Sen. Bob Casey touts legislative plan aimed at helping kids during visit to Centre County
Senator Bob Casey, D-Pa., stopped in Centre County Tuesday and visited Step by Step School for Early Learning to talk about the importance of quality early childhood education.
Casey spoke about his “Five Freedoms for America’s Children” agenda, an update of what his office announced in early 2020 that reflects the COVID-19 pandemic as well as some progress that has been made, he said.
The five freedoms outlined in the legislative plan include the freedom to be healthy, to be economically secure, to learn, freedom from hunger and freedom to be safe from harm.
Freedom to learn is a goal to make sure every child has opportunities for early learning, he said, which could be child care, Head Start or Early Head Start.
“The only problem with some of these programs is, you have a huge gap between those who are eligible for Head Start and those who are being served, those who are eligible for assistance for child care and those receiving assistance. So you’ve got to make sure that at least, at a minimum, the families and the children that are currently eligible are going to be able to be served and that’s just not possible under current funding,” Casey said.
His initiative calls for increasing Head Start funding by $18 billion annually.
While Casey’s proposal includes how to make these centers accessible and affordable to families, the owners say they are facing other challenges, including staffing and adequate pay for the staff, Rachel Johnson, co-owner of Step by Step said.
“I know everybody talks about being affordable for families but honestly ... staff in this field are not making — cannot make — a livable wage,” she said. More support is needed from the government and outside sources.
She and co-owner Rob Johnson were happy to have Casey at their school’s Sandy Drive location to shine a spotlight on early childhood education. To most people without children, early childhood education is out of sight and out of mind, Rob Johnson said.
“If you don’t have a child if ... you don’t need (early childhood education) to get work, I think that people don’t realize how valuable it is. I think a lot of the pandemic kind of brought that to light, because a lot of centers shut down or took a year off, and parents didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said.
Centers can’t be high-quality without quality staff. That can be hard with high turnover. Many staff can go elsewhere and make more money, Rachel Cessna, director of Step by Step, said.
While at Step by Step, Casey read a book to the pre-K class and observed a science experiment.
“They were learning about chemical reactions at a younger age than I could ever remember learning about chemical reactions. It’s just really helpful to be able to see it literally come alive in the lives of children at a place like this,” he said.
The legislative plan was introduced in June. If each of Casey’s ideas became law, he said it could be funded by “making the tax code a lot fairer to families.” His website states a number of tax changes could be enacted to carry out the proposed policies. Those include increasing the corporate tax rate, reducing the tax gap, establish a 15% corporate minimum tax, among others.
