Our chance to build a reliable future for our kids

It’s natural to hear the term “early childhood” and think of pre-Kindergarten programs, but it actually encompasses birth to Kindergarten, including infants and toddlers. I began my career as an early childhood educator 21 years ago and, based on that experience, I can say emphatically that what happens in those years — from birth to Kindergarten — sets the foundation for every grade a child enters through their elementary and high school years.

We have all read or heard about the research indicating that success in earlier developmental years leads to an increased likelihood of success later. But what most people may not know is that Kindergarten curriculum today is academic, with inherent expectations of kids, requiring them to sit for up to 90 minutes at a time, or assuming social emotional skills needed for cooperative learning. If your child enters Kindergarten without having learned things like self-regulation or social emotional health, they are already behind their peers who have received that learning. Waiting until a child is 5 years old to introduce such learning to them is too late.

Of course, parents are a child’s first teacher, but most parents also need to work to provide for their families, let alone spend up to 20 percent of their income on getting the high-quality care and education for their child’s success. Moreover, during the COVID pandemic, we parents learned that adding the “teacher” role to our already long and daunting list of responsibilities at home was incredibly difficult. That’s why it is so important we prioritize attaining and retaining those dedicated early childhood educators whose job it is to provide the high-quality resources to our kids in their earliest years. These individuals love their jobs and they deserve a living wage and career ladder.

Because I am an educator in the public school system now, I have a better wage and I feel valued, thanks in no small part to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and her administration prioritizing teachers and the hard work that we do here in New Mexico. But I’ve worked in the private early childhood sector before, where today’s educators make as little as $12 an hour, with no benefits or health insurance and, in some cases, face being laid off when centers run out of money.

This is what makes the potential for approving Constitutional Amendment 1 so special — it would be a direct and targeted infusion of roughly $150 million into the programs, people and resources that serve our children before they reach elementary school — before it’s too late. Rather than just throwing more money into an overwhelmed system without a strategy, the logic behind this tiny increase to drawing down the Permanent School Fund is that money would be focused thoughtfully on what we know works — home visits, universal pre-K, and interventions for at-risk children and families.

We can build a strong, sustainable early childhood workforce and as a result, generations of kids who begin school with the skills and learnings so crucial to their success as students, and as human beings. We voters have an opportunity to make that change and put our power at the polls behind the important work of building a reliable and sustainable future for our kids and for our state.

That’s why I am proudly voting YES on Constitutional Amendment 1 and hope you will, too.