It’s Back-to-School Time But For Youngest Learners System Not Always Working

As children go back to school this month, families of the youngest learners still struggle with the costs of our patchwork, mostly-privatized childcare and preschool system. The problem with early education costs is a national one : parents struggle to afford the costs of childcare, which in many cases outpaces the cost of a mortgage, and early educators struggle with the economic reality of being one of the most underpaid professions in the country .

However, the problem is even more acute in Virginia, where K-12 teacher pay lags behind other states and compensation for childcare providers lag even further behind. Virginia preschool teachers, teaching four year-olds, tend to make approximately $20,000 less than their kindergarten teacher counterparts , who teach five year-olds. In many regions, the pay is barely enough for early education teachers to keep afloat

In Harrisonburg, early education teachers make approximately $12/hr, just above the Virginia state minimum wage, and in comparatively-well paid Arlington, the ~$19/hr that preschool teachers make means that they would have to work 122 hours a month just to pay rent on the average one-bedroom apartment in their community. Virginia’s Early Head Start teachers earn a salary that is in the bottom quarter of all the states that offer the program, and the Black and Brown women that disproportionately make up the population of early educators are also affected by both gender and racial pay gaps .

Those low salaries do not translate to affordable programs for families, however; a 2023 JLARC report shows that childcare in Virginia is unaffordable for 85% of families with infants and 74% of families with preschoolers. For low-income Virginia families, 97% cannot afford childcare or preschool .

“The General Assembly has been nibbling around the edges of this problem for years, but they have yet to take any real comprehensive action to help either families struggling with the costs of care or early educators who can’t make enough in their field to pay their own rent,” said LaTwyla Mathias, Executive Director at Progress Virginia.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed a bill that would have established a paid family and medical leave insurance program in the state, saying the private sector should provide these benefits to workers.

The bill would have required the Virginia Employment Commission, a state workforce agency, to establish a program providing up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to covered individuals. Eligible employees would have received 80% of their weekly wages under the benefit. The legislation stipulated that workers could use the leave if they needed to care for a new child or a family member with a serious health condition, as well as deal with a serious health condition themselves, among other reasons.

The program would have been funded by contributions from both Virginia employers and employees.

In a statement following his veto, Youngkin said he believes employers should establish leave benefits. The proposed program, he said, is “a one-size-fits-all solution that removes the incentive for the private sector to provide these benefits. Many businesses in Virginia already have paid family and medical leave policies.”

Where the private sector stands on paid leave. Though the share of private companies offering paid family leave is growing, this benefit isn’t yet the norm nationally. Four in 10 HR professionals that the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed said their organizations offered paid parental leave in 2023, up from 33% the previous year. Just one-third of those surveyed said their employer offered paid leave for employees to care for immediate family, while 18% offered paid leave to care for extended family.

The National Partnership for Women & Families noted that most people in the US don’t get paid leave through their jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That includes 3.4 million workers in Virginia, representing about 78% of the state’s workforce.

If Youngkin had signed the bill, Virginia would have become the 14th state to establish a paid family and medical leave program; California, New York, and Massachusetts are among the states that have laws on the books requiring them to provide these benefits, according to the Center for American Progress .

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