State early child care gets $10M boost
Federal grant supports efforts to prepare kids for kindergarten
Efforts to improve the kindergarten readiness of Wisconsin children are getting a boost with a $10 million federal grant aimed at improving access across the state to affordable, high-quality child care and early childhood programming, Gov. Tony Evers’ office announced this week.
Evers said in a statement that a Preschool Development Birth to Five Grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would be used to address the “pervasive challenges around equity, access, quality and affordability.”
“The first years of a kid’s life set the tone for their future success,” Evers said in the announcement.
“Right now, many families struggle to find affordable and reliable care for their kids before they reach school age. This grant provides us with an opportunity to clear some of those hurdles and to connect the dots for our kids and their families.”
Wisconsin’s efforts are part of a broader push nationally to improve access to affordable, high-quality infant and toddler childcare and preschool programs and to ensure more equitable access for low-income children and children of color.
They are driven by a growing consensus that the experiences of children in the first years of life can have profound effects on their development, their academic and career outcomes and society as a whole.
Research suggests that poor children who have high-quality early childhood experiences — not just babysitting, but interactions that nurture brain development — are more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college, be employed as adults and less likely to spend time in jail.
Compared to the later-life costs of welfare, incarceration, medical care and addiction treatment, “there are few if any public investments that will yield a better return” than spending on early childhood care and education, Arthur Rolnick, an economist who incorporates neuroscience into his analyses, told the Journal Sentinel in an earlier interview.
In Wisconsin, there are 400,000 children age 5 and younger, one in five of whom lives in poverty, according to the state. Three-fourths of them have all available parents in the workforce.
Over half of Wisconsin’s children live in a “child care desert,” where there is just one licensed child care seat for every three children, and some counties have no licensed providers at all, according to research conducted by the liberal Center for American Progress.
A recent study by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation found that only one in five Milwaukee pre-schoolers lived reasonably close to a licensed child care facility in 2018 and that the lack of access disproportionately affected African-American and Hispanic children.
And even when it’s nearby, it’s often too expensive for families to access. According to the state’s grant application, the average cost of infant care is about $12,567, 18.5% of Wisconsin’s median family income and 83.3% of the yearly wages of a minimum wage worker.
As part of the grant, the state will improve its data collection and create a system to better-assess the early childhood and education needs around the state, and it will fund what it considers innovative and promising initiatives to address those needs. Among its priorities will be efforts to improve the recruitment, retention of childcare and early education employees in what has traditionally been a notoriously lowpaid field.
“It really will be looking at the entire early childhood system — family-based programs, center-based, linking with
Head Start and Early Head Start,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, one of a number of community partners that will work with the state as part of the grant.
“The key thing is getting low-income children and high-risk children into high-quality, affordable care.”
Funds from the grant would be used to, among other things:
❚ Provide training and coaching for teachers in children’s social and emotional development in an effort to reduce suspensions and expulsions in early childhood settings.
❚ Provide scholarships for earlychildhood teachers.
❚ Expand Wisconsin’s use of the Leading Men Fellowship, a program that encourages young men of color to consider careers in early childhood.
❚ Create a pilot lead-remediation program for early childhood providers, which would provide funds to install and maintain filters, replace lead fixtures and service lines and other cleanwater initiatives.
Contact Annysa Johnson at anjohnson@jrn.com or 414-224-2061. Follow her on Twitter at @JSEdbeat. And join the Journal Sentinel conversation about education issues at www. facebook.com/groups/Wisconsin Education.