“To suggest that it’s adequate as a delivery model I think just flies in the face of the obvious chaos that we’ve inflicted on this space. I think we have a responsibility to do better,” he said.
The comments came during a State Board of Education meeting on Wednesday in Middlebury. With years of work on Act 46, the school district consolidation law, finally behind them, the board’s members de-briefed and engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about priorities moving forward. French, who took over this summer, told the board early education has “emerged pretty quickly as a priority for me.”
Act 166 of 2014 provided all 3, 4, and 5 year-olds not in kindergarten access to at least 10 hours of publicly-funded pre-kindergarten. Families can either attend a public program or use a voucher to send their child to a qualified provider. But the program has been an administrative boondoggle for both the state and providers, in part because it is overseen by both the agencies of Education and Human Services.
“(Act) 166 is inadequate legislation to achieve our policy goals in this area,” French said. “It’s poorly written legislation and in terms of regulation it’s really a mess.”
French’s comments come a few weeks after the Joint Fiscal Office released a legislatively-commissioned report detailing a steep decline in the number of home-based child care providers since 2015. The report didn’t assign a cause to the decline, but did note complaints from providers about regulatory burdens.
“How do we raise quality without putting people out of business? I think that was one of the unintended consequences of 166,” French said.
The secretary said he still wasn’t sure what proposal he would put before lawmakers when they reconvened, although he said one possibility could be to revisit a plan, initially explored last session, to give oversight of the program to a single state agency. French said his first instinct was to wait on a consultant’s report, due in March, about the law’s implementation before putting a proposal forward. But the program’s “regulatory complexity,” he said, needs to be addressed “sooner rather than later.”
Whatever French proposes, child care will likely be a top issue at the Statehouse come January. Gov. Phil Scott has made early education a key priority, and said he wants to put new revenues from sales taxes on online purchases toward child care.
For his part, French said he’s not sure more funding is what’s needed.
“I’m not convinced that putting more money into the system, as it’s currently articulated, is that solution when we don’t know what the consequences of our earlier policy decisions were,” he said.
