Editor’s note: This commentary is by Christina Goodwin, of Essex Junction, the executive director of Pine Forest Children’s Center in Burlington. She has been an early childhood educator for over 17 years and is also a parent of two young children.
When Pine Forest Children’s Center reopened in June, we were ready and eager to return to teaching and our families. We were ready for daily in-person interaction with the joyful tiny humans our early childhood educators had been connecting with on Zoom since March. We were prepared to increase our cleaning procedures and to creatively carry out new protocols like social distancing and temperature checks in ways that were developmentally appropriate, educational and even fun.
We knew our school would look and feel different when we reopened but our priority remained to create a safe, nurturing environment for young children to thrive.
Safely providing early care and education during a pandemic hasn’t been easy and it takes lots of innovation. All of this wouldn’t be possible without the ingenuity and commitment of our teachers and the resiliency of the children and families we serve. It also wouldn’t be possible without the investments policymakers made this year to stabilize and support Vermont’s early childhood education system.
The investments made by the state of Vermont ensured that Pine Forest Children’s Center’s teachers received full pay and benefits throughout the Stay Home, Stay Safe order, enabling them to focus on supporting children remotely, completing over 935 hours of professional development and taking care of themselves and their own families. Our families, and families throughout the state, also got financial help from the state to pay tuition. Without this support, many families ran the risk of losing their child care spaces, which would have made returning to work daunting or even impossible.
Without the combination of Child Care Stabilization funding, uninterrupted payments from the state’s Child Care Financial Assistance Program and scholarship funding from the Burlington Early Learning Initiative’s First Steps Scholarship program, Pine Forest would have suffered debilitating financial losses.
This financial support ensured we were not forced to lay off teachers and our families did not lose access to our program permanently. While Vermont’s early childhood programs and families haven’t been immune to these hardships, we’ve fared much better than most states.
Thanks to funding from the state’s Restart Grant, Pine Forest was able to stock up on cleaning supplies and protective equipment. We were able to safely open our doors in June with reassurance that we wouldn’t have to close again because we ran out of rubber gloves or hand sanitizer. We were able to be creative with solutions for being outside more throughout the day and socially distancing within classrooms by having funds for tiny tables so the kids could eat lunch on the playground or creating new spaces indoors. These funds gave us space to think, plan, and reopen safely.
But now – as we prepare for winter with more time indoors and potential mandated closures, as we continue to grapple with decreased and unsteady enrollment, as we struggle to recruit and retain the qualified early childhood educators we need – nothing feels guaranteed.
We knew about the fragility of the early childhood education system long before Covid-19. We knew too many families couldn’t find or afford quality child care. We knew that in Vermont, early childhood educators, on average, earn $22,000 less than kindergarten teachers with similar qualifications.
We in the early childhood education field have sacrificed and supported ourselves financially for far too long. We need a culture shift. We need the necessary support and resources to ensure this field has long term viable success as we know early childhood education is the backbone of the economy and success for families.
Parents can’t afford to pay more. Early childhood educators can’t afford to earn less. And Vermont can’t recover without affordable, quality child care.
Covid-19 has thrust early childhood educators into the spotlight. The world is seeing, with new appreciation, how resilient, innovative and skilled early childhood educators are and how essential early childhood education is to a thriving society and economy.
Over the past several months, I’ve seen my colleagues in the early childhood education field writing letters to policymakers and advocating for themselves and this field. As we continue to navigate this crisis together, my hope is that we don’t lose momentum. That we continue as a united front to advocate for our businesses, our families, and our field to raise awareness of our essential work.
As a state and as a society we must move forward with a greater understanding of how necessary early childhood education is for children’s development, our economy and our collective future.