At Start Early, we believe that every child deserves the chance to reach their full potential in life. Our mission is to advance quality early learning for families with children, before birth through their earliest years, to close the opportunity gap.

As Washington state continues to grapple with the wide-ranging human and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Start Early Washington recognizes there are a number of strategies that could be deployed to respond to the emergent needs of families. The following are the most pressing budget and policy priorities identified by Start Early Washington to support children and families in the state:

1. Leverage the Home Visiting System to Support Families

   Throughout the pandemic, home visitors have continued working with and supporting families virtually. Depending on family preference, home visitors are engaging with families either on devices like
   laptops or iPads or by telephone. Visits have continued consistently and many home visitors are having more frequent contact with families who are experiencing increased isolation. The home visiting system is well positioned to address the resource connection and social and emotional needs of families. This is a strength of our state’s home visiting models and the system could serve as a vehicle to reach and engage isolated families, particularly those with newborns.

2. Reform Family Co-Pay for Working Connections Child Care

   Early in the pandemic, the Department of Children, Youth and Families waived the family co-pay due to uncertainty around participation in care and also to ease the financial burden on working families. That copay went back into effect on July 1st and the co-payment levels are temporarily capped, with $115 as the maximum co-payment level. The issue of the family co-pay, particularly the cliff that families hit the closer they get to the income thresholds, was identified as problematic long before the pandemic. Long-term copayment reform would provide relief for working families and address the cliff that has long been a barrier.

3. Maintain Working Connections Child Care Rate Increase

   Beginning July 1st, the Working Connections Child Care rate was increased to the 65th percentile of market rate. This increase is funded with CARES funding for State Fiscal Year 21. Ongoing funding is needed to preserve this rate increase. Similar to the family co-pay, the reimbursement rate for Working Connections Child Care has long been problematic. Maintaining this rate increase helps families have greater access while also reimbursing providers closer to the true cost of quality.

4. Preserve Funding for Health and Human Services

   COVID has resulted in far-ranging health and economic impacts for Washingtonians. Our state’s recovery is tied to the availability of systems and services. As such, Start Early supports passage of a fully-funded state budget with adequate revenue to address racial inequity and to fund early learning, child welfare, health and other prevention programs, including home visiting.

In this blog, Amanda Stein, Start Early director of research and evaluation, shares findings and takeaways from our latest research study of pre-K access and enrollment policies in Chicago which aimed to remove obstacles and drive engagement for children and families in underserved neighborhoods.

Equity-Focused Research and Policymaking
At this poignant time, a public health crisis is both holding a magnifying glass to and further exacerbating racial and economic disparities and systemic injustices for young children and their families. The need for equity-focused policy making and research has never been more pronounced. And the field of early care and education (ECE) is no exception.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), in their 2019 position statement on advancing equity in ECE, defines equity as “the state that would be achieved if individuals fared the same way in society regardless of race, gender, class, language, disability, or any other social or cultural characteristic.” This means eliminating “differences in educational outcomes as a result of who children are, where they live, and what resources their families have.”

The Value of Early Care and Education
Given the well-established body of research evidence, there is no doubt that the type and quality of ECE experiences children receive both inside and outside of the home have an impact on their short-term learning and development and later life success. Furthermore, public investments in early education and intervention programs generate savings that benefit the economy long-term.

Yet children, their families, and the broader society are unable to reap the benefits of high-quality ECE programs if children and families are not able to access them. Existing research evidence shows that differential access is an important contributing factor to inequities in enrollment. The long-term benefits associated with strong care and education in the early years make these disparities particularly concerning.

A Focus on Pre-K Access and Enrollment in Chicago
Recently, Start Early partnered with a group of researchers from NORC at the University of Chicago, UChicago Consortium on School Research and policymakers in Chicago to explore whether and how policy efforts in the city helped to create more equity within the district’s early education system for high priority students. We examined access and enrollment to school-based pre-K in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), before and after significant policy changes that began in 2013-14, with a focus on re-allocating pre-K classrooms to schools throughout the city and increasing the number of full-day pre-K classrooms.

The overall goal was to improve access and enrollment for high-priority groups to help them better prepare for success in kindergarten and beyond – including students of color, students speaking a language other than English and students living in neighborhoods with lower income and higher unemployment.

Adopting A Neighborhood-Centered Approach in Chicago
In addition to examining changes in pre-K access and enrollment, we used a “neighborhood-centered” method to explore patterns of access and enrollment based on the neighborhood where students resided.

Our methodology resulted in a concise set of five neighborhoods groupings focused on the characteristics of residents and variations within communities, which is critical to informing policy decisions about how to most equitably allocate services, supports, and resources.

What We Learned: Evidence of Greater Equity
Prior to Chicago’s policy changes in 2013-14, White students and students living in the highest-income neighborhoods had the greatest number of full-day pre-K classrooms nearby and were most likely to enroll in full-day pre-K.

We found evidence of improvements following the policy changes:

• A larger portion of CPS elementary schools offered full-day pre-K, students lived an average of 0.6 miles closer to a school with at least one full-day pre-K and full-day pre-K enrollment rates grew nearly four-fold during the study.
• Enrollment tripled in school-based full-day pre-K among Black students and students living in lowest-income neighborhoods.
• Latinx students were more likely to enroll in full-day pre-K, at slightly lower levels than other groups.

In this blog, Kristin Bernhard, Start Early senior vice president of policy and advocacy, identifies measures voters overwhelmingly approved to improve access to early childhood education at community and state levels.

While large questions remain about the results of yesterday’s presidential election, we are proud and thankful for the overwhelming approval of measures that improve access to early childhood education at community and state levels. Across the country, voters expanded the reach of core early childhood development programs and supports, from paid family leave to universal pre-K. These election results are worth celebrating, as state and community systems are closest to families with young children and play a critical role in building an ecosystem that fosters their well-being.

Voters in Colorado approved a ballot measure that creates a statewide paid family and medical leave program, joining eight other states that offer this imperative benefit. Colorado is the first to accomplish it at the ballot box rather than through the legislature. With this new program, workers can take up to 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new baby or adopted child, recover from an illness or care for a seriously ill relative. Increasing paid family leave is a positive step toward reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health outcomes and allowing more individuals to stay in the workforce.

Voters also approved new funding mechanisms to help finance the creation and expansion of high-quality pre-K programs. In San Antonio, Texas, voters approved Proposition A, renewing a one-eighth-cent sales tax that will continue funding pre-K programs in the city for the next eight years. Additional investments were approved for workforce development and infrastructure. Colorado voters approved a nicotine tax measure that will fund universal free preschool for children of age 4 statewide beginning fall 2023. In Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, voters approved Measure 26-214, known as Preschool for All. Through a tax on high-income residents, the county will provide tuition-free preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds, while also raising the pay of preschool teachers to parity with those of kindergarten teachers. Assistant preschool teachers will be guaranteed a minimum wage of $18 per hour.

In St. Louis, Missouri, voters endorsed a property tax that will raise an estimated $2.3 million annually for birth to age 5 programs and services through the St. Louis Mental Health Board’s Community Children’s Services Fund. This successfully passed measure builds on a collective focus of establishing the city and county of St. Louis as a regional leader in early childhood education.

While we await answers on control of the Senate and the presidency, we applaud these states and communities who have come together to build strong, inclusive and equitable places where families with young children can flourish – from before birth through kindergarten. While the need remains for a more robust national system of early care and education, these victories demonstrate that progress on early childhood can and will continue regardless of what happens at the federal level. We are encouraged by this broad community level engagement to grow support and investment for young children and their families.

Head Start offers a critical opportunity to improve the quality of home-based child care and bolster the sustainability of providers, while enabling Head Start to meet its mission to meet the comprehensive needs of young children and families facing the greatest adversity.

Start Early and its partners supported Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home- based child care, to organize and deliver resources and technical assistance opportunities to potential Round 4 Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP) applicants to increase the number of high-quality EHS-CCP applications supporting family child care home (FCC) providers.

Individuals from 40 states took advantage of the technical assistance opportunities offered to support new and existing Head Start grantees to include family child care in their EHS-CCP proposals. These included well-attended webinars; an online resource library housed on Home Grown’s website; and technical assistance through group and one-on-one peer learning calls.

Bolstered by recent data demonstrating that more parents are seeking smaller home-based child care settings during the pandemic, partnerships between Head Start and home-based child care providers offer promise for dramatically expanding access to high-quality, comprehensive early care and education services in home-based settings and establishing family child care network models that provide critical supports to sustain home-based providers.

Diana Rauner, president of Start Early and Dr. James Heckman, the Nobel prize-winning professor of economics at the University of Chicago kicked off last month’s ASU-GSV Digital Summit with a discussion on the state of innovation in early childhood.

Their discussion ranged from Heckman’s work on long-term impacts of early childhood investments, new ways of measuring social and emotional outcomes, and the importance of investing in parents during these unprecedented times. A video of the discussion and key takeaways are below.

Watch as NEAR@Home facilitators explore topics such as the power of listening, the parallel process and the therapeutic use of self in these meaningful conversations that discuss best practices and aim to empower home visitors.

In this blog post, Melissa Manning, with contributions from Sarah Bergman, share perspectives from the Educare Learning Network’s Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships Community of Practice on rebuilding and recovery post COVID-19. Including, specific thoughts on equitable access to high-quality early care and learning and the need for viewing early childhood systems through a racial equity lens.

In mid-June, after early learning settings were initially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 early learning practitioners from seven states gathered virtually for a Build It Back Better dialogue. The dialogue took place during a meeting of the Educare Learning Network’s Community of Practice for Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership grantees and included leaders of Educare schools and child care providers. Below is a summary of what these leaders in the early childhood field shared about their experience with rebuilding and recovery post-COVID-19:

1. What are some of the hopes, dreams and goals for children that were shared during your Build It Back Better dialogue?

A hope is to provide children with the same educational opportunities as children in more affluent communities, as well as resourcing teachers to support their implementation of best practices in service of children’s school readiness and their own personal growth. We hope that all children will have the opportunity to reach their full potential and want to be mindful of what is needed for staff, communities and families to ensure children have those opportunities. We hope that a young child’s family income, race and/or adverse experiences do not predict their later success. Finally, when we see our kids, especially our Black and Latino kids, we want to be able to give them a fair shake in a world we know is not set up for them currently. Kids in our community who came to our programs are no longer living because of street and police violence. There is hopefulness to see changes to systemic racism in our lifetime.

2. What are some of the worries or concerns for children that were shared? What is keeping people up at night?
Children of color are growing up in a society with a long history of structural, institutionalized racism. So many kids are not in quality programs right now as programs start to reopen in limited capacities. We worry about the domestic and child abuse that might be going unreported right now. We are also worried about the social and emotional development and relationship-based work at every level – including physical contact especially with younger children.

Everything we know about child development is seemingly unavailable during this pandemic. We are worried about what the child care landscape is really going to look like for families. There was a teacher who tested positive the night before school was scheduled to reopen. The Remind app was then used to notify parents of a delayed reopening date. There were 55 families who were scheduled to arrive. Four families did not get the information – one uncle even tried to drop off a little girl, who got so upset that school was not open that day. This incident was a reminder that these kids are at home with family members and wanting to come back. Our kids need these environments. In some cases, we are their stability – their constant.

3. According to participants, how did the supports for young children and families respond or fare? Who has been disproportionately impacted by the challenges?
A positive has been that there was some security built in for families through child care subsidies. There was no parent fee, and slots were saved. Another positive has been smaller group sizes. Adults have time to build relationships with each other and kids.

Some negatives? It is up to states to figure out where their money lands, and that really varies. Also, funding that came through in grant form was insufficient in many cases. Head Start and child care in Illinois are not on the same page, and many programs could not open as emergency care because of the loopholes and discrepancies in policies and procedures. The longer a program stays closed, the harder it is to reopen. The Black Lives Matter movement has had a significant impact on the Educare Seattle community. For equity and racial justice to be a part of what we do, we must understand how white privilege plays out in the child care setting.

4. With respect to concerns or challenges shared, what did participants say has or would help alleviate these issues or make things better?
It would be helpful if different sub-systems were firmly aligned and communicating clear expectations. The conversation should also be raised between public school leaders and local child care providers. Providers want to be responsive to school decisions in order to best serve the community. We are still concerned, though, about how do we partner with families to empower themselves as the most important teacher for their child, while also meeting the need for child care and education? Some families are not quite ready to return on-site, but also not quite comfortable being their child’s teacher.

We want to make sure we are supporting families’ mental health situations and ensuring families have access to services and affordable technology. In order to make things better, we need to be able to manage movement effectively in case someone tests positive for COVID-19. Tulsa Educare was operating 7 a.m. – 6 p.m., and to make it work, there were so many substitutes, interns and aides required. So many folks going in and out. They’ve adjusted, so that now, there are three teachers with children all day. It is so calm. That is a solution that children will really benefit from.

5. As we work together to rebuild the early childhood system, what questions should we all be asking to ensure that ALL young children and families thrive?

We need to ask ourselves: what is it we really want? We need to slow down and have dialogues about this. What is it we want our children to experience? What kind of citizens do we want them to become? What is the role of profit in our child care industry? How can we cultivate more respect for teachers, especially our birth-to-age 5 teachers? Who do we want to be taking over this world? What skills do they need? And of course, in each conversation, we need to ask ourselves, how are the children?

To learn more about how Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership grantees have faced the COVID-19 pandemic and what policy recommendations they have made, please read the Educare Learning Network’s blog series “A Path to High-Quality Child Care through Partnerships.”

Build It Back Better is a project of Start Early (formerly the Ounce) focused on identifying the critical questions that early childhood systems and services must ask as we rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic. The writings that emerge from the initiative center the experiences and voices of those most directly and disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact on early care and learning. Join the conversation at the Early Child Connector’s Recovery and Rebuilding Hub.

Melissa Manning is the Early Childhood Services Training and Professional Development Coordinator at Sunbeam Family Services and Co-Chair of the Educare Learning Network’s Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships Community of Practice. Melissa has been in the field of early childhood education for three decades in a variety of capacities including, Infant/Toddler teacher, Center Director, Health Services Manager, Program Operations Manager, Quality Assessor and her current role as Training & Professional Development Coordinator for Sunbeam Family Services’ Early Childhood department. Melissa has worked with Head Start programs since 2002 and has extensive knowledge about Head Start Program Performance Standards, nonprofit management and best practices in the field.

Sarah Bergman was the Leadership and Educational Equity Fellow at Start Early this past summer. Sarah has her Master’s in Early Childhood Education from Erikson Institute and is a Chicago Public Schools teacher. Sarah’s interests are focused on bringing developmentally appropriate teaching practices to all primary aged students and connecting the dots between policy decisions and everyday life in the classroom.