NEWSLETTER
The state of early care and education today is, in a word, unsustainable.
That is what they found a recent survey of 10,000 early childhood educators, and it is what suppliers continue to share anecdotally.
With pandemic in the rearview mirror and Accompanying financing Now the field brought a memory that vanishes: many early education suppliers discover that they cannot keep up with the growing costs, staff scarcity and moral low.
In January, the National Association for the Education of Small Children (NAEYC), a non -profit defense group that works to promote early learning of high quality, surveyed Early childhood educators in all states and environments, including central programs, based on home, Head Start and Public Preschool.
“What we see in this survey is alarming and not surprising,” says Daniel Hains, managing director of Policies and Professional Advance in Naeyc.
Around a third of the suppliers who responded informed having paid more for rent this year than the previous year, while almost half said they are paying more for property insurance and civil liability insurance.
“Everything is uploading all the time,” says Meredith Burton, director of the Childhood Development Center of the University of Furman, a small two classes program in Greenville, South Carolina.
Burton has the unique advantage of operating its program within a building owned by the University, which does not charge its rent, but everything else, from public services to cleaning and food supplies, has continued to increase since 2020, she says.
That reality makes it almost impossible to pay the habitable salaries of the staff, much less pay them what they deserve, without forcing the programs to be, many suppliers have found.
After 28 years working in early childhood, the Jennifer Trippett program experienced a budget deficit for the first time in 2024. In response, it had to increase enrollment prices in families by 20 percent in January. More than half (55 percent) of the suppliers surveyed by NaeyC in January said they had also raised the registration in the last year.
Even with this adjustment of the registration, Trippett, who is the director of the Cubby Children's Care Center in Bridgeport, West Virginia, the largest license program in the state, which serves around 450 children every day, is “seriously contemplating” closing some of their classrooms in August, when the children registered until the next age band.
“I am fighting every day with the staff,” he admits. “Every day, I am walking on egg canoeras: 'Who will they cancel? Who do we have to cover?' It is every day.
In 2019, before the pandemic, Trippett paid his staff about the same salaries as the Walmart, Target and Hospitality companies paid their employees. It worked well, since some people preferred to be close to young children, and she could guarantee regular business hours, while the other work required some shifts at night and weekends.
Today, that is not the case. Those same employers have doubled their initial salaries, according to Trippett, and “I have not been able to follow the rhythm,” he said.
Cubby's pays his staff between $ 12 and $ 16 per hour. Meanwhile, the local service station begins employees at $ 15.50 per hour, he says, and “my 15 -year -old niece began at $ 12 per hour in the mall.”
Trippett is in the same Catch-22 that so many other suppliers of early education: he really needs to give his staff an increase to compete with other companies in the community, but he cannot ask the families registered in their program to pay more than they do. Already, he says, he is charging more than many can pay.
This is emblematic of what thousands of suppliers shared in the Naeyc survey. More than half said their programs were insufficient compared to what they would like to see. When asked why, 41 percent said that parents cannot pay the cost of care, and 37 percent said their compensation is too low to recruit and retain qualified personnel.
Burton, the South Carolina supplier, feels that, after a momentary impulse in the status during the worst days of the pandemic, the public has once again forgotten early childhood educators.
Hains, from Naeyc, confirmed that many suppliers feel that way. He described him as a return to an “uncomfortable status quo.”
“It feels almost like a slap for many suppliers,” says Burton. “Here we were being recognized as an essential workforce, and now we return to:” Work as hard as you can, as many hours as you can, for low salaries and almost without benefits, and we still hope you deliver the highest possible quality. “That is not sustainable to anyone.
In fact, almost half (47 percent) of suppliers in the survey said that their exhaustion has worsened in the last year, attributing its condition to low wages, physical and mental demands of work, and inappropriate resources to face the challenges of development and behavior of children.
Burton can attest to all that, including navigation of the best way to meet children with “very specific needs that we had never found before.”
“It has definitely become more difficult,” says Burton. “I love what I do, (but) I am tired most of the time, not necessarily physically tired, only emotionally and mentally exhausted.”
She adds: “A large part of that is the expectation that I set out.
Although it is not reflected in the survey, Hains says that he has recently had conversations with suppliers that are experiencing “concern, confusion and uncertainty” about the burst of changes that arise from the federal government.
The freezing of temporary funds in February caused some panic, since affected Several Head Start programs, he acknowledges. Many educators are also worried about Medicaid destinationThat around 230,000 of them, or one in four nationwide, trust health insurance.
Financing interruptions and setbacks arrive at a time when the field needs more public investment, no less, says Hains.
“We have become accustomed to how bad things are and how much people are fighting,” he acknowledges. “But this is still a crisis, even if we have become accustomed to the crisis.”
