t acquire funding that day, I have them fill out an application, tour the facility, and we take their kids as they wait (for funding). l take them because when I had my child 41 years ago, someone opened the door for me.’ ”

While we are grateful for the generosity and heroism of early education providers who help parents no matter what, we also know it’s essential to build a system that makes child care accessible and easily affordable so that individual providers don’t have to keep knitting individual safety nets.

Children and families deserve the consistent support of a well-funded early education and care system. So please join the effort to support Common Start by joining one of the local Common Start chapters.