Welcome back, let’s catch up.
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It’s good to be in your inboxes again. The EdNC team took a sabbatical in July — a month jam-packed with early childhood news. Let’s take a look back, and then a look toward the coming months.
The state legislature convened and passed a test-out option for people to qualify to work in early childhood programs.
The minimum requirement to work in a licensed child care program in the state was one community college course. Now people can instead take a test to earn the NC Early Childhood Credential.
Some early childhood advocates and providers are concerned that the change was a step toward lower quality. But others are hoping it will open the field to a larger pool of experienced people, such as teachers from other states, during a period of staffing shortages.
Early childhood faculty members at community colleges are developing this test, along with other initiatives to address both the short-term crisis and the long-term early childhood teacher pipeline issues. They’re working on:
- Early childhood apprenticeships.
- Sped-up courses to get teachers credentialed more quickly.
- College credit for prior learning through a “challenge exam.”
More on what the legislative session meant for early care and education below.
Congress did not act on child care.
Child care investments did not make it into Congress’s reconciliation package as advocates hoped. The bill focuses on efforts to slow climate change and increase health care access.
Many providers and advocates in North Carolina were hopeful that the federal government’s large-scale investments could have made a big difference for children and families.
Providers are worried about next year.
Without action from Congress, providers and advocates are more nervous about next spring, when stabilization funds that programs have largely been using to increase wages run out. The long session — when the state legislature will craft its budget for the next two fiscal years — is the next chance for more public funding for the system. But we will not have a budget before that funding cliff.
How many programs will have to close, due to staffing shortages or other financial challenges, remains to be seen.
As school starts back, EdNC is hitting the road again.
The EdNC team is visiting all 58 community colleges this fall. We’re focusing on some specific research areas, including early care and education. I’m excited to spend time with early childhood students, faculty, providers — and of course folks outside of early childhood too!
We’ll be asking about how colleges are responding to workforce needs, addressing compensation in the field, and providing child care support to students. I’ll see some of you on the road. For the rest of you, don’t hesitate to reach out with story ideas, questions, or just to connect.
Thanks for reading!
Early years at the GA: Updates from the legislature
Besides adding the test-out option for prospective early childhood teachers, the General Assembly:
- Allocated $9 million in recurring funds to increase rates that programs receive to serve 4-year-olds enrolled in NC Pre-K. This money is intended to increase teacher wages in private programs. Both public schools and private programs house NC Pre-K classrooms.
- Used federal pandemic relief money from the American Rescue Plan Act to temporarily increase the rates that programs receive to serve children through the state’s subsidy program, which partially covers the cost of care for eligible working parents or caregivers. Those funds ($206-215 million) will run out in September 2024. This moved the rates from ones based on a 2015 market rate survey to rates based on a 2018 survey. But experts say those rates are based more on what parents can afford than on the true cost of high-quality care.
- Changed the rules on criminal background checks to align with federal requirements and required the Division of Child Development and Early Education to report back to the legislature on the impact of that shift.
Early Bird reads: What we’re writing
Pre-K suspensions and expulsions can have dire effects — but we don’t know how common they are
I’m so proud of my early childhood colleague Katie Dukes, who this week brought us her first look at the state of exclusionary discipline practices in early childhood settings.
Suspensions and expulsions in the early years can have harmful effects — on brain development, mental health, and educational outcomes. But no one knows exactly how often these practices are used.
Dukes unpacks why these are harmful and what kinds of efforts are under way in North Carolina to better understand the problem. She’ll be looking next into solutions to reduce these practices.
Your take, for goodness sake: EdNC perspectives
Perspective | What does college have to do with newborns? Everything, it turns out
“College is expensive,” Book Harvest CEO Ginger Young and consultant and long-time child advocate Carl Rist write.
“And many parents, rightfully and understandably, see it as out of reach for their children. Yet research by Professor Willie Elliott from the University of Michigan finds that children who have college savings of as little as $1-$499 are three times more likely to attend college and two-and-a-half times more likely to graduate than those who do not.”
In other early learning news: What I’m reading
Research & Resources: Let’s talk pandemic home-based care
Researchers from the University of California and Northwestern University looked at the impact of the pandemic on North Carolina early childhood programs. What they found is consistent with what we already know: large enrollment declines, not many closures. But their paper does provide some concrete numbers and some interesting details on provider type:
- Child care centers lost about 858 children on average per county. Centers had a 41% drop in enrollment statewide.
- Family child care homes, on the other hand, lost about 14 children per county. Their enrollment dropped only 19%.
- About two centers closed per county from February to December 2020, while the number of home-based providers increased by 4%.
- These closures affected the highest-quality programs only (rated 5-star on the state’s scale).
- Counties with higher percentages of Hispanic residents had higher closures than those with smaller Hispanic populations.
The researchers guessed that home-based providers’ flexible schedules, smaller group sizes, and lower tuition rates helped them fare better than centers during the start of the pandemic.
