This week’s post comes in the form of a vlog* and is from contributor Bradford Wiles. Scroll down for a transcript of the audio.
Health means…increasing the proportion of children who participate in high-quality early childhood education programs.
*According to Merriam-Webster, a vlog is a blog that contains video material.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, my name is Bradford Wiles and I’m an associate professor and Extension specialist in early childhood development here at Kansas State University.
And here on the health means blog today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what might be coming down the pike for early childhood care and education and how that will bolster the health and well-being of our communities. And so what we see in the funding for early childhood care and education, the American Rescue Plan give us a really nice cash infusion of around $348. million. And those are split between essentially recovery grants and sustainability grants and I talked about those in the last blog post so please take a look.
But what I’m going to talk with you about today on the policy side of things is also around the legislation that is slated to be voted on in the House and the Senate and the primary one is the Childcare for Working Families Act, and this is legislation that has been brought to the Senate before. It did not pass but typically we see that, where initial bills don’t always get passed but it takes two or three times to get them there.
And one of the things that they focus on is reducing the fiscal burden for families, the proposal is 7% but the Health and Human Services has the barrier around 10% so I imagine there’s some flexibility there between what they will propose and what they might be able to get through.
But for context. Families earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level are spending about 35%, on average, for childcare, when 10% should be the max. Families that are 200 to 400% of the federal poverty levels are spending about 14%, and then you only get to the 7%, if you’re more than 600% of the federal poverty level which is around $150,000 per household. And so we can see that that would make a significant difference in the availability of funds for low income families or even low and middle class families.
Another element is to increase the wages for early childhood care providers that are essentially in line with public school workers.
This makes a lot of sense they’re essentially credentialed almost the exact same way, and have similar levels of training for in-classroom teachers.
They’re also focused on the quality insurances, you know quality integrity or quality rating systems. And of course, increasing the supply as the demand far outstrips supply in our state and many, many others.
And finally, they’re really interested in expanding preschool care so three to four year olds through the state public education system. And so we’ll see where those things go, but it seems quite likely, it seems to be a shared agreement with the Congress and the house that childcare is an important investment in America, and we know that there are health consequences and health outcomes that come from access to high quality, affordable childcare, that are not just the individual who’s receiving the care but also the families themselves. So you know as you can imagine the stress level is reduced when one has access to quality affordable childcare. And of course, there’s the added benefit of the academic education and the social and emotional experiences that young children get in high quality childcare.
So, to me, health means access to quality affordable childcare as a function of individual family and community health.
