As employers and workers who have been operating with remote structures since the pandemic return to in-person or hybrid work, we cannot miss this critical moment to address what the pandemic has laid bare: The early education and child care field is broken, and working parents — women in particular — are bearing the brunt of the consequences.

For the sake of the well-being of working parents, children and our economy, it is essential that we act to provide flexibility for working parents in the short term as affordable and accessible early education and child care remains challenging in the coming months and years.

At the same time, we must also make significant changes — including bolstering the financial stability of providers, raising wages for early-education professionals and reducing per-child costs for families — to begin the urgently needed work of overhauling our child-care system for the long term. Long closures, increased costs for cleaning, and reduced capacity upon reopening from the pandemic created a shortage of child-care seats and long wait lists for families, with some providers choosing not to reopen at all. Yet the sector has long strained under a tenuous financial model, with low wages for early education professionals, astronomical per-child costs for families, and individual child-care businesses facing constant financial instability and risk of operating at a loss.

Thanks to inadequate investment from government at all levels, child care has been an industry that is unaffordable for most working families, barely solvent on the provider end, and in many cases, offers poverty wages for early educators. Given the stringent income criteria for Head Start, many low- to middle-income families don’t qualify for any subsidy and often pay upwards of $30,000 a year per child. Pre-pandemic, the Economic Policy Institute reported that many families now spend more on child care than on college tuition over the course of a child’s life. And troubling data show that over the last year, a staggering number of working parents, particularly women and women of color, have been forced to leave the workforce due to a lack of child care. A few states have taken action to stabilize costs, but not nearly enough.

Studies undertaken last year found that state-level policies that mandated the closure of child-care centers or imposed class-size restrictions increased the unemployment rate of mothers of young children in the short term. Nationally, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of Latinas (57.1%) and Black, non-Hispanic women (53.6%), reported a loss of income since March 2020, compared to 41% of white, non-Hispanic men and 40.4% of white, non-Hispanic women. Further, many working parents have weathered this temporary disruption in care thanks to flexibility from their employers, but that flexibility is much more common among affluent, higher-income workers with the ability to work from home, than it is among lower-wage, service industry and blue-collar workers.

The state Department of Early Education and Care recently reported that 90% of pre-pandemic licensed provider slots have returned in the state, a figure that has been increasing in recent months. Though this sounds promising, the incredible instability of the child care and early-educator workforce capacity is still evident, with widespread shortages reported — not shocking, given the salaries are consistently at or just above minimum wage. Many early educators work multiple jobs to make ends meet, with many having families of their own. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, 92% of the child-care workforce in Massachusetts are women and 41% are women of color.

We must tackle both the wage problem within the child-care industry and our family-friendly workplace benefits, flexibility, and culture if we hope to equitably get our region back to work.

Luckily, momentum is building at the municipal, state and federal levels for transformational change to this system. The expansion of the child tax credit in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was significant for cash strapped families. Further, communities across the commonwealth and the Legislature are eyeing ARPA dollars for investment in the early education industry, especially for communities heavily impacted by Covid-19 and child-care shortages.

Groups like the Common Start Coalition and the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education are building a movement of parents, early educators, organizations, and business leaders for lasting change. Most significant is the proposal by President Biden in the American Families Plan to make early-education programs for 3- and 4-year-olds free and to cap child-care and early-education costs for families at 7% of their income. The president’s efforts are buttressed by tremendous effort by members of our congressional delegation, especially U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, U.S. Rep.Ayanna Pressley and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Our state must step up to complement these efforts by expanding tax credits for families with children, and act quickly to explore and adopt greater flexibility and a range of family-friendly benefits, including child care. We are encouraged by state Senate President Karen Spilka’s plan to rethink and adequately fund intergenerational care models as part of the Legislature’s appropriation of ARPA funds, and hope the final product includes a robust new investment in the child-care system.

At the local level, municipal officials should be engaging in conversations about how to encourage new child-care centers and keep the ones they already have, and ensure they reduce roadblocks related to zoning, onerous parking requirements and other local ordinances that keep new centers from opening or thriving. It is critical that the business community support these efforts at all levels of government with gusto.

This system was broken before the pandemic, and the past several months exacerbated the crisis for families struggling to balance work and child care, as well as the providers who are trying to provide that essential care. Now is the time for a sustainable reform to this system that treats early education as the essential component of the fabric of our life that it is.

Saskia Epstein is vice president for client and community relations at PNC Bank. Lizzi Weyant is director of government affairs for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC).

---
Original story HERE