An investment in Child Care is an investment in Rhode Island's future - The Boston Globe

As a working mother, I struggled to afford child care when my children needed it. That’s no surprise, because high quality infant care can cost more than tuition at the University of Rhode Island.

Luckily, I had amazing family support including my Aunt Gloria, who watched my children until they entered Pre-K. There was little to no public pre-K in my city or surrounding area, and the private pre-K bills left little extra money in our monthly family finances, so I was constantly worried. However, I knew it was worth it because I watched my children blossom in early childhood education, developing good social skills and foundational literacy skills.

Now, my kids are well on their way to adulthood, and I remain dedicated to helping all of the Rhode Island caregivers who need child care support.

When Covid-19 shut down our child care programs in March 2020, working parents struggled to balance their responsibilities at home and work during the chaos of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time the child care industry reopened in June 2020, they were heroic and focused on keeping our kids and families safe. Unfortunately, with the threat of the Delta variant and the lack of vaccinations for young children, the pandemic is far from over in the early childhood sector. Perhaps now more than ever, our child care industry is at a crisis point, as the rest of the economy re-opens and child care cannot compete with other industries for talent at the wages they currently pay.

This is an equity issue. Working as an early childhood educator is a high-skill but unfairly low-wage job. As U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pointed out recently: “About 90 percent of child care workers are women, and disproportionately women of color. They make, on average, $27,000 a year, which puts ‘child care worker’ in the bottom 2 percent of occupations. Many rely on social services to make ends meet.” This is certainly true in Rhode Island. Some of these women are also the sole providers for their own families.

All of our children and families deserve high-quality child care options in their communities that meet their cultural and linguistic needs.

Every day, we hear from the child care providers in our communities about how difficult it has been to attract and retain staff for these essential jobs. High-quality early learning is fundamental to later academic success for our children, and a big part of quality care is having trained, dedicated and experienced early educators. These important educators deserve to be compensated fairly for their work; however, child care providers cannot raise wages without public investment since the cost of care is already unaffordable for many families.

The child care industry is unable to open to full capacity and meet the demand from families seeking to return to work because of the severe workforce shortages. Unless Rhode Island addresses the workforce shortage crisis in child care, and pays these workers a fair wage, this will continue to be a problem. Rhode Island needs to retain the current workforce, increase wages, and open additional early education capacity for families.

With the investment of some federal funding, Governor Dan McKee is taking bold action, making a down payment proposal – Rhode Island Rebounds — to invest in child care through premium pay. The Governor’s plan calls for investing $13 million to provide retention bonuses to supplement baseline wages for more than 8,200 childcare workers, as well as assistance to new family child care providers entering a market that needs expanded capacity. His proposal will retain this experienced workforce, recruit more talent, cover some start-up costs for new family child care providers, and encourage entrepreneurs – many of them women of color -- to open up their own child care centers and start their own small businesses.

In the coming weeks, the governor will be in conversations with our General Assembly to get these critical funds in the hands of our child care workers. In addition to the child care investments, our Governor is proposing investments in our DCYF direct care staff, our pediatric healthcare recovery, and our early intervention workforce. These investments are pieces of our larger health and human services investment strategy, and they are the pieces that need to be implemented now as our providers continue their response to COVID-19 and its aftereffects.

We are committed to partnering with our colleagues in State government to make this happen. We have an opportunity to make a real difference – for these sectors, for working parents and caregivers, for our children, and for the future of our State.

Womazetta Jones is Rhode Island’s Health and Human Services Secretary and a mother of three.

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An investment in Child Care is an investment in Rhode Island's future - The Boston Globe
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