In her inauguration speech, State Senator Robyn Kennedy talked about the importance of investing in early childhood programs. She also appeared earlier this month on Strategies for Children’s 9:30 call as part of our “First Year Tour” meet-and-greet with newly elected legislators. Click on the white arrow below to hear her speech or read her tweet.
Archive for the ‘Cost and affordability’ Category
In quotes: Massachusetts State Senator Robyn Kennedy
Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Funding, MA Legislature, Strategies for Children, tagged #ChildCare, #mapoli on March 31, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Our Advocacy Network in Action: Leea Cooley
Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Developmentally appropriate practice, Early educators, English language learners, Family child care, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Professional development & preparation, Social-emotional development, Standards and curriculum, Strategies for Children, tagged #Advocacy, #EarlyEducators, #FamilyChildCare on March 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Leea Cooley has been interested in working with children for a long time. As a child growing up in Indiana, she liked to play school. As a teenager living in Agawam, Mass., – where her family moved for her father’s career – she loved to babysit.
But it wasn’t until she was a newly divorced mother of two children talking to her divorce attorney that she thought about weaving her interest in children into a profession.
“My lawyer told me that she thought a good career for me would be family child care. She saw the way that I cared so much about children. So I pursued my license, and I got it. And my lawyer put her two children in my program. Along with my children, they were my first customers. And since then, I’ve been running my family child care business for 25 years right here in my house.”
It’s a career that has been full of joy, generosity, and hard work. And one that has led Cooley to join Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network, so she can formalize the work that she has been doing for parents for decades.
“One of the main lessons I’ve learned,” Cooley says, “is that parents need help. They need advice. They need guidance. They’re working full time jobs and then they’re going home and caring for their families, and they don’t always have time to access the information that they’d like to have.
“Over the years, my biggest aha moment is I need to be that resource for families.”
(more…)In quotes: Governor Maura Healey makes the case for her budget proposal
Posted in Business and economy, Child care, Cost and affordability, MA governor, MA state budget, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, tagged #InvestInChildCare, #mapoli, #MARunsOnChildCare on March 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“A day after unveiling her $55.5 billion state budget, Gov. Maura Healey is on the road trying to garner support for her plan. She made a pitch Thursday morning to 800 members of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
“ ‘We know some of the challenges that we’re confronting right now: an unprecedented housing crisis, skyrocketing costs for quality child-care, companies unable to find workers with the skills they need to grow,’ Healey said. ‘The good news is we can, working together, fix that.’ ”
“Healey said her budget, along with a $750 million tax reform bill she proposed earlier this week, would help to stop the exodus of workers from the state. Since the pandemic, more than 110,000 people have left Massachusetts to find work in states with a lower cost of living, according to Internal Revenue Service data obtained by The Boston Globe.”
“ ‘No one is going to compete harder as your governor than me. I promise you,’ Healey told Chamber of Commerce members.”
— “Healey pitches her budget and tax reform plans to Boston’s business community,” Steve Brown, WBUR, March 2, 2023
Lessons from Somerville: How to build a strong and sustainable early childhood system
Posted in Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Family engagement, Funding, MA state budget, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Philanthropy, Pre-kindergarten, tagged #earlyed, #ece, #InvestInChildCare, #MARunsOnChildCare on February 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Photo: Huong Vu for Strategies for Children
Somerville, Mass., has spent years building a strong foundation for its early education and care programs.
Now, a case study – One Somerville, Every Child — explores how Somerville has used a three-year (2019-2022), $1 million grant from the Commonwealth Children’s Fund to make vital progress that will support young children and families – and set an example other cities can learn from.
This work began in 2018 when representatives of the City of Somerville and the Somerville Public Schools were introduced to team members from the Commonwealth Children’s Fund – thanks to the Harvard Education Redesign Lab’s By All Means Initiative.”
Somerville officials “shared plans and dreams they had for expanding their early childhood services, and the CCF team shared their plans to start investing in communities piloting innovations in early childhood systems,” the case study says.
Somerville had three goals it sought to achieve:
• expand and institutionalize its early childhood programs
• expand its existing preschool initiatives, and
• bridge the gaps between children’s birth and when they start school
Another program that was central in the grant-funded work was “Somerville’s light-touch, universal home visiting program, SomerBaby,” a first point of connection “to early childhood services and supports for many families.”
(more…)In quotes: child care is also expensive in the United Kingdom
Posted in Cost and affordability, International, Quotes, tagged #InvestInChildCare on February 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“Of the multitude of problems plaguing the UK, one issue is rising toward the top of the pile—and it has nothing to do with Brexit.
“Calls to tackle the exorbitant cost of early-years child care are growing louder ahead of the next general election, due within two years. There’s no easy fix for a system that’s become dominated by private interests, and any meaningful reform would likely require an injection of public funds at a time when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is focused on tightening spending to bring down inflation.
“The average cost of a full-time nursery slot in Britain is about £14,000 ($17,000) a year, but it can be double that in London and other places. After taxes, the average household income is just over £32,000, making the UK the most expensive country in which to obtain care for children aged 2 and 3, relative to wages, in the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.” [The United States is the second most expensive country.]
“The expense is particularly painful with prices for just about everything rising, and it’s eroding decades of progress in getting more women into the workforce… ‘Unless politicians wake up to the fact that this will be a doorstep election issue, they’re going to meet some very, very angry parents,’ says Sarah Ronan, who leads work on early education and child care for the nonprofit Women’s Budget Group.”
— “UK Getting It ‘Totally Wrong’ on Soaring Child Care Costs,” by Olivia Konotey-Ahulu, Bloomberg, February 13, 2023
The National Early Care and Education Workforce Center – a federal effort deployed by local and national leaders
Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Federal, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged #ece, #ECEWorkforce on February 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Photo: Huong Vu for Strategies for Children
Earlier this month, federal officials announced that they are creating the new and promising National Early Care and Education Workforce Center (the ECE Workforce Center). It’s a national effort to rebuild the workforce that includes local leaders here in Boston.
Launched by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with $30 million in funding, the new center will address an old problem: even before the pandemic, the early childhood workforce was plagued with low pay and high turnover rates. This situation has grown worse during the pandemic.
“We know it is hard for families to find quality early childhood programs. One of the reasons is that programs are having trouble recruiting and retaining early educators,” January Contreras says. Contreras is the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, part of HHS. “We cannot continue to expect early educators to remain in these critical roles only to earn poverty wages.”
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra adds, “HHS is honored to launch this first-of-its-kind research and technical assistance center to support the essential early childhood workforce who partner with families every day to ensure young children have what they need to thrive.”
The new ECE Workforce Center will help by addressing recruitment and retention. The center’s work will include the input of early educators and be carried out over the next five years by six partner organizations. They are:
(more…)Welcome to Massachusetts: home of high-priced child care
Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, tagged #CostOfCare, #SolveChildCare on February 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“As Governor Maura Healey takes the helm of Massachusetts state government, a new report is detailing an uphill battle for one of her key priorities: The high cost of child care.
“The new data from the Department of Labor show parents in two Massachusetts counties pay the third-highest child care prices in the nation. The annual cost of infant center-based child care in Middlesex and Norfolk counties was more than $26,000, according to the data, eating up nearly 20 percent of median family budgets. Only parents in Arlington County in Virginia and San Francisco County in California paid higher sums.
“Though Middlesex and Norfolk topped the list, Suffolk and Essex counties also ranked in the top 20 for infant child care costs, and all 14 Mass. counties appeared in the top 100 among more than 2,800 counties nationwide for which data were available.”
“ ‘All across the country, families are facing burdensome childcare expenses. The last few years have highlighted the tension parents experience when they need to go to work to provide for their families, but have difficulty doing so if they can’t access affordable child care,’ Labor Dept. Women’s Bureau Director Wendy Chun-Hoon said in a press release.”
— “Eastern Mass. has some of the highest child care costs in the country,” by Christina Prignano and Ryan Huddle, The Boston Globe, January 31, 2023
Flaws in Massachusetts’ child care system cost $2.7 billion per year in lost earnings, lower productivity, reduced tax revenue
Posted in Business and economy, Child care, Cost and affordability, Funding, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Research, tagged #SolveChildCare on January 31, 2023| 1 Comment »
Screenshot: Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation
The good news: since the start of the pandemic, Massachusetts has seen increased investments in child care, up to $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2023.
The bad news: these investments aren’t paying off the way they could.
A new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF) — Preparing for Child Care Reform: How to Improve the Subsidy System to Maximize Future Investment — points to a key problem, noting:
“The subsidized child care system in Massachusetts is complicated and inefficient. The result of a state-federal partnership, it serves three different eligible populations with two different forms of subsidies and uses multiple funding streams.”
“Massachusetts is to be commended for its substantial investment in child care in recent years; unfortunately, the subsidy system is complex and inefficient,” Doug Howgate, MTF’s president says in a press release.
Among the results of this systemic failure, the report says, is “lagging enrollment numbers, financially unstable providers, and disruptions and delays in care for families.”
According to MTF’s previous research, this complicated inefficiency comes at a high cost: “due to inadequate child care, Massachusetts loses roughly $2.7 billion a year in lost earnings for employees, additional costs and lower productivity for employers, and in reduced tax revenues.”
(more…)An update on the Early Childhood Agenda
Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Early educators, Family engagement, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children, tagged #TheEarlyChildhoodAgenda on November 29, 2022| 1 Comment »
The Early Childhood Agenda is making progress. This convening series hosted by Strategies for Children has brought together more than 400 individual advocates and partners. Participants have been meeting in five working groups to identify systemic challenges and set priorities.
Last week, participants attended a whole group meeting – dubbed “Bringing it all Together” and recorded in the video above – to talk across the Agenda’s working groups and ensure that the groups’ efforts are aligned and that any gaps in the work are addressed.
Among the themes that were discussed:
(more…)Mo Barbosa: from zero to 24 and beyond
Posted in Achievement gap, Boston, Child care, College/career readiness, Cost and affordability, Developmentally appropriate practice, Infants and toddlers, K-12, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children, tagged #TheEarlyChildhoodAgenda, #ZeroTo24 on November 9, 2022| Leave a Comment »
One of the most important lessons you learn in a conversation with Mo Barbosa is that everything in youth development work is – or should be – connected.
“The better we do with zero to five,” Barbosa says of working with young children, “the better we’re going to do with the next 10 to 15 years of development.”
Barbosa is the senior director of Community Engagement at Health Resources in Action, where his goal as a trainer and facilitator is to professionalize the youth work field. He is the facilitator for convenings of The Early Childhood Agenda, which are hosted by Strategies for Children.
Barbosa’s sweeping focus is on the zero-to-24 age range – “or 24-ish” he says, “as we’re starting to understand the brain, we’re going a little bit later.”
But instead of a well-paved road that leads from birth to early adulthood, children and families in Massachusetts — and the rest of the country — face a fractured system.
“There has been this historic difference between where you get child care and how much of it is early education and how much of it is just a place to put your kid,” Barbosa says. “And that difference has dictated quality. It has dictated pay. And it has dictated opportunity.”
Barbosa recalls running an early childhood program in St. Louis where children who lived in local housing projects would not go to kindergarten because they could not pass the screening test. Instead, they would enter first grade as six-year-olds with no early childhood classroom experiences.
The solution?
(more…)-
Eye on Early Education is a blog of Strategies for Children, an organization that works to ensure that Massachusetts invests the resources needed for all children, from birth to age five, to access high-quality early education programs that prepare them for success in school and life. The blogger, Alyssa Haywoode, comes to Eye on Early Education after a career in journalism. -
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