Investments in early childhood education long overdue in Pennsylvania | Opinion

Pennsylvania’s children and families are facing a crisis. Parents are unable to find reliable and high-quality child care due to a critical shortage of child care workers, Early Intervention providers, and pre-K educators.

Most Pennsylvanians believe that children are our future and the well-being of all children is important to the health of communities. And parents know that laying a strong foundation for children while they are infants and toddlers is critical to their long-term health and well-being.

Early intervention for children and families provides critical support and resources. Strong preschool makes it more likely that children will succeed as they move through elementary and secondary school. We know that high-quality child care produces improved math and language ability, reduces the likelihood of grade repetition and generally contributes to children’s healthy development.

However, finding reliable, high-quality child care and pre-K is incredibly difficult in Pennsylvania. Even those parents who can afford child care face long waitlists and the situation is much worse for low-income families.

As a former director of a child care facility, there were days that Heather wore many hats — cook, infant caretaker, PreK teacher — while managing the facility just to keep open the classrooms that hard-working families relied on.

Sometimes, however, the facility had to close due to a lack of funding and staff. Consequently, parents, often essential workers — police officers, teachers, doctors — were unable to go to work themselves, causing a ripple effect through the community.

Seventy-two percent of low-income families with children under 5 who are eligible for subsidized child care are unserved. There are currently more than 3,000 unfilled child care positions in Pennsylvania. Filling these vacancies would provide access for 25,000 more children and their parents to safe, high-quality child care.

The benefits of high-quality child care and investment in early intervention are not limited to children, however. Research shows that high-quality child care has a positive impact on parents’ earning potential, generates increased employment and tax revenues and increases job retention and productivity for employers.

According to Start Strong PA, the economic impact of the child care crisis is staggering, costing the commonwealth $6.65 billion dollars a year in lost wages, productivity and tax receipts.

Last year, Governor Josh Shapiro expanded the child and dependent tax credit, easing the burden on families. A clear next step to alleviating the commonwealth’s child care crisis is to find solutions to ease the burden on the workforce.

Many educated and trained child care workers simply cannot afford to work in the field. Child care workers currently make less annually than parking attendants, housekeepers and retail salespersons.

Across the country, states led by both Democrats and Republicans, have shown that investing in early childhood care and education works. In addition to investing in recruitment, retention or wage impacting strategies to solve the child care teacher shortage, states as diverse as New Mexico, Virginia and Minnesota have made investments in the child care workforce and seen positive outcomes.

Pennsylvania policymakers have the opportunity to demonstrate the same care for Pennsylvania children thanks to investments brought by the Governor’s budget proposal.

For the first time since 2007, the Governor’s budget proposes a new line item for early education. The budget includes significant increases to support early childhood education, including $55 million dollars to provide retention and recruitment bonuses to child care workers that will assist with finding and keeping qualified workers and teachers. An additional $10 million has been proposed to increase Early Intervention provider rates, so that every child across the commonwealth will have access to the support and services they need to succeed. On top of this funding, $15 million is proposed to raise wages for Pre-K Counts educators and stabilize the program’s workforce.

These investments are long overdue.

If we truly care about our children, and if we want to create healthy families to build strong communities, then we must invest the resources to make that happen.

Our children have the potential to grow beyond all we can imagine. It’s time we invest in the child care workers who lay the foundation for their success.