Child care workers, crucial to economic recovery, earn poverty wages in 40 states - CBS News
By Megan Cerullo
Lavida Reaves spent more than a decade working as an early childhood educator at a daycare center, nurturing young minds and bodies day in and day out throughout most of her twenties, while the infants' and toddlers' parents earned livings in other professions.
At her peak, after earning an associate's degree in early childhood education, Reaves said she made $1,200 a month working for a small, community-based program in North Carolina. She loved the tightknit community her employer, Excel Christian Academy, provided. But she simply could not make ends meet, and pursued a bachelor's degree so that she could transition to working in the public school system.
"The only reason why I left was because I couldn't afford to care for my family," Reaves, 32, told CBS MoneyWatch. "Now, working with the school system, I'm at $5,800 a month. It was a big jump."
She's not the only child care worker who has left a low-paying job in pursuit of a living wage. Early childhood educators across the country earn a median wage of $11.65 an hour, according to the 2020 Early Childhood Workforce Index from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California at Berkeley. Black early educators on average are paid $0.78 less per hour than their White peers, CSCCE reported.