R-E-S-P-E-C-T: MetroWest early childhood educators have a message for state officials

FRAMINGHAM — Early childhood educators made their voices clear when state officials visited the city last week: We want respect.

"We are not just child care, we are not just day care as a field," said Heidi Kaufman, director of education at the MetroWest YMCA in Framingham. "To be recognized for that is helpful. (But) Personally, I feel devalued and minimized when I'm called as working in child care, because that is a only a small part of what I do. From a workforce perspective, very few people would like to be a child care worker — a lot more people would like to be an early childhood educator."

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Local pre-school teachers and administrators met Wednesday with various state officials, including Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler and Commissioner for Early Education and Care Amy Kershaw during a listening sessions at MassBay Community College's Framingham campus.

The listening session was among 13 that Gov. Maura Healey's Early Education and Child Care Task Force is holding throughout the state. The task force, created earlier this year, is represented by every department in Healey's purview, including the Department of Transportation and Labor and Workforce Development, to try and combine forces to help increase preschool access throughout the state.

A constant theme coming from educators during the Framingham meeting was that in order to improve early childhood services, staffing must be adequate for pre-schools and early childhood care centers. That means being able to pay staffers competitive salaries, which can come at the cost of making child care and preschool affordable for families.

"The biggest barrier for us is trying to find ways to pay our workforce without pricing out our families," said Kat Horion, executive director for The Children's Center of Brookline .

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The issue of preschool access has an ongoing issue in the city, with Framingham Public Schools reporting last year that 60% of 3- and 4-year-olds in the city are not attending any form of preschool. Educators believe that causes a significant gap among students once they enter kindergarten, with many of them lacking the social and emotional skills their peers developed while attending preschool.

One goal of the Healey administration has been to expand preschool access into so-called Gateway Cities, defined as midsized urban centers that anchor regional economies; Framingham is among them. Last November, Healey announced a goal to make preschool universal in Gateway Cities by 2026.

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"We are intimately aware of the challenges in Gateway Cities around pre-k access, it is one of the reasons the governor announced the Gateway to Pre-K Initiative , which is aimed at creating universal access to preschool in all Gateway Cities by 2026," Tutwiler said. "The pathway toward that is through a program called the Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative , which is funded through the current fiscal year for $22 million and creates a mechanism that allows school districts to partner with pre-k providers in the community to create pre-k access opportunities."

Part of that goal involves implementing Commonwealth Cares for Children grants (C3) . The monthly grants use federal and state funding to help child care centers make payroll without passing costs on to families.

The program has been successful, so successful that the state had to institute changes this spring to reduce payments made to child care centers that had less than 33% of students attending receiving state child care financial assistance (known as "vouchers"). This decision was criticized by preschool educators during the meeting for not being an adequate way to distinguish needs for families and providers, due to some students enrolling in preschool through other means of financial assistance that was not coming from the state.

"The C3 funding has been really incredible, as it relates to our ability to increase educator salaries," Kaufman said. "With this funding we've made great progress in terms of quality and accessibility. The strict definition of subsidies included only kids on vouchers in contracted slots, so that means kids fully funded through different programs. It also doesn't include children that received YMCA financial assistance."

Early childhood workers seek greater recognition of professionalism

Lisa McElaney, an early childhood mental health coordinator, said that while her job is mainly working with children, she has found herself increasingly working with stressed out and overwhelmed staff members. She said a majority of the staff with which she works are not full-time professionals.

"We polled 80 of the educators that we provide consultation to last year, and 70 of them work at least one other job, and 60 of them work two other jobs, and that second or third job doesn't include parenting or grandparenting," McElaney said.

Tutwiler said that after seven listening sessions, a desire for greater professionalization and respect by people working in preschool settings has been a constant topic.

"There is a concern about this idea of the de-professionalization of the early education sector, when we know what the research tells us about the very important work that they do," he said. "There are lesson plans, there is teaching happening, and the research validates how important all that work is. We've heard a lot of that and we want to be part of the solution around addressing that concern."

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: R-E-S-P-E-C-T: MetroWest early childhood educators have a message for state officials