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Archive for the ‘Cost and affordability’ Category

Today is Advocacy Day!

Posted in Cost and affordability, Early educators, Family engagement, Head Start, MA Legislature, MA state budget on March 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

Today is Advocacy Day 2020 for Early Education & Care and School Age Programs and there are TWO ways to participate. 

You can come to the Massachusetts State House. Here’s the schedule:

9:30 a.m.

Registration in the Great Hall

10:00 a.m.

Speakers – including Early Education and Care Commissioner Samantha Aigner-Treworgy

11:15 a.m.

Meetings with Legislators

 

Or you can participate right from your program by:

• finding your elected officials and their contact information by going to www.WhereDoIVoteMA.com

• following them on social media

• taking pictures of your program and share them with your state representatives and state senators on Facebook and Twitter. Use the hashtags #ValueEarlyEducators and #ValueAfterSchoolEducators

 

The next step? Keep the advocacy going! In the coming weeks and months you can: (more…)

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A state-by-state look at child care policies

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Early educators, National on March 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

With State House Advocacy Day approaching on Thursday, it’s a good time to ask: How are states doing on child care?

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has taken a look – and summed up its findings in a recent report, “Early Progress: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2019.”

Accompanying the report are a collection of fact sheets on all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“Given the importance of child care assistance to families, it is essential for states to have strong child care assistance policies,” NWLC says in a press release.

The report and the fact sheets assess states in five key policy areas: (more…)

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In quotes: A Federal Reserve Bank of Boston article weighs in on child care

Posted in Business and economy, Child care, Cost and affordability on February 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

“When people ask me why it’s difficult to find high-quality early child care, one of the first things I bring up is how quality is too expensive for most parents. As a result, providers often don’t charge enough and parents don’t pay enough to cover the true cost of quality care.

“If they did, early child care educators would be making more than the poverty-level wages many earn. But most parents would also be pushed out of a child care market that’s already difficult to afford. The result is what we see today: a market that allows substandard early child care and education to proliferate. Just ask the experts who rate the majority of child care as fair.

“In this mostly private market, charging less than what high quality truly costs has been the pathway to increasing access to early child care, but it’s a dead end. Without intervention, the tenuous balance between rate-setting for parents and low wages for workers will continue, pushing down quality and the overall supply of early child care.”

 

— “High-quality early child care requires fair teacher pay supported through public investment: Sacrificing quality to increase affordability is not the answer,” by Sarah Ann Savage, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, January 30, 2020

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Using data to map Boston’s child care landscape

Posted in Boston, Child care, Cost and affordability, Research, Strategies for Children on November 7, 2019| 2 Comments »

Parents already know that it’s tough to find high-quality, affordable child care in Boston.

Now, a new report — State of Early Education and Care in Boston: Supply, Demand, Affordability and Quality — has used data to better define the child care landscape for policymakers.

“During the process of creating a citywide plan for young children to achieve this goal, we discovered that there were many questions that could not be answered and supported with the data available,” the report, which was released by the Boston Opportunity Agenda, explains.

Among the questions: (more…)

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Boston identifies child care challenges — and tries out a solution

Posted in Boston, Child care, Cost and affordability, Family child care, Infants and toddlers on October 22, 2019| 1 Comment »

Mayor Marty Walsh helps launch the Child Care Entrepreneur Fund Pilot. Photo: John Wilcox. Source: City of Boston Mayor’s Office Flickr page.

 

What makes child care work?

Mayor Marty Walsh decided to find out by asking the city of Boston.

“In 2019, we added an optional survey to the annual citywide census related to early education and care. We wanted to better understand how families access and experience care for their children ages five and under,” Walsh says in a new report on the results of the survey called, “Making Childcare Work: Results from a Survey on childcare arrangements and challenges.”

“The survey, conducted by the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, found that more than one-quarter of stay-at-home parents, the vast majority of them women, couldn’t work” because they lacked child care, the Boston Globe reports. “Nearly 60 percent of those parents cited cost as the biggest obstacle. Parents of children under 2 had the hardest time finding available slots.”

The report’s other key findings: (more…)

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A new report talks about child care

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, MA Legislature, National, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children on October 15, 2019| 1 Comment »

 

“America, It’s Time to Talk About Child Care.”

That’s the title of a new report that declares what a lot of parents already know: America has a child care problem.

“…the federal government does not treat early childhood education as a public good nor does it provide adequate funding to support it,” the report says. “This chronic underfunding has led to a shortage of affordable, quality child care across the nation. And to the extent that child care is affordable for families, it is largely because early educators earn very low wages, and many must struggle to feed their own families.”

Eight organizations released the report jointly. They are: the Center for American Progress, the American Federation of Teachers, the Center for Law and Social Policy, Community Change, Every Child Matters, MomsRising, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Service Employees International Union.

This shortage of affordable, high-quality child care makes it tough for parents to go to work, which slows down the economy.

“Right now, the U.S. economy loses an astounding $57 billion per year in revenue, wages, and productivity as a result of child care problems,” the report warns. (more…)

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Center for American Progress looks at high child care costs

Posted in Business and economy, Child care, Cost and affordability, Federal, Funding on July 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

 

How bad are high child care costs?

Even though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says families should only spend 7 percent of their income on child care, it turns out that working families with children younger than age 5 are spending on average nearly 10 percent of their income.

That’s one of the troubling findings in a new issue brief – “Working Families Are Spending Big Money on Child Care” — from the Center for American Progress.

Without affordable child care, it’s harder for parents to go to work and harder in turn for them to earn the middle-class salaries that can provide families with long-term stability. This is a particularly tough challenge in Massachusetts where the Coalition for Social Justice – which Strategies for Children is a member of — is campaigning for affordable child care.

“Absent large-scale policy action on this issue,” the brief says, “young adults have reported child care expenses as the top reason they are having fewer children than they would like. In fact, in 2018, the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low for the third straight year, falling below the replacement rate needed to keep the population constant from one generation to the next.” (more…)

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Recap of the State House hearing on early education and care

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Funding, MA Legislature, MA state budget, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children on July 10, 2019| 3 Comments »

Jessica Merrill, Titus DosRemedios, Kelly Savarese, Dawn DiStefano, Nicole Penney, Kim Davenport, Grace Cruz, Efrain Ponce Hamlet, Amy O’Leary, Clifford Kwong, Lisa Van Thiel. Photo courtesy of Kim Davenport.

Last week, there was a standing-room-only hearing at the Massachusetts State House where parents, teachers, and advocates called on elected officials to increase access to high-quality, affordable child care, expand preschool, increase educator salaries, and other priorities.

“Right now many parents struggle to access affordable childcare, and they often choose to stay home to avoid expensive daycare,” WWLP.com reports on the issues covered at the hearing, adding:

“Expanding full-day preschool would give parents the option of going back to work on a part-time or full-time basis.”

The multi-generational impact of having more preschool programs for children that would make it easier for parents to go work would be hugely beneficial for Massachusetts. This could be accomplished by a number of bills that were discussed at the hearing including: (more…)

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Throwback Thursday: a video explores the high cost of child care

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Early educators, National on June 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

What happens when parents are spending $10,000 or more a year for child care?

What happens when early educators and child care workers don’t earn enough to cover their own families’ expenses?

There are no easy answers, but as we blogged last year, the video posted above shines a needed spotlight on these challenges.

Recently at a Boston Foundation event on the early childhood workforce, Marcy Whitebook included the video in her presentation, and noted that it has been one of the most widely shared resources that she and her colleagues at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) have produced.

CSCCE produced the video along with the national nonprofit Child Care Aware of America.

For more information, research, and data about child care costs and workforce salaries, check out this Child Care Aware webpage as well as CSCCE’s webpage on compensation and its resources on the high cost of child care.

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In quotes: Massachusetts Congresswoman Lori Trahan

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, Federal, Head Start, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Quotes on June 21, 2019| 1 Comment »

Congresswoman Lori Trahan; Pat Nelson, Executive Director of the Concord Children’s Center; Amy O’Leary, Early Education for All Campaign Director at Strategies for Children. Photo: Eric Stein

 

“I was honored to speak briefly at the Kathy Reticker Forum’s screening of No Small Matter. The film addressed the question ‘Why, when the importance of quality early care is so widely accepted and known, do we continue to fail so many children?’

“It is an important question to ask. Our children are America’s most valuable resource, yet across our country, too many families don’t have access to high-quality, affordable early learning and care that will help them thrive without breaking the bank. Programs like Head Start and grants like Child Care and Development Block Grants (CCDBG) are investments that bring real and positive results to our communities. That’s why I fight hard in Congress to support and grown them. These programs have a proven track record of success in Massachusetts and around the country, and are exactly the type of investments our federal government should be making when it comes to the children and families that are most in need.

“I’m also proud to be working on a number of other pieces of legislation like the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, which dramatically expands access to quality, affordable child care for all families. Congress can and must make progress on this important issue. There’s work to be done.”

 

– U.S. Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA 3rd District)

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