In response, the national conversation has kicked into high gear. More than a dozen states have rewritten literacy laws, banning discredited instructional methods and mandating phonics-based curricula. Districts are overhauling materials. Parents are being urged to act in a multitude of ways: reading more at home, hiring a tutor, trying multiple apps.

I’ve spent decades as a classroom teacher, literacy coach, researcher, and now training future educators. I’ve worked with children who thrive and children who need extra support with reading. And I’ve seen how often parents are sent searching for complicated solutions while underestimating the impact of what happens in ordinary moments at home. That’s overlooking something both simpler and more immediate: Families already have powerful, evidence-based tools at their fingertips, and they don’t cost anything.

This isn’t a critique of schools. The evidence of what’s possible when schools commit fully is compelling: Louisiana became the only state to fully rebound in reading post-pandemic. Mississippi climbed from near the bottom of national rankings to the top ten in fourth-grade reading. Systematic, structured literacy instruction works when it’s implemented well. 

However, the best outcomes happen when classrooms and homes work together. The current reading crisis has exposed how much everyday language, attention and early habits have been neglected in shaping literacy, long before a child is ever formally tested.

Start with something deceptively simple: conversation. Reading is not just about decoding words on a page; it’s built on language. When parents narrate what they’re doing, ask questions and engage children in back-and-forth talk, they are building vocabulary and comprehension in real time. This isn’t enrichment. It’s the foundation strong readers stand on, and it happens in the car, at the kitchen table and at the checkout line.

Then there’s the way reading itself gets treated. Too often, it becomes something children think only “counts” as reading if it’s from a book. But literacy lives in the real world. A grocery list. A recipe. Street signs. Instructions. When children see that print carries meaning in daily life, they begin to understand why reading matters at all. 

And yet, in a culture saturated with screens and subscriptions, one of the most effective tools is analog: the public library. It’s easy to overlook because it’s free. But access to physical books — and the sustained attention they encourage — offers something many digital experiences do not. At a time when families are told to download more, the better advice may be to step into a quieter space and let a child linger with a book.

Honesty about the basics matters too. Letters and sounds are not outdated or trivial; they are essential. Helping children learn the alphabet, recognize letters in the environment or spell their own name is not busywork. It is preparation for the moment formal instruction begins and a base for whether that instruction sticks.

Perhaps most urgently, parents should stop being told to “wait and see” or “they’ll grow out of it.” These may sound reassuring, but in reading, it can be costly. Unlike spoken language, reading does not develop naturally without direct teaching. When a child consistently avoids reading, guesses at words, or becomes visibly frustrated, those are not quirks to outgrow. They are early warning signs. 

The earlier parents and educators respond, the easier the path forward, and the window for intervention narrows quickly. What looks like a behavioral problem in fourth grade often traces back to a foundational gap that could have been caught in kindergarten.

None of this will single-handedly reverse national test scores. But that’s not the point. The point is that in a moment when the literacy conversation is dominated by policy, programs and products, the most immediate and equitable intervention available risks being overlooked entirely: what families do every day.

The NAEP data tells a story of stratification: scores rising for high-performing students while struggling students fall further behind. That divide is not about capacity. It is, in part, about access to the kinds of early language experiences that wire children for reading before they ever enter a classroom. Debates about curriculum mandates and state laws are worth having. But while those debates unfold, children are sitting at kitchen tables tonight.

Parents are not a backup plan for struggling schools. They are a child’s first and most consistent teachers. The reading crisis is real. But so is the quiet, largely untapped power sitting in ordinary moments.

If better outcomes are the goal, the question shouldn’t stop at what schools will do differently next year. It should also demand answers about what’s already possible today — and why anyone has been told it isn’t enough.

So said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has just published its examining state-funded preschools. 

“That’s the story this year — that the race is highly uneven,” said Barnett. “Even as some states are racing toward the finish line, more states are moving in the wrong direction. A few states never entered the race. They’re not running.”

The research center has been publishing the State of Preschool Yearbook since 2003, measuring state-funded preschool programs against a set of quality standards and tracking programs’ enrollment and funding. For the first time, six states hit all 10 of NIEER’s , which measure factors such as teacher credentials, staff professional development, curriculum supports, class sizes and staff-to-child ratios. One of those states, Georgia, became the first with a universal preschool program to meet all 10 quality indicators — a feat that NIEER is touting widely and which Barnett said made the Peach State a “symbol” for everyone else. 

“You don’t have to choose between serving all the kids and building a high-quality program,” he said. “Georgia shows you can do it and not break the bank.”

In the 2024-25 school year, state-funded preschools saw record high enrollment and funding, though the pace slowed considerably from the prior year, according to NIEER’s findings. 

State-supported preschool programs now serve a combined 1.8 million children nationally, including 37% of 4-year-olds and 9% of 3-year-olds. The states that contributed most to the enrollment gains are California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri, adding more than 52,000 new preschool seats.

Federal, state and local governments spent a combined $17.7 billion on preschool, with more than $14 billion of that amount coming from states. More than half of states increased their funding for preschool, including Michigan and New Jersey, which increased spending by more than $100 million each. Meanwhile, 17 states spent less, with Arizona, North Carolina and Texas among those seeing the biggest declines. Another six states do not have a state-funded preschool program, as defined by NIEER: Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Thus, the high-stakes race metaphor. 

“You have states moving ahead,” Barnett reiterated. “But you have states faltering, states that didn’t make much progress.”

Part of the explanation for the faltering states, he said, is that they have less federal funding to prop up these programs than they used to. But that’s not the full story, since even in some states with budget deficits, , they managed to increase funding for pre-K. “It is about how you set your priorities,” Barnett said. 

This report found that enrollment for 3-year-olds in public pre-K is at an all-time-high, though Allison Friedman-Krauss, lead author of the report, clarified that it’s only marginally higher than it was the previous year and that it still lags far behind enrollment for 4-year-olds. 

Several states have pledged to serve all 3-year-olds, including less populous ones like Vermont and New Mexico and more populous ones such as Illinois and New Jersey. 

It takes time to build those programs, though, Friedman-Krauss and Barnett said, so the progress on serving 3-year-olds is expected to be slow and incremental. 

As for Georgia, it joins an elite group of states that are lauded by NIEER for quality, including Alabama, Hawaii, Mississippi, Michigan and Rhode Island.  

Each of the 10 quality benchmarks represents an improvement in preschool quality that can be felt by children and families, Barnett said. 

“Children’s experiences can be tremendously different between programs that have all of this in place and programs that have little in place,” he said. 

For example, he added, “one of the keys to good early childhood education is the teacher-child relationship.” It is much more likely for that relationship to be strong and for children to get individualized support for their learning and development when a teacher has fewer children in her care.  

And better-prepared teachers, he said, are going to have more realistic expectations about what the job entails and will be more likely to stay in their positions for longer. That matters for young children, who benefit from consistent, stable caregivers and teachers. 

To meet all 10 benchmarks, Georgia its staff-to-child ratios and maximum classroom sizes, said Susan Adams, deputy commissioner for pre-K and instructional support at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.

As of fall 2024, Georgia has reduced maximum preschool class sizes to 20 and set ratios at one adult to 10 children, Adams said. The state has also achieved salary parity for preschool teachers, so that they now align with the earnings of K-12 teachers, she added. 

What sets Georgia’s preschool program apart is that it is maintaining a high-quality learning environment while serving more than 70,000 children per year across Georgia’s 159 counties. 

The changes to ratios and maximum classroom sizes did reduce the number of preschool slots statewide, but the state is midway through a four-year effort to build back that capacity, by adding 100 new classrooms each year, Adams said. 

NIEER is tracking a number of other states that, with just a few changes, could join Georgia in providing universal access to high-quality pre-K, including New Mexico, which will be on par with Georgia once it meets the benchmark that requires all lead teachers to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. 

While Barnett believes NIEER’s close tracking of state-funded preschool programs helps with accountability, he clarified that Georgia and other states are not improving their programs just so they can check another box in a report. 

“The rationale for the leadership is not to get the acclaim or recognition from us,” he said. “Their rationale, really, is we need to provide a better program for kids.”

When Rickencia Clerveaux McClean’s son was around 18 months old, she noticed he wasn’t speaking the way she expected. He pointed instead of asking. He struggled with food textures. McClean looked ahead at his future in public school with some dread.

Fortunately, she said, there was an opening at Head Start at Action for Boston Community Development in Dorchester – the same program her younger sister had attended years before. Now her son is three, eating applesauce with his classmates and using his words.

“I feel like ABCD helped him navigate first before he was able to go to a public school,” said McClean, whose 2-year-old daughter is enrolled there, too. “That’s the best pathway for any kid who’s having a difficult time on their own.”

McClean, 27, is a student at Roxbury Community College working on the requisite classes for the nursing program. Head Start, she said, is what makes that possible.

She is among the lucky ones these days. Massachusetts has lost 1,300 Head Start slots over the last three years, as the federal government has level-funded the program, and there is worry that more seats could be in jeopardy.

The 60-year-old federally funded program for children from low-income families is navigating what advocates describe as a painful stretch of uncertainty.

The Trump administration’s , released earlier this month, includes $12.3 billion for Head Start nationally – the same level as the prior two fiscal years. While that has forced programs to reduce the number of families they serve, it is a retreat from that the administration might seek to eliminate the program entirely.

“It has been an incredibly unpredictable year, from both policy changes to funding instability,” said Michelle Haimowitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Head Start Association, which advocates for Head Start programs in the state. “Flat funding itself is a pretty sharp cut to programs every year, given increasing costs from things like health care and rent and utilities, as well as the need to continue to raise wages for our educators.”

Head Start provides early education, health, nutrition, and family support services to children from birth to age five.

In Massachusetts, it serves more than 11,000 children annually across 28 programs and employs about 4,000 early childhood professionals, according to the . Families receiving Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children, SNAP benefits, or disability assistance, as well as children in foster care or experiencing homelessness, qualify automatically.

Massachusetts is one of the few states that supplements the federal program with state dollars, contributing $20 million on top of the $189 million in annual federal funding that comes to the state, according to the .

The Massachusetts Head Start Association is asking the Legislature for a $4.56 million increase — enough to fund a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for program staff.

“Just because you close a classroom here or there doesn’t mean the children aren’t there to fill it,” said Haimowitz. “Programs need to make terrible choices between access and being able to staff the classrooms they are able to maintain.”

State financial support has crept up in recent years, but Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed 2027 budget kept its recommendation at $20 million, as does the version advanced through the House on Wednesday.

“We know it’s a tough budget year,” Haimowitz said. “And at the same time, we need to make sure our programs have what they need to keep as many classrooms open as they can.”

Compounding that financial pressure is a bureaucratic disruption that began a year ago. On April 1, 2025, the Trump administration five of Head Start’s 10 regional offices, including the Boston office that had served Massachusetts and the five other New England states. Massachusetts programs were reassigned to the Philadelphia regional office, which now carries twice its previous caseload.

Haimowitz said several programs in the middle of federally approved construction projects have nearly missed contractor payment deadlines because approvals that once flowed through the Boston office have stalled.

“Those bureaucratic slowdowns can seem really minor, but if you’re a contractor who’s been hired to build a Head Start program and your check hasn’t been clearing — that’s not minor,” she said.

The funding pressure came to a head last fall, when the federal government shutdown cut off grants to six Massachusetts programs with November award dates. operated by Self Help Inc. in Brockton and Norwood closed, leaving roughly 550 children without care and more than 150 staff furloughed.

McClean, who sits on ABCD’s policy council, has been tracking the funding uncertainty alongside other parents.

“Everybody’s on the edge, because we don’t know exactly the certainty of what can happen,” she said. A Haitian immigrant trying to carve out an education and a life for her family, McClean said the Head Start program is not “just like a place you drop your kids. It’s a family. It’s a community.”

She said the program is not only crucial to her children’s development, but also makes it possible to work toward her goal of becoming a nurse. If her Head Start program is cut, McClean said, “I’ll have to drop out of school.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

To a child in their care, their roles may be indistinguishable. Both teachers play with them, read to them, sing to them and guide them throughout the day. 

But each pair consists of a lead teacher — the senior professional in the classroom — and an assistant teacher, who may serve in more of a supporting role but, in many programs, acts as a co-teacher. 

Assistant teachers, despite their status as the junior educator, are “an integral part of the teaching team,” said GG Weisenfeld, associate director of technical assistance at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). They are participating in children’s brain-building, actively contributing to their learning and development, she said. 

Yet in most early care and education settings, and in most states, the policies and pay for assistant teachers do not align with that reality. 

When it comes to teacher qualifications, NIEER recommends that, at minimum, assistant teachers hold a Child Development Association (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for entry-level early childhood educators, or have equivalent preparation from at least nine credits of coursework. This benchmark for teacher qualifications is accepted by other leading organizations in the field. 

Often the first credential in an early educator’s career, the CDA introduces teachers to foundational child development concepts, the conditions of a safe learning environment, how to establish healthy relationships with families and more. 

“Having that basis,” Weisenfeld said, “allows that person some comfort and knowledge to be able to” serve confidently in an early learning setting.

But only one-third of state-funded preschool programs have policies in place that require these minimum qualifications for assistant teachers, NIEER found in a . 

Weisenfeld, who authored the report on assistant teachers, said the findings were “troubling,” noting that having low or no qualifications can justify low wages and trap teachers in a cycle where they can’t afford the education needed to advance in their careers. 

It’s critical to have skilled teachers working with young children, Weisenfeld added. “If we want the child outcomes … they need to be qualified and then they need to be supported once in the classroom.”

The report also found that only 30% of state-funded preschool programs met NIEER’s minimum standard for professional development of at least 15 hours of in-service training for assistant teachers. 

In a field where low wages and scant benefits affect early childhood educators in every role, assistant teachers fare worst of all, earning an average of $11.88 per hour as of 2022, according to . 

That financial reality makes it difficult for states to set higher standards for assistant teachers. Instead, it’s becoming increasingly common, Weisenfeld noted, for states to see that they aren’t filling open positions for early childhood educators and to respond by — allowing teenagers to fill teaching positions, instituting higher adult-to-child ratios and loosening training and licensing requirements.

“Cutting qualifications so you can justify inadequate salaries is not a good thing,” Weisenfeld said. 

She added: “To me, the strategy should be to help people raise their qualifications, help support people getting the qualifications, and ensure they are adequately compensated for their work.”

It’s not the norm, but a few states are pursuing that strategy. New Mexico is one of them. 

Assistant teachers in New Mexico’s state-funded pre-K classrooms are required to have an associate degree in early childhood education (or be actively enrolled in a program to earn one). If they have an associate degree in another field, they must earn 12 college credits in early childhood education, said Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Care and Education Department. 

To work in one of the state-funded pre-K classrooms, assistant teachers must also complete 44 hours of mandatory foundational training and an additional 24 hours of training annually. 

Lead teachers in these classrooms, in contrast, must hold a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and complete additional hours of professional development. They also earn more money, as is typical for more seniority across professions. 

“The important thing,” Groginsky said, “is they are both considered teachers and are both bringing a full set of knowledge and skills to advance the education of young children.”

Across early care and education settings in New Mexico, assistant teachers must earn a minimum wage of $18 an hour (about $37,000 per year for a full-time teacher), the secretary shared. Assistant teachers in state-funded, community-based pre-K classrooms are also eligible for the , which ensures that teachers with an associate degree and up to three years of experience earn $45,000 and teachers with an associate degree and more than three years of experience earn $50,000.

“The idea is we’re moving up the compensation to reflect the level of education and the skills that both the lead teacher and the assistant teacher bring to the classroom,” Groginsky said. 

Alabama is another state that meets NIEER’s benchmarks for assistant teacher qualifications and professional development and that Weisenfeld praised for its “brilliant” approach to building a pipeline of assistant teachers in high school.

Assistant teachers in Alabama’s First Class Pre-K Program are required to have a CDA credential or equivalent coursework in child development, and complete at least 20 hours of professional development each year. 

A number of K-12 schools in Alabama offer a pathway for high school students to pursue and complete their CDA, qualifying them for assistant teaching positions in the state’s preschool program upon graduation, said Milanda Dean, director of workforce development at the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. From there, teachers can participate in Alabama’s to earn their associate degree and even bachelor’s degree.

“We’re helping them earn their credentials,” Dean said, “and growing our workforce.”

Although the exact roles and responsibilities of assistant teachers do vary from program to program, it is important that these educators are recognized for the strengths and skills they bring to the classroom, said Ami Brooks, secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. Assistant teachers are not there just to wipe the tables, walk kids to the bathroom or put the cots out for naptime, she said. 

“We want to honor the early childhood development knowledge he or she is coming in with,” said Brooks, “and use that to partner with the lead teacher so they can work together to help the children develop.”

In 2024, Mama Freda’s Tiny Tots Child Care opened as first in-home child care program in North Carolina.

The licensed family child care home (FCCH) in Kings Mountain is one of four of its kind across three states that the nonprofit, formerly known as East Coast Migrant Head Start Project, has opened in recent years to serve agricultural workers and their families.

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The organization started launching home-based child care programs two years ago because of their convenience for families, their intimate environment for children and parents, and their fit for rural communities, Grow Early Learning staff told EdNC on a recent visit to Mama Freda’s.

“We’re able to serve closer to where families actually live, and … it’s more affordable,” said Andrea Martinez Langlois, Grow Early Learning’s family child care home manager. “We can provide all the services that (we can at) the center level, just more intimate. And I like that we can bring people like Arikco in who has built such trust with families.”

Support from Grow Early Learning has guided Arikco Watkins, owner of Mama Freda’s, from opening the program in 2024 to creating a place of learning and consistency for families during an uncertain period.

Grow Early Learning, a grantee of the federal early childhood program Head Start, operates and one family child care home in North Carolina that together serve 24 of the state’s counties.

As Watkins opened Mama Freda’s with new support, federal policy change and government shutdowns have threatened Head Start programming across the country.

Last fall, the federal government shutdown — the in U.S. history — across 10 states. Ten of those centers were in North Carolina. At the time, Grow Early Leaning CEO Javier González said the shutdown disrupted care for 250 children across the state.

When the federal government reopened on Nov. 13, however, challenges remained.

For many years, federal policy limited immigration enforcement officials from entering places of worship, hospitals, and schools — including — based on their status as “,” or locations where people access activities essential to their well-being.

In January 2025, an executive order and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed these locations’ protected status, allowing immigration enforcement to occur in locations central to communities’ well-being. Across the country, Head Start providers witnessed the negative consequences of this federal action, from decreased attendance rates to detainment and family separation.

In response, 12 Head Start associations addressed a letter to Congress in March 2026 demanding changes to these policies. As lawmakers look to end a driven by disagreement over DHS funding in light of immigration enforcement tactics, the asks lawmakers to place restrictions on DHS to “ensure that ICE and CBP agents no longer conduct enforcement actions at Head Start, child care, or other early learning programs with young children.”

“It is essential to protect the children served by these programs nationwide so that parents can feel secure knowing their children are safe while they work, attend school, and support their families and the economy,” reads the letter.

Last fall, some of the parents whose children attend Mama Freda’s caught word that immigration agents were nearby.

Watkins had already discussed a plan with Grow Early Learning staff. She was able to communicate with parents and assure them that agents were not allowed in the home without a judicial warrant. Parents picked up their children, some telling Watkins their preferences in case they were separated from their children. Watkins sent them home with extra food and told everyone to text her when they made it home. Everyone was safe.

But it’s not just during emergencies that Grow Early Learning’s support has made a difference for Watkins and her program, she said.

“Sometimes I sit and I cry because —��I’m serious —��I’ve never had this opportunity, or even had this support,” she said.

The difference made by funding and coaching

Grow Early Learning’s funding, technical assistance and coaching, and emotional support has changed the experience of owning and operating a family child care home, Watkins said. She knows what it’s like to do it all on her own.

After getting married and having kids in her early 20s, Watkins said she struggled to find child care for her own children and wanted a job with more flexibility. She drew inspiration from her mother, Freda, who took care of the neighborhood’s children when Watkins was a child. She decided to open her first family child care home, which offered 24/7 care, and ran it for seven years on her own.

“We wear many hats,” she said. “We are the cooks, we are the teachers, we are the disciplinarian. We are the secretary. We have to do it all.”

The wide range of demands, along with the isolation that comes with limited adult interaction, are common reasons for burnout in the field.

In North Carolina, the number of family child care homes has decreased by 17% since 2018, according to the state’s .

Watkins’ winding journey, including running a child care center for a brief time before considering leaving the field altogether, brought her back to in-home care. When she left a job as a teacher at a local child care center to pursue opening a new program of her own, she did not know how she would find the funding or the children.

“Something was like … you need to do it, you need to do it,” she said. Watkins moved forward with getting a new license and named the program in memory of her late mother.

The same day Watkins left her job, she got a call from Destiny Simmons, a family child care home specialist at Grow Early Learning. Simmons had been searching for new licensed programs to partner with the organization.

Simmons not only helped Watkins find children and open her program, but she also visits every two weeks to coach Watkins and meet with families. As part of the Head Start model, Simmons provides case management services to families. She connects them with resources from health to education and helps them set and meet goals.

Four children in Watkins’ program are funded through Grow Early Learning, but the coaching and high-quality curriculum provided by Grow Early Learning improves the experience for all children in the program, Watkins said.

And the consistent funding has allowed Watkins to hire other staff, including one full-time and two part-time employees. Watkins said having a team of adults on site makes the job less stressful and isolating — and improves the care and education they are able to provide to children.

“When you think of a family child care home, it’s just you,” Watkins said. “But then when you’ve got a team that comes in, and not just a team, but (it) becomes family.”

Supporting ‘how we get food on our table’

For 50 years, Grow Early Learning has served agricultural workers’ child care needs across the country, including an estimated workers residing with their families in North Carolina.

The federal 2024 Appropriations Act , allowing migrant and seasonal Head Start programs to serve any child who has one family member whose income comes primarily from agricultural employment and removing prior restrictions based on federal poverty guidelines.

Grow Early Learning’s explains that these new eligibility requirements have created more opportunities for families to enroll children at one of Grow Early Learnings’ campuses — including four children enrolled at Mama Freda’s.

“This is how we get food on our table,” said Martinez Langlois of the agricultural families Grow Early Learning serves. “This is a population that is important and a daily part of everyone’s lives. So the idea that us together can support that is beautiful.”

New ways to reach families

In recent years, Simmons and Martinez Langlois have built Grow Early Learning’s first family child care programs from the ground up.

“We started from ground zero,” Simmons said.

They knew that small, in-home programs would help them better serve rural places with small pockets of children, where larger centers do not make sense. And they knew many families prefer the family-like environment, especially for their youngest children. Nationally, infants and toddlers are more likely to be served through in-home programs than centers, .

The Grow Early Learning team had to find families that needed care and providers who were willing to partner with them and locate physically close enough to the families. They had to address a host of logistical challenges home-based programs face, like navigating zoning and homeowners association rules. They also walk new providers through the licensing process, which can be confusing and overwhelming.

“We have connections where we can bring you from zero to licensed,” Martinez Langlois said. “We make it happen.”

They have learned a lot, and they know there is a need for more facilities.

“We suffer through the same struggle that most people in rural areas suffer with, which is there is more children who need care than there is (individuals) available to provide it,” she said. “So we are constantly looking at: we know there’s a population here, there are no providers right now, but there may be soon, and contacting either licensing specialists or regional specialists.”

Growing Early Learning has partnered with the Southwestern Child Development Commission’s , one of several efforts in North Carolina to reverse the trend of home-based program closures.

Finding the right people and building relationships takes time, Martinez Langlois said.

“You can’t make providers pop out of thin air,” she said.

Creating community, giving back

Building relationships with parents, too, takes time. But Watkins’ care for her parents, in addition to support from the Grow Early Learning team, has built a community at Mama Freda’s that protects its members’ well-being.

When Watkins encountered a language barrier with some of her parents who primarily speak Spanish, for example, she prioritized finding a solution in a translating device to make sure she could communicate with them, and she is in the process of hiring a staff member bilingual in English and Spanish. More recently, outside of the family care home facility’s operating hours, she hosted a Halloween party and planned an Easter egg hunt for the spring — both events that she plans with parents’ schedules in mind to make sure as many of her families as possible can attend and be in community with one another.

“I center it around them,” said Watkins of her approach to engaging with students’ parents, adding that the care she provides is reciprocated by parents in both words and actions.

“It’s amazing just how supportive they are and how they appreciate. It shows me that they appreciate what I do for their babies,” she said.

Simmons added that relationships between parents have also helped parents navigate the state’s early childhood health and education system and its requirements, like registering children in kindergarten or signing up for Medicaid.

“I feel like they advocate for each other because it’s so intimate,” she said.

Supporting each other extends to times of uncertainty at the federal level. When navigating the moment of potential of immigration enforcement last fall, Martinez Langlois said Grow Early Learning provided specific mental health support to families, like a therapist coming to the family child care home after the incident.

Watkins also said she checked in with parents on how they were feeling and what she or Grow Early Learning could do to support them.

“I love my job so much because I can help,” Watkins said, “When you take the time out, and you give back to others, it’ll come back to you. It always does.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Throughout her career, Ross said she has seen a number of incremental pay bumps, including an increase after she earned an associate degree in 2021. That year, her salary was about $47,000. But the most significant change in her income came in 2022, she said, when Washington began implementing the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in an effort to boost wages in the child care sector. The initiative provided funds to make early educators’ salaries equivalent to K-12 public school educators.��

Ross received an additional $14,000 that year and her pay has continued to increase. Today, she makes around $67,000. The additional income has allowed her to buy a home and enroll her children in after school activities like boxing and gymnastics.��

The Pay Equity Fund — the first program of its kind in the United States — has been as a model for improving early educator retention, creating stability for a workforce largely made up of women, , in an industry with one of the in the country.��

But despite its popularity with educators and advocates, the fund has faced instability over the years and now it’s on the chopping block. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday, April 10 that included a to the Pay Equity Fund, which would eliminate the wage supplements that provided the city’s early childhood teachers with higher salaries. 

Bowser that what she hears most from families is that they want more opportunities for child care and they want it to be less expensive. But the Pay Equity Fund is “not a child care affordability fund, it’s more of an income support fund for child care workers,” she said. “It does not respond to what people are saying.”

Ross is one of more than in D.C., who would be drastically impacted by this change. Without the extra dollars she receives through the program, her salary would drop precariously, to the point that making the commute to work in D.C. wouldn’t make much economic or logistical sense. She lives over an hour away by car, and with her experience, education and credentials, she could likely find a job in the public school system where she lives in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. A job like that would bring benefits and a stable salary, she said. 

“Yes, everyone loves the Gan,” she said, referring to the early childhood center where she works. “It’s a special place. But everyone has to live in the real world. They have to pick between the love for their job or their income. Without pay equity, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ross said. Her partner has encouraged her to think about the long term, but she said she’s having a hard time asking herself,“If they cut the money for me, what is the plan?”

The Struggle for Consistent Funding

Created through the District’s budget and administered by the , the Pay Equity Fund initially delivered direct payments to eligible educators. During its first year, early childhood teachers received a one-time payment of , depending on their role and employment status. In 2023, the fund offered teachers up to four quarterly payments of up to $3,500 each. Then , the model shifted: instead of educators applying individually and receiving direct payments, licensed child care programs that met the requirements could opt in and receive funding through a payroll formula. 

The voluntary program was designed to help providers recruit and retain staff by offering more competitive wages, and its reach has been substantial. was distributed to over 4,000 home- and center-based child care providers during the initiative’s first two years, and went to 365 child care facilities in 2024.

This isn’t the first time the program has faced instability. In April 2024, Bowser suggested fter a , the D.C. Council , but advocates warned that with the increase in participation, more money was needed. That same year, to make budget recommendations for the program, which led to the Early Childhood Educator Pay Scales Amendment Act of 2025, a measure that for early educators. 

Some centers in the city, including the Gan, absorbed the cuts so that the teachers’ paychecks would be unchanged, said Noah Hichenberg, director of Gan HaYeled. 

To be fully funded in fiscal year 2027, the Pay Equity Fund , said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The program has grown more expensive because of its success, she noted. While the program had lower participation in its first few years, it has since grown in popularity. from Mathematica shows that after the first two years of implementation, there was an in D.C., about 7% higher than the estimated levels in the absence of the program. 

Gunderson said more teachers have enrolled in the program, stayed in their positions and gone back to school to pursue an associate or bachelor degree, with the goal of being able to earn a higher income upon graduation. 

“The fact that we’re able to increase utilization is a good thing,” said Gunderson. “Normally this would be something that would be celebrated.” Instead, it has resulted in a more expensive program, limiting the number of educators who are able to take part. 

LaVonda Butler-Means, an assistant teacher at Gan YaHeled, is one of the teachers who was motivated to pursue a higher level of education. The first year of Pay Equity her salary jumped from $43,000 to over $50,000. Encouraged, she enrolled in an accelerated program to get an associate degree, for which she estimated cost her around $26,000 out of pocket. Her goal was to become a lead teacher at the Gan after graduating in May, a move that would bring her a $10,000 raise. If the fund is eliminated and the increase doesn’t come through, she said she will have to look for another job.

“There is no way I can go back to make what I was making and sustain life,” Butler-Means said.  

One of the challenges of building a sustainable funding pathway for the Pay Equity Fund, explained Jamal Berry, president of Educare DC, an early learning program, is that it takes time to see the impact. that access to high-quality child care is a worthwhile investment, but the success of programs are often realized across a child’s education, which do not always translate into an immediate win. 

But leaders at programs participating in the Pay Equity Fund do report benefits, including lower staff turnover. 

Hichenberg credits the Pay Equity Fund with elevating the quality of care and stabilizing the workforce at his program. Of the 27 educators who work at the Gan, 23 have been there for more than three years since the Pay Equity Fund began. He anticipates it will be much harder to hire people at a lower salary level if the program gets cut. “Its’ not just a burden or headache, it’s a more volatile experience for our youngest learners,” he said.  

Staff turnover at Educare DC has also fallen since the Pay Equity Fund was implemented, and more staff are receiving additional education credentials, said Ronnell Nathaniel, the program’s vice president. Like at the Gan, her staff has benefited from the pay increase. Some teachers have shared that they’re purchasing their first home, she said, though the fact that the funding is in jeopardy has worked to undercut the staff’s sense of security and stability. “The inconsistency is every year,” she said. “You have to be concerned about that.”

Gunderson anticipates that the impact of gutting the Pay Equity Fund would be felt most keenly in programs serving infants and toddlers, which are the most expensive to maintain because of high staffing ratios. “They’re the first to go,” she said. Without a dedicated funding stream for the Pay Equity Fund, each budget cycle poses tough choices about which programs to fund and which to cut.  

“We’ve scored a touchdown and now we’re fumbling the ball,” said Berry. “States like New Mexico and New York are moving in this direction,” he gestured forward with his hands, “and we are moving backwards.”

Advocates Prepare to Push Back

Advocates are gearing up for a fight to save the program. Ahead of the budget release, educators and supporters turned out in protest at the John A. Wilson building in downtown D.C., where the local government is headquartered, as part of a . The national is slated for May 11, and advocates are encouraging child care providers to close or operate on a reduced schedule to show the impact of their services. 

But as compared to 2024, when the program first came under fire, it’s been harder to galvanize support for saving the program. LaDon Love works at Spaces in Action, a grassroots advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that played a significant role in the 2024 effort to save the Pay Equity Fund and is involved again this year. Love said that when she goes and speaks to early childhood educators, they think the major fight is behind them. “We won, right?” she said. Many do not realize their salaries are on the line again.  

When asked if the parents feel some outrage at the cuts and how it could impact the teachers who look after their children, Butler-Means shrugs. “Some take it really seriously,” she said. “Others it doesn’t matter to them as long as their kids have somewhere to go.” 

There are a few options that advocates and policymakers are exploring to keep the fund intact. One route involves creating a dedicated funding stream for it, similar to what has done in shoring up their own early childhood infrastructure. Another solution is to develop a new for Washington, D.C., which would increase revenue by adding a broad-based value-added tax to businesses. Experts believe this tax could raise as much as $500 million, and could be routed to social services programs that are on the chopping block, like the Pay Equity Fund. But, a tax like this would likely require a phase-in or implementation lag of a year, meaning that programs that could be funded by it would face a shortfall in the interim. An indefinite pay cut may loom too large for Ross and Butler-Means, pushing them out of their current roles, even with the possibility of a more stable funding source in the future. 

But there is something positive to have come from all of this, said Hichenberg, the Gan’s director. “The Pay Equity Fund has given all of us a gift of what is possible when pay is raised, and that has been beautiful to see,” he said. 

“It’s a stabilized workforce, more content teachers, more robust work-life balance and vacations,” he added. “It has allowed our core group of educators to stay stable for a number of years and allowed us to move forward as a school, improving quality in the classroom and smoother transitions for the parents. These have always been our goals. But the Pay Equity Fund has been the element of stability that has allowed for it.”

More recently, though, the preschool decided to establish protocols for another kind of emergency: the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the area. 

Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, when immigration enforcement activity across the country intensified, staff and families have experienced extreme stress and anxiety about the possibility of masked agents apprehending children at their own schools, said Leah Cates, executive director of Second Street Youth Center. (Previously, education settings like Second Street would’ve been protected from immigration raids under the so-called sensitive locations policy, but the administration that designation in January 2025.)  

Cates is glad she put that new lockdown protocol in place, she said, because they’ve had to activate it twice already. 

One of those times, a teacher heard a young boy at the school yell, “Pistola! Pistola!” — Spanish for “gun” — after he saw, through a window, an ICE agent with his weapon drawn, trying to detain someone on the street right outside the school.

“We had to pull our children off the playground, bring them in and immediately go into lockdown,” Cates said. 

Some children go on walks in the community with teachers throughout the day, she added. During lockdowns, the staff use radios to communicate about the presence of ICE and determine whether groups on walks should return to the school or go to a nearby church or the fire department to seek immediate shelter. 

Their fears are not unfounded. So far, five of the 210 children enrolled in the state-funded preschool, which serves ages 3 to 5, have experienced a parent or primary caregiver detained by ICE, said Cates, who is keeping track of the impact on her school community. Many other students have relatives who have been detained, deported or otherwise apprehended by the federal agents. More than 80% of the students are from immigrant families, she added, and most are from South and Central American countries. 

Second Street offers just one example of the terror echoing through homes and early childhood programs across the country, in red and blue states, in rural and urban communities, and in documented and undocumented families. 

Researchers at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national, anti-poverty nonprofit, have been examining the impact this administration’s immigration agenda is having on young children and their caregivers.

Between June and December 2025, CLASP staff held focus groups with 56 “at-risk” immigrant parents and primary caregivers of 74 children ages 6 and under. They also interviewed nearly 70 individuals who provide services to these families — many of them as early care and education providers, but also some home visitors, health care workers and others. Their findings, which anonymize the participants, are detailed in a pair of reports — centered on the experiences of young children and their immigrant families, and focused on early care and education providers in their communities.

The interviews were conducted in seven states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. In those states, immigrant families with young children range from 13% of the population in Michigan to 41% in New Jersey, according to from the Urban Institute, which combines from 2022 and 2023. Nationally, about 24% of children ages 5 and under have at least one immigrant parent. 

What emerged from the research is a clear picture of communities that are experiencing toxic stress and trauma, said Kaelin Rapport, policy analyst at CLASP and an author of both reports. 

“People are really scared, and they’re struggling immensely,” Rapport said. “Care providers are not feeling secure. Parents are struggling to feel safe themselves. Children are internalizing these stressors and these pressures.”

The concern that many immigrant adults feel, Rapport added, is preventing some of them from leaving their homes, whether it’s to go to the grocery store or to work. 

“It’s confining the entire family inside this emotional pressure cooker,” Rapport said.

Many parents attempt to shield their young children by avoiding conversations about immigration enforcement, yet their fears and anxieties still permeate the household.

“It was very clear that children are feeling the trickle-down effects of stress,” said Suma Setty, senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at CLASP and an author of the two reports. 

During an interview, the director of a child care center near Dallas shared with Setty that, before 2025, children in the program used to be so curious about visitors who came to the center. Now, when they see new faces, they hide behind the teachers’ legs. “That’s been a marked change she has observed,” Setty said. 

Cates, who was interviewed for the CLASP reports and shared details about the experiences of her preschool community with �鶹��Ʒ, has seen the way information about immigration enforcement reaches children at Second Street — and how they respond. 

It’s a regular practice at the preschool for staff to ask children how they’re feeling each day, she shared. One day, a little girl said she was scared. Her teacher told her she is safe at Second Street. But the girl said, “No, ICE can get me,” then started to cry, Cates recalled. 

“The child knows,” she said. “They may not understand everything, but they know someone was taken in their families. They see the upset of parents, the upset of family members.”

Then, she added, they take what they learned and tell their friends. Cates and other staff have overheard children talking about ICE on the playground, she said. 

“We think we’re doing a great job of shielding children, but little children have big ears. They put their listening ears on, and they hear everything,” she said. “We’re not doing as good a job as we think. Those 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds are hearing, and being affected by, the trauma.”

In interviews for the CLASP report, Rapport said, several families and early care and education providers described children as “clingy” now. Some children who had been sleeping independently through the night are now insisting on sleeping in bed with their parents. Others, he heard, are less friendly, more emotionally reactive, more frightened of strangers and less adaptable to changes in routine. 

As for the caregiving staff he interviewed, Rapport said a word that comes to mind to describe their predicament is “desperation.” They are stressed and traumatized from the past 15 months too. They’re also depressed, burned out and dealing with compassion fatigue. 

“People who work in child care and early education do it because they love children and want children to succeed in life. They want children to have a healthy upbringing,” Rapport said. “They pour so much of themselves into that work. They’re pouring from that well, and sometimes that well runs dry … for themselves and their families.”

Most early care and education providers are underpaid, working in under-resourced programs, and in some cases are immigrants themselves or have immigrant family members to think of, the researchers said. Yet, as they write in the report focused on providers, “ECE service providers are being asked to do more than the work that they trained for; they are asked to be immigration law experts, administrative law experts, second parents, and even work for free.”

That certainly rings true at Second Street Youth Center. 

In addition to the new lockdown protocols, the preschool has made changes to other procedures. 

The program has implemented “very stringent rules” around access into the building. “If we don’t recognize who you are, we aren’t letting you into the first doorway,” Cates said. The maintenance staff, as part of their duties, now regularly walk a two-block radius around the building to scan for ICE activity. Families know to text school staff about any ICE activity they’ve seen or heard about in the area, and staff then distribute the message to all families so they can make alternative pick-up arrangements for their children. 

On top of that, Second Street has held events to educate parents about their rights. The school partnered with an immigration attorney who volunteered to help families make a plan for their children in the event something happens to them. 

The work is taking a toll on staff, she said, noting that staff are increasingly asking for a day off here and there because “it’s just all too much.” 

“But my staff … understand the No. 1 concern is the health, safety and well-being of children,” Cates emphasized. “Before we do anything else, our job is to keep children safe.”

The child care closure at UNO is reflective of a concerning trend: Across the country, universities, school districts and hospitals are shutting down affiliated child care programs at an alarming rate as the cracks in America’s child care system begin to widen into fissures.

Since the beginning of 2025, a growing number of institutions have closed or put forth plans to close on-site child care programs that serve employees and, in the case of universities, student parents. These include universities such as , , and the , along in Washington, Arizona, and Kentucky. During the same time, public K-12 districts — including in Michigan, in Missouri and in Colorado — have announced similar closures, as have hospital systems in , and .

In almost every case, administrators are pointing to rising costs as a key culprit. Indeed, absent public funding, large institutions cannot run a sustainable child care business, particularly as most institutionally-affiliated programs offer tuition discounts to employees. In the case of Baptist Health, a nonprofit health care organization in Arkansas, the system said it $2 million a year operating two of its child care centers.

While there may have been a time when such losses were manageable, these institutions are being buffeted by other headwinds. Many colleges, universities and school districts are dealing with declining enrollment numbers that have . A key federal funding program that helps colleges and universities subsidize child care for student parents — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — has been held flat, which is a functional decrease in the face of inflation and rapidly rising child care costs.

Meanwhile, hospital systems are struggling with Medicaid cuts, rising labor costs, and tariffs increasing the costs of imported medicines and supplies; The American Hospital Association a “perfect storm of financial pressures.” 

The rash of institutional closures should be a stark warning about the future of employer-sponsored child care. That term usually conjures the concept of private companies offering on-site centers or subsidies for child care as a workplace perk. But in practice, these institutions function similarly: They operate on-site child care for their community members, such as staff, students or patients — and in many cases, the programs have been around for decades. In a sense, we might consider institutionally-affiliated child care programs the best-case version of employer-supported care. The institutions are often anchored in public missions, subject to greater accountability and backed by generally reliable funding streams. Yet, even these programs are disappearing.

If institutions designed to serve the public can’t sustain employer-linked child care, it raises a larger question about how realistic it is to . 

It seems clear that, reluctant as the decision may be, child care quickly finds itself on the chopping block when budgets tighten. Often, it is viewed as a nice-to-have for institutions, even while it’s a must-have for families. When programs close and families lose subsidized care, they’re often forced into a wild scramble for a spot among scarce options. With the aforementioned headwinds only projected to worsen, more closures are, unfortunately, likely on the way. 

To be clear, the closures don’t signal that on-site child care is inherently flawed. In fact, the passionate reaction of families and providers show just how valued these programs are. The question is, how should such programs be funded? A model that relies on institutions themselves bearing the cost seems to be breaking down. Similarly, depending on a single funding stream, like CCAMPIS, is clearly risky, as it keeps programs in a constant state of vulnerability — just one unfavorable grant cycle away from collapse.

What’s needed, instead, is a way to wrap institutionally-affiliated child care into a broader publicly-funded system, as is done in nations like and . 

The child care sector may well be entering a phase where Band-Aids like incentivizing employers to offer child care benefits like on-site programs or stipends can no longer hold back the bleeding. If universities and hospital systems — to say nothing of Fortune 500 companies like and — are increasingly unable or unwilling to maintain their child care programs despite evidence of their positive impacts, then a course correction is needed. 

Policymakers are rushing to incentivize employer-sponsored child care at a moment when the American economy is slowing down and financial headwinds are picking up. If there’s any good news, it’s that about five thousand years ago humans invented a way to pool individual resources and redistribute them for collective benefit. In other words, the antidote to institutional child care closures is the same as the antidote to mom and pop child care closures: tax dollars. 

Every child who starts at Lemay Child and Family Center in St. Louis County receives a developmental screening during their first month of attendance.

Based on these screenings, kids can receive speech or occupational therapy at the center, and staff can connect families with community support like help sourcing healthy food.

“The economy right now is just really challenging,” said Denise Wiese, the center’s executive director. “So we feel that those extra supports we give parents and children are really critical.”

More than 60% of the children the center serves qualify for a state subsidy program that helps cover the cost of day care for low-income and foster children.

But if lawmakers approve a proposed $51.5 million cut to that program, Wiese told The Independent, the center could be forced to roll back services or reduce scholarships that make child care more affordable.

The cuts are part of a laid out by Republican state Rep. Dirk Deaton of Seneca, chairman of the House Budget Committee, that would eliminate incentives the state currently pays on top of the basic child care subsidy rate.

Deaton told the committee the enhancements were created before the state started paying market-rate costs for child care.

“When those were put in place, the rates weren’t, in some cases,100% of market rate,” he said. “In a lot of cases, we’re already paying the market rate. So why would we be paying more than the market rate?”

For child care providers, Wiese said, losing these payments will be “devastating.”

“That increase for us over the standard daily rate is critical because we welcome any child, regardless of the family’s income level or the child’s developmental level,” Wiese said. “…If those enhancements get cut, we will have no choice but to reduce some of the services that we provide for these children.”

Casey Hanson, deputy director at Kids Win Missouri, told The Independent the proposed cuts would have an outsized effect on the state’s most vulnerable children.

The funding enables providers to cover losses if foster families need short-term or irregular child care. It also helps train staff to work with kids who have experienced trauma.

“Some people think, ‘Okay, that funding just gets cut, and so they still get paid the market rate. They don’t get this extra bit,’” Hanson said. “But it’s not an extra bit to be able to provide that additional therapy or additional support.”

With the cut to their bottom line, child care providers may have to turn families away.

“What decisions do they have to make?” Hanson asked. “Do they have to lay off staff? Do they have to close?… Do they just quit taking foster families?”

Some facilities already hesitate to take on those families, Hanson said, and the proposed cuts would “de-incentivize that even more.”

The cuts come during a period of instability for the program. At the end of 2023, the state changed software providers to manage the subsidy payments, and technical difficulties led to a backlog of missed payments that .

Some day care providers closed under the pressure, and the stress continues today.

Demand for child care subsidies has , exceeding the amount of money appropriated to the program this fiscal year.

With available funds shrinking, the state’s education department launched a waitlist for the program at the beginning of March. Children under state care, like foster children, are exempted from the waitlist. Those who qualify based on their income, though, will have to wait until funds are available.

“Our system is already at or over capacity,” Hanson said. “We don’t have enough resources to serve the children and families that are qualified with this current [funding] structure.”

Despite mounting pressure, providers are expected to see a long-awaited change in the way subsidies are paid that state officials promise will be initiated by this summer.

Currently, child care providers submit attendance logs and are reimbursed based on the number of days subsidy children are in their care. In May, the department plans to pay subsidies at the beginning of the month based on enrollment, not attendance.

Gov. Mike Kehoe championed the switch in his inaugural State of the State address last year.

“We will not allow late payments, or technology issues to put these small businesses at risk of not being able to provide for families in need of child care,” he said.

The governor is still supportive of paying providers based on enrollment, but Deaton’s proposed budget could prevent this change.

Deaton’s budget plan includes instructions to pay “solely on a child’s actual attendance and shall not be made prospectively, on authorization, enrollment, contracted slots or any other non-attendance-based methodology.”

State Budget Director Dan Haug told the House Budget Committee Monday that the state would hold off on paying by enrollment in May if Deaton’s suggestion is signed into law for next fiscal year, which begins in July.

“I don’t think it would make sense to make a change in May and then go back on July 1,” he said. “That would not be good for the providers, moving them around with how they’re being paid.”

Paying on enrollment gives flexibility to providers, Wiese said. A family may need to miss 10 days in a month, but the center can only get paid for five absences.

“If a family wants to spend their day with their child, that’s the best thing for the child,” she said. “If [the state is] paying us based on authorization, that slot is paid for whether that child is here or not.”

With budget amendments forthcoming, Hanson hopes to see edits to benefit child care providers.

“We know that (lawmakers) care about children and families,” she said. “But sometimes these decisions don’t reflect that these [cuts] are going to be really painful for children and families in our state.”

The Independent’s Rudi Keller contributed to this report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

After struggling for months to sustain her child care business at home, Minerva Caba Toribio thought she would have to close due to rent increases and high costs. But now, she’s able to operate out of a classroom located on Granite Street in Worcester at the Guild of St. Agnes, the largest early education and care agency in Central Massachusetts. Caba Toribio has space for 10 children, with five currently enrolled and three others that will soon be joining.

“We serve Brazilian families, Latin American families, immigrant families,” she said. “They feel comfortable to see that we can speak the same language and we have the same traditions.”

Caba Toribio will be able to use the space rent-free for two years. By saving on rent, utilities, meals, and other expenses, she hopes to restart her home-based child care service once the time is up.

It’s all part of a pilot program called the , formed in partnership by the Guild of St. Agnes – which serves almost 2,000 children across roughly 150 child care establishments — and the Worcester-based Seven Hills Foundation — which provides supportive services to children, adults, and seniors with disabilities and other life challenges. Their new family child care incubator — only the third of its kind in the nation — provides two classroom spaces that were empty due to a lack of staffing to two licensed educators to operate their child care businesses while they prepare to later offer the service in their homes. The program is meant to provide more child care slots in an area where demand is high but supply is low, while also making it easier for family child care entrepreneurs to get their start.

“In addition to expanding care to more children and families by using classrooms that were otherwise empty, we are able to share services such as transportation, healthy meals, and business support to the resident educators as they establish their new businesses,” said Sharon MacDonald, president and CEO of the Guild of St. Agnes.

The program, which can accommodate up to 20 children, was modeled after in Boston, which was the first of its kind in the Commonwealth and provides short-term program space, resources, and training for newly licensed family child care entrepreneurs. The other incubator program in San Francisco in 2019 and has trained and established more than 100 new child care businesses, creating over 800 new child care slots.

“I was thinking about closing my business, so when I heard about the incubator, I thought, ‘That can’t be possible. I will have a space where I can keep working with the same families that I had at my home?’” Caba Toribio said.

The other resident educator, Eva Fajardo Marroquín, is a newly licensed provider who will lead the second classroom with 10 children.

Around 59,000 (70 percent) of infants, around 43,000 (43 percent) of toddlers, and around 10,000 (5 percent) of preschoolers in Massachusetts live in a child care . The state defines this as areas where for every three children there is only one child care slot, though there are regions in central Massachusetts where the ratio is greater than ten children to one slot.

Granite Street is in the heart of one of Worcester’s child care , according to Leslie Baker, program director for the Seven Hills Foundation’s Center for Childcare Careers.

The children’s tuition is covered by state subsidies, meaning the Guild of St. Agnes and the Seven Hills Foundation are not responsible for the educators’ salaries. A $1 million grant from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts allows them to pay for the building, the classroom equipment and supplies, and a full-time project coordinator who provides case management, business training, and professional development support for the two educators. (The foundation also provides grant funding to CommonWealth Beacon.) The educators will soon establish savings accounts so the coordinator can document their progress towards their long-term business goals.

Cost isn’t the only barrier that aspiring educators face in trying to open family child care businesses. Many, including Caba Toribio, face landlord resistance and struggle to find homes or apartments that allow family child care to operate. Others struggle with navigating the licensing process with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

Many of the families served by the Guild’s child care programs qualify for (CCFA) vouchers from the state. But that system remains underfunded even after the Legislature approved Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to change the income eligibility threshold from 50 percent of the state median income to 85 percent last year. That move added 4,000 low and moderate-income families to the program, but more than 30,000 children were on the statewide waitlist for the program at the end of 2025.

“It’s opportunities like this that are making sure we are creating pathways for early educators, because the more classrooms we can fill with great educators, the more slots that will become available for the littlest learners in our community,” said Sen. Robyn Kennedy, a Democrat representing Worcester, at the pilot program’s ribbon-cutting event on Monday.

The Commonwealth’s early child care system continues to suffer from a due to low earnings, a lack of employee benefits, and subsequently high turnover.

Among family child care program owners and employees, just over 40 percent receive paid time off, around 25 percent receive paid sick leave, around five percent receive discounted child care, and less than 8 percent receive dental insurance and retirements benefits, according to a 2025 published by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Just 4 percent of employees receive health insurance compared to 15 percent of owners.

“I don’t think we often think of childcare as a business,” said Sen. Michael Moore, a Millbury Democrat who represents Worcester. “You can’t be successful if you can’t operate it, put the business model together, and be able to afford it.”

Caba Toribio said many families prefer home-based family child care over center-based child care because it is often less expensive, more flexible, and tightly knit.

“We have a small group. Some parents prefer that. The children have the opportunity to feel like they are part of a family,” she said. “Here in the center, I keep the same concept. Because it’s a small group, they feel safe.”

Baker and MacDonald want to ensure that the program is sustained after the educators move out in two years.

“As they eventually launch their business, part of the project is to backfill it and continue this on,” MacDonald said. “One of the questions, obviously, is: What does it cost to do that without the grant funding?”

They are confident that eventually, other cities and programs across the state will pursue their own incubator projects.

“We’re trying to develop a model that could be replicable by other family child care systems,” Baker said. “We’d like to be that resource for other systems that are interested in developing this.”

This article is part of CommonWealth Beacon’s ongoing coverage of early childhood education issues and is funded, in part, by the .

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Child care during nontraditional hours — including early mornings, evenings, nights and weekends — is a growing need for American families. Flexible care with variable hours from week to week is also in demand.

In many homes across the country, work happens outside of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The best available data, drawn from the past decade, suggest that in some states live with a parent who works nonstandard hours, and that accommodate those schedules — though these figures rely on data collected before the pandemic. These data also indicate that work outside traditional hours is common in families that have lower incomes. 

Expanding access to equitable child care options requires careful attention to the diverse child care needs of working families. For a parent who starts a shift as a nursing assistant at 7 a.m., works overnight as a hotel receptionist or drives for a ride share service as a second job on the weekend, , as many licensed child care programs follow a more conventional schedule. Challenges also exist for parents who work jobs with rotating shifts, who not only require care outside of normal business hours, but also need the hours to be flexible. 

To ensure that working families can thrive, the child care sector needs more public investment in child care settings that offer care during nontraditional hours and increased support for the workforce needed to deliver it. When designing a universal child care system, policymakers must consider the growing population of parents working outside traditional business hours and should incorporate the following three principles.

Include home-based child care providers in policy design. Right now, most child care during nontraditional hours is , rather than by licensed child care providers. In other words, by people families trust who care for children in ways that resemble parental care. This type of arrangement — known as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care — is in the U.S. child care system. This trend points to both a preference and a gap: Families rely on familiar, home-based care during these hours, yet the supply of licensed child care that is open during these hours simply isn’t there. Building a universal child care system that is responsive to families’ needs will require recruiting and investing in licensed family child care providers and FFN caregivers who operate outside of child care licensing systems. Building policies that include the full range of home-based providers will require creative solutions, such as community-based peer support groups and access to resources and materials related to caring for children. 

Create fair working conditions and compensation for providers who offer care during nontraditional hours. Increasing child care access for working families must prioritize investment in the workforce caring for children during . These providers face some of the in an already strained sector: low pay, unpredictable schedules, on-call demands for families that need last minute child care or need to change hours without notice, and the strain of balancing their own family responsibilities with offering child care. Many FFN caregivers provide child care for their families . Expanding child care options that meet the needs of families working nontraditional hours requires intentional strategies that ensure a livable wage for paid child care workers and compensation for FFN caregivers — many of whom indicate for their work. These approaches must also reflect that the cost of care varies by time of day. 

Right-size standards and regulations to reflect the realities of providers caring for babies and children during nonstandard hours. Finally, quality and regulatory frameworks must evolve to recognize that care at 10 p.m. does not look like care at 10 a.m. Children’s development during nontraditional hours is shaped by like shared meals, bedtime stories and quiet, unstructured time. Systems that measure quality solely through daytime standards risk missing — such as healthy sleep practices and creating calm and comfortable environments — while placing unnecessary burdens on providers. Universal child care systems should offer tailored professional development that reflects the realities of care at night and on weekends — focused less on building lesson plans and more on developing routines, relationships and supporting children through transitions like bedtime or early wake-ups.

As states and cities build universal child care programs, ensuring access to child care beyond standard work hours must be a central goal. By embracing a mixed-delivery system that values all types of care, investing in compensation and professional development, and developing appropriate standards, early adopters of universal child care initiatives can provide an example of how to create policies that meet the needs of all working families.

was originally reported by Lauren Nutall of .

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — In early December, drilling resumed near Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

Newly installed gas wells dot property at 2020 S. Watson Road, less than one mile from the day care. One day in December, the sound of fracking machinery was so cacophonous that children couldn’t play outdoors.

For gas companies and stakeholders, the project is . But many Arlington residents and experts say it could come at the expense of the community��— especially its children.

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In January 2025, the Arlington City Council unanimously approved a permit allowing French oil and gas company TotalEnergies to install 10 new gas wells in East Arlington, which has a heavy concentration of Black and Latinx residents. It marked the first time in over a decade that the city council approved a permit for a new drill site after years of community opposition.

Named Maverick, the new site also lies near three schools — Johns Elementary, Adams Elementary and Thornton Elementary. Five wells owned by the same company already occupy the plot of land near the new drilling site, which the company has owned since 2008.

Hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — is used to extract gas by pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals into bedrock. Texas policymakers have lauded the activity as a boon to local communities, garnering $2.48 billion in state tax revenue in 2025, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Arlington is choked with hundreds of these gas wells. The city, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, is a modern-day Golconda. ��

But fracking has drawn sharp criticism from health experts, who say it could be linked to severe conditions like preterm births, congenital anomalies, lung diseases and childhood cancers.

The practice has also elicited backlash because of its role in accelerating the global climate crisis through greenhouse gas emissions. TotalEnergies has been embroiled in legal controversies for years, and its troubles have mounted in recent months. , brought on by a coalition of French environmental groups and more than a dozen municipal authorities.

The company has rejected proposed limits to its fossil fuel production. “It makes no sense at all to prevent TotalEnergies [from] producing oil and gas that the global energy system still uses today,” it “The courtroom is not the right place to advance the energy transition.”

The 19th interviewed Arlington residents about the impact fracking has had on their lives. They shared their fears about their grandchildren’s health, their experiences living in neighborhoods impacted by fracking and their reservations about TotalEnergies expanding operations in the city.

Devastated residents throughout Arlington

Ingrid Kelley, 69, has grown tired of the gas wells sprouting throughout North Texas. Several sit less than a mile from her house in East Arlington, and a pungent lingering scent of sulfur and something else that she can only describe as “rotten” has settled into her neighborhood. She fears what might happen to her 4-year-old grandson, who lives with her and attends Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

“I can’t project and trace what all is going to affect him and all those that live around there and all those that are around these sites,” she said. “It’s very hard to project what’s going to happen, how many people are going to have increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, cardiac disease — all the things that go along with being premature or having congenital heart disease that affect you the rest of your life.”

Her grandson — who was born in Arlington with a congenital heart disease — has had to undergo intermittent nebulizer treatment since he began attending Mother’s Heart in 2024, a treatment typically reserved for those who have lung complications. He had no prior respiratory complications, Kelley said. Kelley won’t open windows at home, fearing contaminated air from nearby fracking sites will seep in.

“We’re like one big science experiment here,” said Kelley who, in 2016, became involved with . She is now on the board.

Edgar Bunton, who is in his 60s, moved to his home in southwest Arlington six years ago and lives less than 600 feet from more than a dozen wells. His wife began to experience frequent and unexplained migraines. Two of his grandchildren who live near these gas wells have respiratory complications, which Bunton attributes to the wells.

“I really got on board because of my grandbabies,” he said.

The adverse health effects of hydraulic fracturing on children have been studied over the decades.

“This is a cumulative risk issue, because this is not just one chemical at a time people are being exposed to,” said Meagan Weisner, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund and a former public health epidemiologist who has studied health impacts related to oil and gas development in Colorado. “This is dozens of chemicals coming from more than just one site because they’re already near other wells.”

According to Weisner, the contaminants released are dangerous to nearby residents not only during the drilling phase, which emits numerous toxic chemicals, but also after.

“There were a lot of parents that were reporting their children were feeling ill during the pre-production phase,” Weisner said, which encompasses drilling. “So it would not surprise me at all if these residents in Texas that are close to these 10 wells experienced adverse health impacts because of their proximity.”

Children in particular are uniquely susceptible to harm. “We saw health impacts in children extended out to two miles from the pad,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be the exact same in Texas, but we saw adults had reported significant adverse symptoms within a one-mile radius but, for children, it was within a two-mile radius, and that does track along the lines of children are just much more vulnerable.”

The 19th reached out to the City of Arlington for comment. In an emailed response, the city only said that the drill site was approved because “it met the 600-foot spacing requirement from protected uses, as outlined in the City’s Gas Drilling and Production ordinance.”

TotalEnergies did not respond to questions from The 19th.

Before energy companies descended on Arlington, the sprawling land behind Phil Kabbakoff’s house was decorated with oak trees. When the company Chesapeake Energy arrived in his neighborhood, they were leveled and reduced to kindling. Now, a towering drill rig owned by TotalEnergies looms behind the 84-year-old’s home in their place.

Kabbakoff resides in the Glen Springs subdivision of southwest Arlington, the same neighborhood where Bunton’s grandchildren developed respiratory illnesses.

“A lot of these houses now are leased, and so people come and go, and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “We used to know everybody on the street.”

Like other residents, he was upset that more gas wells were installed by Mother’s Heart. “We were up in arms about it all the way around,” he said.

While Kabbakoff would like to see sustained changes made to fracking practices in the city, he believes that Arlington elected officials will only continue to value the interests of gas companies despite protest.

“They’re never going to change, not this council,” he said. “They don’t know anything about it. Nobody’s researched it. They could care less. They know they make money from it, and that’s all they’re worried about.”

‘Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters’

In 2005, landmen arrived to secure land for mineral ownership and drilling rights from Arlington residents. Ranjana Bhandari, founder of Liveable Arlington, was approached and ultimately declined.

“This is almost 20 years ago,” she said. “Because I was a mother — I had a young child — I didn’t think that it made any sense to have that kind of pollution around our children.”

At the onset of the fracking boom in Arlington, Bhandari spent hours poring over reports from other regions that experienced similar fracking booms, hoping for a glimpse of what this new development might mean for her city.

“Very quickly, they built 56 drill sites here, and they were spread out all over the city,” she said. “There’s literally one everywhere you see, one every few minutes.”

She read studies about cancerous pollutants linked to childhood leukemia coming out of states like Colorado. In the neighboring city of Fort Worth, she saw reports that air quality was slowly deteriorating because of drilling-related emissions of benzene, .

“Benzene is a serious, serious cat,” she said. “It’s a category one carcinogen. There’s no safe amount of it.”

Bhandari recalled a particular moment when she and her family stopped at a red light directly across from one now-defunct drill site around 2011. Within minutes, she said, they began to feel sick. “That was my first inkling that we weren’t just looking at climate harm.”

The discovery was bleak to Bhandari. By 2015, families in Arlington found themselves overwhelmed by the drill sites’ noxious fumes and the effects of fracking that rippled throughout the city — so much so that they decided to intervene. She created Liveable Arlington the same year.

“We were a mothers’ organization — mothers and grandmothers concerned about children’s health — and, through our campaigns and over the years, started learning many new things,” Bhandari said.

“We focused on the science. We focused on the community,” she continued. “I started it as a concerned parent. We were much more focused on fracking near children, fracking near day cares and schools, and so some of our most successful campaigns and most of our advocacy was to stop expansion of fracking around eight sites in Arlington, which are right next to day cares.”

Now 61 years old, she has seen the very problems she once read about penetrate her own community. And the repercussions have been more consequential for some communities than others. More often than not, Bhandari said, they’ve settled disproportionately in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, like the one where Mother’s Heart is located.

“The burdens of fracking were so unequally distributed,” she said. “The other bigger picture that people seem to miss when they say, ‘It’s OK to put it somewhere else, just not near me,’ is that you always will preserve a safe place. Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters.”

The national nonprofit plans to the occasion with an “intentional year of celebration, reflection and doing what we’ve always done — center the voices of educators,” said CEO Michelle Kang. 

A century is a long time for any organization to exist. It is a long time — period. Thus, NAEYC’s centennial presents an opportunity for longtime early childhood educators and leaders to recognize the progress the field has made, and to consider why, 100 years later, some systemic issues remain unchanged. 

Founded in 1926 and first known as the National Association for Nursery Education, NAEYC has a long history of promoting high-quality education for children from birth to age 8, advocating for improved working conditions in the field, and helping families and the general public understand the value of early childhood education. Today, it is the largest early childhood education association in the country, with affiliates in nearly every state, reaching hundreds of thousands of educators through its research, advocacy and membership network.

Over the past century, NAEYC has been involved with a number of the profession’s major . The organization participated in the creation and expansion of , a federal program that provides high-quality early care and education to children from low-income families; collaborated on the development of the (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for the field’s educators; and built the first national to demonstrate quality in early learning programs.

But at the same time, the field has been defined by stagnation in critical areas, such as low compensation, insufficient public funding and a lack of professional recognition. 

“It’s a lot of ‘two steps forward, one step back,’” said Marcy Whitebook, who co-founded the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) in 1999. “It’s not that we haven’t made progress. It’s that these problems we’ve had for a long time endure.”

Whitebook, a septuagenarian, recalled meeting with other child care workers in the 1970s and 1980s to campaign for better working conditions. At that time, these teachers felt their contributions to society were underpaid and undervalued. 

“People who did the work had no rights, raises and respect,” Whitebook said, referencing the of a campaign from that era. “That’s still true.”

Few would dispute that. Early childhood educators today make an average of to care for and teach the nation’s youngest children, according to the CSCCE 2024 Workforce Index — despite a growing body of research and increased awareness among the public that the early years are foundational for learning and development, and deeply connected to a person’s eventual success. 

In a of the early childhood workforce, released by NAEYC in February, educators reported high levels of burnout and increasingly unstable personal financial circumstances. One teacher in California said, “I’m constantly worried about making rent and affording groceries, which distracts me during the day.” 

Many teachers are also dealing with the consequences of working in understaffed programs. Teacher turnover remains high and recruitment challenging, largely because many educators leave the field for better-paying jobs elsewhere. 

What would most help them stay in the field, the survey respondents said, is better pay and more employee benefits. Instead, many providers are experiencing stagnant federal funding and a perceived reduction in public support. 

Carol Brunson Day, who became a NAEYC member in 1969 and later served as the organization’s president, believes that wages and compensation remain the biggest issue facing the field. 

“That problem was there when I entered, and it’s still there,” she said. “We’re working on it, but we don’t seem to be getting the kind of traction we should be.”

Day added: “Until we solve that problem, we are still going to have high turnover, which is not just not good for teachers, it’s not good for young children.”

Day also spent 20 years as president of the Council for Professional Recognition, a nonprofit that NAEYC helped form in the 1980s to oversee the administration of the CDA credential. 

That credential, she said, has not only helped “produce competent caregivers,” but has also created a pathway for a racially, culturally and linguistically diverse workforce — primarily women — to advance their careers in early childhood education. As a result of getting many community colleges to recognize the CDA and award credits toward an associate degree, some early educators have been able to use their CDA as a springboard to earn four-year degrees and beyond. “It’s not perfect yet,” Day said, “but it’s there.”

Kang called the credential “one of the best first steps into the field of early learning,” noting that at her own son’s high school, students can pursue coursework to earn their CDA before graduation. 

“It has represented the path for so many people who would not otherwise have been able to be part of the field,” Kang said.

Even still, it’s not a solution to the lack of professionalization that early childhood educators face. There is still, among much of the public, a perception that adults who care for babies and toddlers are not teaching, but “babysitting.”

“We have not gotten to a place where we fully understand, as a community and a country, that these are professionals doing this work,” Kang acknowledged. “We push back against the narrative that anybody who loves children can do this work.”

That misconception likely perpetuates the low compensation in the field and the limited federal investment it receives. If the public and policymakers recognized the importance of the early years, they would, theoretically, want to pay the professionals who work with young children a living wage while also investing public dollars to boost quality and accessibility. 

“The entire system depends, basically, on very underpaid people doing the work,” said Whitebook. “The whole thing has been operating on cutting corners with the people who do it.”

Indeed, the current structure of the system is unsustainable, said Kang, resulting in a “” of early care and education. And yet she finds herself thinking back to at least one point in the field’s history when that was perhaps not the case.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in early care and education allowed the field not only to survive the disaster, but to come out of it, in some respects, stronger than before. That was also a time when many families and government leaders referred to early childhood education as “essential,” though Kang said she hasn’t heard that sentiment expressed for several years now. 

“There is very little about COVID that I would say we want to go back to,” Kang said, “but I do want to go back to that moment where policymakers on all sides of the political spectrum, families, community leaders recognized the importance of early childhood education and the investment needed to have it work well.”

It proved that it is possible for public dollars to buoy early childhood education and to raise the stature of the professionals who work in the field, she noted. 

“I don’t want to see us have another global calamity to get there,” Kang said. But when she reflects on NAEYC’s 100 years and the narrative around high-quality early learning, she said one thing is clear: “We need to support the professionals who are doing this work … so children can get everything they need to become the citizens we want them to be.”

For Emily Knox and her wife, Forever Young Child Care Learning Center in Manchester was a dependable cornerstone of their daily routine for more than two years. But on March 5, her wife arrived to pick up their son and found the center’s staff in tears. It would be, they abruptly learned, the center’s final day, as staff members rushed about, packing up children’s art projects and medical paperwork to give to parents.

“It was surreal, honestly,” Knox said. She was aware of the pressures that the early childhood education industry faced in Connecticut, from a lack of available spots to an underpaid workforce, but watching her son’s own facility suddenly shutter, seemingly without warning, was “an eye-opening experience.” 

The closure of Forever Young hits as vanishing federal aid and runaway Medicaid costs threaten an ambitious new initiative to expand affordable child care.

The Early Childhood Education Endowment, as a vehicle to create thousands of new affordable child care program slots by the early 2030s, is projected to receive $30 million from the budget surplus after Connecticut’s fiscal year ends June 30 — less than a tenth of what lawmakers pledged last June.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration said Monday it’s unclear whether the fiscal bleeding has stopped.

“It is too early to speculate,” Lamont’s budget spokesman, Chris Collibee, said Monday, adding that while global economic instability is a concern, the administration remains committed to supporting affordable child care.

“Gov. Lamont has taken a leading role both locally and nationally to increase investment in early childhood education,” Collibee said. “He’s fully dedicated to making sure that we deliver on that vision and promise.”

“I think we are all committed to the vision that we’ve set forth, and we stand ready to take the action that we need to take based upon the funding that is available to us,” added Elena Trueworthy, commissioner of Office of Early Childhood Education.

The state already opened 1,000 Early Start program slots in January and has earmarked nearly  from the endowment for various expenditures, including grants for local school districts to expand their preschools, increasing the rate that providers are paid and a planned study that will assess the need for a health insurance subsidy for employees.

Eva Bermúdez Zimmerman, executive director of Child Care For CT, said that the Manchester closure reflects broader pressures eroding the existing care infrastructure.

“The system is interconnected,” and the network’s financial needs are greater than even the hoped-for deposit in the hundreds of millions, she said. “I really do hope that elected leaders understand that you can’t build up a system and ignore the pressure that’s gotten us to here.” 

CT still forecasting big surpluses – but not for child care

Lamont responded to the child care crisis with a big step 13 months ago, proposing that Connecticut dedicate a portion of the massive budget surplus it generates annually toward early childhood education.

But much of that surplus is already accounted for. Using a series of aggressive caps set in 2017, Connecticut has since left an average of $1.9 billion unspent each year, which represents 8% to 9% of the General Fund.

About three-quarters of that, roughly $1.4 billion, involves certain income and business tax receipts lawmakers cannot spend easily. These protected dollars are immediately stripped from the budget and used chiefly to whittle down Connecticut’s pension debt, a that ranks among the largest, per capita, in the nation.

The remaining tax and fee receipts, federal grants and other revenues flow into the budget, where additional spending controls typically force hundreds of millions in additional savings each year.

And — with an initial investment of $300 million — they and Lamont stipulated much of this second-tier savings would be dedicated to the child care initiative each year.

that would translate into a $309 million deposit in the summer of 2026 and almost $560 million 12 months after that.

Medicaid spending plagues CT finances for 3^rd year in a row

But while the program that saves funds to reduce pension debt continues to save big dollars, the second-tier savings effort is in jeopardy. And some of the problems that shrank this year’s estimated payment to the child care program could get much worse.

One big obstacle is Medicaid, a federal health care program run in partnership with states. Medicaid demand has remained greater than pre-pandemic levels, even though enhanced federal aid ordered in response to COVID expired in 2023.

the state Department of Social Services will overspend its $3.7 billion Medicaid line item by $85 million this fiscal year. The department overspent on Medicaid by  last year and almost  two fiscal years ago.

Congress last July ordered cuts to Medicaid and other programs worth more than $1 trillion by 2034 to help finance big federal tax cuts aimed chiefly at high-earning households.

The Lamont administration hasn’t projected yet what Connecticut could lose next fiscal year. But , a New Haven-based policy group, estimated in January that federal Medicaid grants and aid sent directly to households — such as health care-related tax credits — would be down about $579 million in the next state budget cycle.

That federal tax relief also has softened state tax revenues.

Connecticut links its corporate tax system to the federal code, as do several other states. So, when Congress extended federal corporate tax breaks set to expire, Connecticut lost hundreds of millions in expected revenues from big business.

CT has options to bolster child care services

But this doesn’t mean Connecticut lacks options to bolster funding for child care.

Analysts estimate the state program that forces lawmakers to save a portion of income and business tax receipts will have a banner year, grabbing to pay down pension debt.

Lamont already has proposed scaling back these savings rules — albeit just once — to return $500 million to 2.2 million Connecticut residents in the form of a $200-per-person state tax rebate.

The checks would be sent in late October, just days before the gubernatorial election, and some Republicans have charged the Democratic governor’s proposal is merely a political stunt to help him win reelection to a third term.

But many of Lamont’s fellow Democrats in the House and Senate majorities have said those savings rules should be rolled back somewhat to permit greater investments year after year in child care and other core services, including health care, education and municipal aid.

Legislators from both parties have advocated big ongoing tax cuts this year, which also would necessitate saving less to reduce the state’s pension debt.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, a proponent of the Early Childhood Education Endowment, has said a modest amount of tax relief could be considered, but said nothing should be allowed to jeopardize a program that could benefit thousands of children from low- and middle-income households.

“It’s a reminder we’re going to have to prioritize at some point,” he said. “I personally think that, before we start implementing new tax changes to the tax code, we ought to be very mindful of how important this child care endowment could be in the long term.”

But House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, who also supports greater state investment in affordable child care, said Lamont and the General Assembly aren’t doing enough to trim spending in other areas.

Republican lawmakers have said Connecticut should look to tighten raises for state workers, cut Medicaid programs for undocumented residents and seek greater efficiencies at public colleges and universities.

“Democrats were more interested [last year] in a press release than creating a sustainable early childhood program,” Candelora said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

In doing so, it will become the latest in a wave of states that have established standalone departments for early care and education in recent years, joining the ranks of , and .

The shift toward unified governance structures comes at a time when the sector is getting more attention and, in some states, more investment. That, plus an effort to improve families’ experiences in accessing public programs for them and their young children, seems to be driving this trend.

Whether a state’s governance structure can make a meaningful difference in how its system of early childhood education functions, though, is a question worth asking — and it’s one many early childhood policy leaders are trying to answer.

. . . . . 

Every state has a unique organizational framework, but historically, programs and services for young children and their families have been housed across several common agencies, such as an education department, a department of health, and a department of welfare and social services.

That was the case in Colorado before it launched its Department of Early Childhood in 2022, explained executive director Lisa Roy, and it made for a disjointed experience. 

“Having things scattered across different agencies just makes things confusing for families,” Roy said. 

And that is the case in Illinois now, said Teresa Ramos, secretary of the new department that is slated to on July 1. 

“What excites me, over time, is building a system that can more seamlessly serve parents and providers,” Ramos said. She wants to lift “some of that burden” off of families and educators who have to keep track of “which 12 people to call” and ultimately simplify their experience of engaging with government services. 

The other consequence of programs being spread across different departments is that it creates a leadership vacuum in early care and education, said Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer who has studied early childhood governance and recently wrote a on the topic.

“It’s a complicated ecosystem,” Regenstein said. “When oversight of that ecosystem is splintered across multiple agencies, with none as their primary expertise, it shows.”

Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University, which , used the pandemic as an example. During that time, a state education secretary’s focus was likely on reopening K-12 schools, even though their department also oversaw Head Start and pre-K programs, while the health secretary was probably thinking primarily about hospitals and health care, not child care licensing and quality. 

“What you had in early childhood was a system entirely run by middle managers,” Regenstein said. “Halfway up the org chart, they may or may not be empowered to interact with the legislature. Their orientation was to run a grant program, rather than think systemically about how those pieces fit together.”

He added: “That’s not a knock on those people. But when it was literally nobody’s job to think about the system as a whole, it just made everybody’s job harder.”

The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center has identified 13 states that have established standalone departments or offices of early care and education. In those 13 states, there is a senior leader whose entire job is to think about, organize and prioritize issues affecting early childhood. That change is both symbolic and actual — or it can be, when managed thoughtfully. 

Another dozen or so states — while not going as far as creating a new department — have made meaningful changes around early childhood governance and leadership, Regenstein added. 

“The question I’d ask,” he said, “is has a state taken action to elevate leadership in early childhood and done something to unify oversight? Even if they haven’t gotten all the way there, I want to give credit for progress.”

Of course, the formation of a new government agency, and the appointment of a senior official to lead it, is not in itself a victory. Only once those pieces are in place does the hard work begin. 

“Early childhood programs are historically under-resourced. Putting them all together doesn’t give you some kind of economy of scale — ‘oh, good, we’re all here and we’re all under-resourced,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, acknowledging the challenge these departments face. 

She added: “We’ve focused on building a system of programs and services that are well connected and aligned. We’ve done a really good job. We still have much work to do.”

. . . . . 

One thing all of these states seem to have in common is a governor who is willing to prioritize young children and families and make early childhood education a signature part of their platform. 

Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico all ran campaigns that emphasized early childhood education and later stewarded the creation of a standalone department. That is no coincidence, Osborne of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center said. 

For this organizing structure to be successful, she said, “it has to come from the governor.”

Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, made a similar point. “What matters more than any org chart or structure is leadership. Full stop,” said Stebbins. “When you have a strong governor, it is like wind in the sails.”

That significance doesn’t evaporate once the department has launched. These governors appoint cabinet-level officials, such as Roy in Colorado and Groginsky in New Mexico, to lead the new agency and work alongside them as they make decisions that are relevant to early care and education providers, children and families. 

In practice, these states end up with a dedicated early childhood advocate attending cabinet meetings with the governor and other department heads.   

“It’s not just symbolic. It’s really important,” said Osborne. “The secretary of early childhood is sitting side-by-side with the secretaries of … education and health. They can make decisions at that level, think about how to work together and leverage resources, in real-time.” 

That’s an enormous improvement over the “middle manager” dynamic that Regenstein described.

“It is much more likely that you’re going to be able to get the resources that you need,” Osborne added. 

In Colorado, that has had a real impact, Polis shared. 

“It certainly elevated the discussion about early childhood education in our state,” Polis said. “Dr. Roy attends every cabinet meeting. We talk about early childhood education every week. Before, no one owned it in the state.”

That access has given Roy opportunities to communicate directly with the governor about nuances in the field and to get a broader perspective of his competing priorities, she said. 

“The governor is a partner with me in thinking through these things,” Roy said, adding that “having that access and having his ear has been so important.”  

That kind of centralized leadership and governor’s support have been essential in enabling New Mexico to make groundbreaking progress on early care and education in the last several years, according to Groginsky. 

“There’s no way this kind of rapid, system-building growth could’ve happened with three different agencies, middle-level managers and staff working cross-departmental,” she said, referring to the recent transformation of early childhood education in the state, including the launch of the first statewide universal free child care initiative in the U.S. 

It is much more efficient and effective, she added, to channel all that time, energy and resources “in one direction, under one leader.” 

. . . . . 

This recent burst of activity in the development of early childhood education departments has precedent. In the early 2000s, a trio of states — Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington — each created a new agency to focus on early childhood. 

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, , is considered to have been the first state-level early childhood education department, said Amy M. Jacobs, the agency’s commissioner since 2014. She said her office has received numerous requests and questions from leaders in other states who are now trying to stand up a similar governance structure (which she describes as a “one-stop shop” for families). 

To those leaders, she typically tries to impart a few key lessons. 

One, she said, is to take their time. It’s OK to go slowly, especially if it means getting it right. Georgia’s department underwent many iterations before the final pieces were in place in 2017 — a full 13 years after it launched. 

Another, Jacobs said, is to create a system that makes sense in the context of their state. “There’s no ‘right’ way to create your agency. There are no ‘right’ set of programs,” she explained. “Every state is going to have their own pathway.”

In practice, that means that New Mexico’s department may have more programs and services under its umbrella than Colorado’s, and that shouldn’t be a critique of either agency. 

Finally, Jacobs said, it’s important to understand that anyone involved in this work may need patience if they want to see ideas about the field of early care and education meaningfully change. 

“Culture change will take longer than you ever think it will,” Jacobs said, noting that after more than two decades, she believes that the perception of early childhood educators as “babysitters” has changed and that the field is now highly valued by Georgia state leaders and policymakers. “It’s been a long process. … It just takes a lot of time to change that mindset.”

The formation of these departments is in itself momentous, many policy experts said, because it signals that early childhood is an issue that’s so important it deserves — literally — a seat at the governor’s table. But their existence does not guarantee their long-term success. 

Many of these agencies are still very new, having been ushered in by the sitting governor. One of the major tests is whether they can withstand leadership change — a new governor, perhaps from an opposing party, who maybe isn’t as keen on putting early care and education toward the top of their platform, said Regenstein. Some states, like Georgia and Massachusetts, have survived that type of leadership transition. 

“We still cannot answer the question to states, ‘Is this something we should do?’” said Osborne. “But we think there are models of these new departments that really can make it so you’re prioritizing early childhood, so you can use funds more efficiently, and decisions can be made that will enhance programs.”

We are developmental cognitive neuroscientists who study how children’s daily interactions with parents, caregivers, teachers and peers shape , and development. We are not anti-AI, but we are extremely concerned about corporate efforts to market AI toys to parents and educators of young children. We do not yet know how many young children are already engaging with generative AI bots, but if are any indicator, this is a rapidly growing market. 

Some companies say their toys and devices are “age-appropriate” and will support children’s learning and development, but that’s not always the case. For instance, the makers of Kumma, a plush teddy bear, promised to build conversational skills for children from ages 3 to 5. But the toy was pulled from the market last year after it was caught encouraging researchers testing it . 

Beyond these physical safety risks, we have essentially no data on how interacting with generative AI “friends” will shape very young children’s foundational brain, socioemotional and language development. Rather, the preponderance of evidence about how brain development works in the earliest years of life suggests that families should proceed with caution before letting their littlest children play with these new technologies in the form of toys.

We are not alone in this concern. Together with scientists around the world who study the exquisite, human-to-human interactions that shape early brain and cognitive development, we recently released an about the risks of direct infant-AI interaction. 

Decades of scientific studies paint a clear picture of optimal development in the first few years of life. Babies and toddlers grow and learn through daily, moment-to-moment interactions with their close caregivers. Indeed, humans cannot develop fully without these foundational interactions. Present, responsive, real-time interactions shape children’s language, sculpting their growing understanding of new words, grammar, pronunciation and social intentions. 

These real-time interactions shape children emotionally, helping them map their inner experiences to their outer perceptions. There is evidence that when a caregiver and a young child interact, — from eye contact to to heart rates, oxytocin levels, and even . 

Unlike AI models, which can parrot human-to-human interactions, caregivers pair their words with touch, eye contact and facial expressions that signal their love and attention. Real conversations include inside jokes, local dialects, family lore, and the distinct conversational patterns that make a family a family and a community a community. 

Development is about real-time rhythm, and every unique caregiver-child dyad develops their own. It’s not about perfection. It’s about presence, something an AI model can never and will never be able to provide. 

In fact, toys that imitate social responsiveness may interfere with an infant’s developing sense of how people relate to one another. The better these toys get at mimicking a parent, a child care provider, a grandparent or other adult caregiver, the more concerned we should be, particularly in the earliest years when infants and toddlers are developing a distinction between self and other  — a growing awareness that the other humans who surround them each have inner worlds of their own. 

From a policy perspective, . There is much more to learn about these new technologies before parents let their babies play with them. 

Without these policy protections, parents and educators must take the lead, that simulate social reciprocity, replace face-to-face caregiving, or are designed to replace soothing behaviors that infants and toddlers need from caregivers in order to build attachment, trust and human connection.

The earliest recorded scientific experiments with electricity happened 3,000 years ago. Today, access to electricity has raised the standard of living for nearly the entire world. Still — after more than a hundred years of widespread use, safety standards and engineering to wield electricity for the common good — no responsible adult would let a child anywhere near it in raw form. 

AI has the power to improve human lives, but these are early days. We take for granted that we cover our light sockets to protect all our community’s children. We must take the same protective stance with AI.

While teachers of all grades shape their students’ lives, kindergarten teachers play a unique role in that they build a formative early bridge from home to school. They introduce fundamental academic skills, build foundations for social and emotional development and help young learners develop confidence, curiosity and a lifelong love of learning. 

“As an educator, my mission has always been clear: to ensure every student, regardless of background, zip code, or circumstance, has access to a high-quality education,” Gray wrote in a published by the NEA Foundation. “I see my work as an act of justice.”

Gray has started a number of programs at her school to support students in need, including working with classes to raise funds to donate to peers and creating opportunities for families to volunteer as tutors. She has also participated in various teacher advocacy efforts. Gray has testified before her state’s legislature about issues such as mentorship and compensation, and has participated in the , which aims to improve the teaching profession and student outcomes.

In the conversation below, she reflects on her career, the importance of mentorship in education and what drives her to make change — whether launching a new initiative at her school or using her voice to advocate for change across her profession. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m curious about your career and how you got to this point.

I have been an educator for 13 years in the public school system in Texas. I have [spent] the majority of my years teaching kindergarten in Temple ISD [Independent School District] in Temple, Texas … but I have taught at multiple campuses with different demographics.

One campus I was at was all about teaching students social-emotional skills … I got a chance to build relationships, and I learned a lot [about] emotional growth.

I had an opportunity to teach my first year at a campus that had … a lot of attendance issues. On my first meet-the-teacher night, I had maybe three parents show up. By the end of the year celebration, every single parent and grandparent showed up. That was probably the turning point to let me know I was in the right space. 

What has mentorship meant to you in your career?

Before I started as a teacher, I was working at a day care, and I was in a pre-K 3 class, and that was really my first official class, but it wasn’t at a public school. When I had the opportunity to get my certification, I got a chance to teach in the school district with my mentor, Leah Suchomel, who taught kindergarten. She taught me so many things that I didn’t get in the books or in the classroom. Yes, I learned a lot about … the different theories and Harry [and Rosemary] Wong’s but until you’re actually in a setting with a teacher that is willing to trust you enough to teach her class — and just that compassion that she showed, not only to me but to her students — I still take [that] to this day.

How have you paid that forward as a mentor?

My mentee came from Texas A&M. Her mom was an assistant principal. Her grandma was a teacher. Her aunt was a principal. So she came from a long line of educators, but when she told them she wanted to be a teacher, they asked her, “Are you sure?” Because it is different from when they were teachers. 

I thought about what my mentor taught me, and I tried to see what my mentee needed to be successful for when she would become a mentor. It’s like a torch being passed.

How did the pandemic change your experience as a teacher?

During the pandemic, you could see a difference in the social-emotional status of our students. Before the pandemic, we were trying to get kids to learn how to use technology, but after the pandemic, I noticed my students wanted to have me read them big books. They didn’t want to just always be on a tablet to learn. I mean, that’s a tool as well, but they really craved that attention. 

Right now, I feel like we have so many students that are having to learn how to regulate their emotions. When they are playing … or working with classmates, they have to learn, How does this person feel before I react? If they’re on an iPad, nobody is there to tell them, “Hey, you’re being rude on this game.” They have to learn … the body language of someone who needs space. They missed a lot of that during their first years of growing up.

You’ve started a few programs and clubs at your school. Why did you start the Stars Helping Stars program?

I started that program when I began here at this school. I saw one of my students that was kind of struggling. I overheard him tell one of his classmates that he had slept in his car last night. And then his mom had called me and let me know that they had lost their housing. So, what I did with our kids — since it’s a STEM campus — we repurposed items from recyclables such as snowglobes, jewelry boxes, guitars, water guns and containers and sold them in order to get gift cards for homeless families at our school. 

The next year, that effort evolved into a tutoring group. Parents would come in and tutor kids on Tuesdays before school or after school. … And we saw a significant increase in our students’ accountability. 

What about the Breakfast Club program?

Once a month I’ll have mentors that will come through and just do different activities with about a group of 25 kids that range from kindergarten all the way to fifth grade. The high school volleyball team volunteered to come in, and they played volleyball. A group of soldiers came, including my spouse, and they did different stations where they had to talk like a soldier, act like a soldier, sound like a soldier…. Maybe one day they want to grow up to be in the military. We don’t know, but just planting those seeds so they can see things outside of their home and outside of the classroom, that’s the whole point.

Do you think being someone who gets things off the ground is part of why you won this award? 

I do believe that it plays a big role. … That and also just being a person of action. That picture behind me — that is me signing with the governor of Texas. (House Bill 2 authorized $8.5 billion in new . A portion of that funding went toward teacher and staff pay raises.) And that day, I sat at the table speaking for 384,000 teachers that are in Texas that needed that extra pay. There were other teachers in different parts of Texas … who had to work pick-up jobs during Christmas just to make ends meet. And I wanted to do something about it. And so just being able to tell our stories together, bring our stories together — to sit and pass a bill of one of the largest allotments that has been passed in Texas. 

As the only elementary school teacher to win this NEA Foundation award, what do you have to say about the early years?

I think that early childhood sets such a big seed … for our students to have character, to have work ethic, to understand the importance of [this] journey. … I always have kids that end up being best friends, and I have at least one or two that end up being best friends all the way up to high school.

I’ve been teaching long enough to have those memories. Thanks to Facebook, I can see where they tag [me in photos from when] they were in kindergarten and now they are getting ready to graduate. It’s like, “This all because of you, Ms. Gray.” 

How do you cultivate friendships and relationships that last a lifetime? 

Part of it is the atmosphere in a classroom. It’s just everyone uplifting each other. And if someone doesn’t, if you don’t like what someone else said, it’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to just totally not listen to that person.

That’s what some of it is. Also, just being able to have … relationships with families. 

Whenever we have parent conferences — I don’t just do the beginning of the year, I do the middle of the year as well because I want [parents] to know that we are partners. The majority of the time they’re here with us, with the teachers, not at home. And so just building their relationship … you can understand like, “Oh, I understand the reason why he may need the extra hug today.”

In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words.

Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as they worked through the lesson. One young boy caught her attention.

“This student had struggled significantly the year before and often avoided reading tasks,” she said. “This time, I watched him carefully tap out each phoneme, blend the sounds and read a multi-syllable word independently.”

What stood out wasn’t just that he read the word correctly – it was how he approached it.

“He didn’t guess. He didn’t look to the teacher for the answer. He applied a strategy he had been explicitly taught,” Williams said.

She has observed several meaningful changes in students over the past year.

“Students are approaching unfamiliar words with greater confidence,” she said. “Instead of guessing, they are using strategies and applying phonics patterns they’ve been explicitly taught. You can hear the difference – they are sounding out words more accurately and blending more smoothly.”

The breakthrough she observed is part of a broader effort across rural central Missouri. Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP work directly with teachers in Phelps County schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Coordinated locally through the Phelps County Community Foundation, coaches visit classrooms regularly throughout the school year. They observe instruction, model lessons and provide feedback, strengthening foundational reading instruction for kindergarten and early elementary students.

The effort is taking place at a time when reading proficiency remains a challenge across Missouri and the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level, while 42 percent scored below the basic level.

Education leaders say improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success.

Before the collaborative began, the biggest challenges for K–1 teachers in St. James R-I centered on consistency, skill gaps and limited structured support.

“Teachers were using a variety of reading strategies, programs and materials,” Williams said. “While many approaches had strengths, there was not a cohesive, research-aligned framework guiding K–1 reading instruction across classrooms. This sometimes led to uneven student outcomes and confusion when students moved between grades.”

Some students entered kindergarten with limited literacy exposure, and teachers needed clearer tools to systematically build phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding skills. Identifying and addressing skill gaps early was challenging without a unified approach.

“From my perspective as principal, the most significant change since TNTP coaches began working with our teachers has been the shift to consistently structured, research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading,” she said.

Instead of learning strategies in isolation, teachers now receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice.

“I have seen a significant shift in teacher confidence, collaboration and mindset around early literacy instruction,” Williams said. “Teachers understand how students learn to read, have a stronger grasp of foundational skills — especially phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding – and can clearly articulate the ‘why’ behind their decisions.”

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

“Early literacy is no longer just an initiative,” she said. “It’s a unified commitment supported by knowledge, collaboration and confidence.”

A first-year teacher finds support

For Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Newburg, the coaching model provided unexpected support.

“You see so many posts online telling new teachers to run from the profession,” she said. “But when you have a support system – coaching, small groups, someone to talk through what’s working and what’s not – it makes you want to stay. It takes away that feeling that if a student struggles, it’s all your fault.”

Wood said the approach reduces “teacher guilt” – the feeling that struggling students are solely the teacher’s responsibility.

Her literacy coach, Kelly, follows a predictable rhythm each month: a Zoom planning meeting before a visit, in-person classroom observation, immediate feedback afterward and ongoing email check-ins.

“It definitely makes you feel like you are not alone,” Wood said. “As a new teacher, there are so many moments where you wonder if you’re doing it right. Having someone come in, observe and then talk it through with you – it changes everything.”

At the beginning of the year, some students did not yet recognize their starter letters – A, M, S and T – or the sounds they make.

“Now almost every single one of them knows capital, lowercase and sound,” she said. “That growth has been huge. Kindergarten is such a growth year. They come in barely recognizing letters, and by the end they’re reading.”

Wood admitted feeling nervous before Christmas break, wondering whether students would retain their skills.

“I sent home decodable passages because I thought, ‘They’re going to forget everything.’ But they came back after break and every single one of them just took off. It was like something clicked,” she said.

The improvements teachers are seeing in classrooms are reflected in early assessment data from participating districts.

In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94 percent of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began. In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5 percent in the fall to 89.4 percent by the spring.

At Newburg Elementary School, 100 percent of kindergarten and first-grade students demonstrated growth in reading assessments, with gains that more than doubled typical annual progress.

From classroom change to district strategy

For April Williams, assistant superintendent in the St. James R-I School District, the impact is most visible during classroom visits.

“As an administrative team, we met every Wednesday morning and did literacy walks,” she said. “We wanted to be grounded in the work, too – not just supporting teachers but really understanding what effective literacy instruction should look like.”

Those visits give district leaders a firsthand view of how instruction – and students – are changing.

“Just last week I was in a kindergarten classroom, and the words students were decoding and understanding – for February – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Seeing that difference in students’ abilities has been incredible.”

What began as a local effort in rural Phelps County is now expanding across Missouri.

Through the state’s Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant, the coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide, including 40 K–5 schools and 20 middle and high schools. Literacy coaches trained in the same model used in Phelps County now support teachers across multiple regions of the state.

Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers.

For Williams, the goal is simple: ensure the work continues long after the original grant funding ends.

“Probably what changed the most is we renewed our commitment to literacy district-wide,” she said. “It wasn’t just something happening in elementary anymore – we started asking how the entire district supports literacy and keeps it at the forefront of everything we do.”

She added: “The goal is for this model to live beyond the grant — and beyond all of us. So that it simply becomes what we do.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

States including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have garnered attention in the media for offering lessons other states can learn from — a February New York Times opinion piece heralded the trio as “.”

Yet the Southern surge narrative has, so far, largely ignored another commonality among those states: tremendous improvements in early childhood education.

The most commonly cited reasons behind the trend relate to , specifically a commitment to phonics-based pedagogy, and a willingness to who are not reading on grade level. Importantly, this did not happen overnight, and it didn’t occur in isolation: Rachel Canter, who led a Mississippi education policy and advocacy group that was instrumental in shaping the state’s approach, the New York Times that the “Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” but added that “people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

Indeed, in the same 2013 legislative session in which Mississippi passed the , which codified many of its reforms, the legislature also passed its first state pre-K bill, the (ELCA). The ELCA was a state-funded initiative that established voluntary, free or low-cost, high-quality pre-K programs that operated through partnerships between private pre-K providers, school districts and, in some cases, Head Start programs. These collaboratives had to meet all put forth by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Over the years, enrollment in the Collaboratives has : When they were launched in 2014, the Collaboratives served 1,774 children and by the 2022-23 school year, student enrollment in pre-K had reached 6,800.

In on how the ELCA came about, Canter explained that with major early childhood and K-3 reforms both passing at the same time, the policies were designed to align. For instance, the pre-K legislation required participating providers to administer a school readiness assessment that lined up with the one students would be asked to take in Kindergarten. Substantial funds were invested in instructional coaches for pre-K teachers, and in providing pre-K teachers with access to literacy professional development opportunities comparable to what the state’s K-3 teachers were being offered.

Around the same time, neighboring states were engaged in their own reform efforts. In 2012, the , commonly referred to as Act 3. This unified early childhood governance within the Louisiana Department of Education and set the stage for broad reforms. Over the next few years, Louisiana required every child care program that received a dollar of public money to participate in the state’s accountability system, which included getting a minimum of two quality-focused inspections per year. The bar was also raised for teacher qualifications, requiring all lead teachers in publicly funded early learning settings to have at least an , a state-based professional credential.

The efforts paid off. Researchers that from 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood education programs in Louisiana that scored proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) rating scale — a commonly-used measure of teacher-child interactions — rose from 62% to 85%. For child care programs specifically, excluding state pre-K and Head Start classrooms, the percentage of programs scoring proficient or above increased even more impressively, from 40% in 2016 to 73% in 2019. The kids in those classrooms, of course, are many of the same kids who later on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ fourth grade literacy exam.

Alabama, meanwhile, has long been a leader in pre-K. In 2001, the state launched First Class Pre-K, an initiative that funds full-day pre-K across a variety of school- and community-based settings. With a focus on quality, the system has been since 2006 as part of the organization’s . However, funding constraints kept the program small. In the mid-2010s, though, First Class Pre-K began to scale. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of participating 4-year-olds from about 3,600 to more than 24,000. Around the same time, the state made a major investment in coaching for pre-K teachers, and its coaching model grew from serving around 200 teachers in 2012 to nearly 1,500 as of 2024. When Alabama began leaning fully into the science of reading with its , pre-K teachers in public schools also started getting on the subject.

Connecting early care and education reform to the Southern surge is, of course, an exercise in correlation and not causation. As Canter pointed out with regard to the science of reading, this is a multifaceted story and assigning too much credit to any one factor is unwise. Moreover, other states that have made major investments to their early childhood education systems — such as California and its universal transitional kindergarten program — have not to date seen the same types of literacy gains. What does seem fair is speculating that in a counterfactual world where Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama make the same reforms to K-3 but ignore early education entirely, the Southern surge would have been blunted. 

These states, then, offer important lessons for both early childhood and K-12 stakeholders around the importance of tightly and thoughtfully aligning both systems — in both directions — and ensuring there are enough resources present to support educators. Leaders don’t have to look far: groups like the have been developing alignment frameworks and tools for years. What’s needed is a renewed commitment, particularly among state and district leaders, to seeing early care and education not as a nice-to-have, a wholly separate enterprise, or even worse, a competitor — but as a core part of ensuring all children are reading on grade level. That might not be a miracle, but it would sure be an accomplishment.