Early Education Talks Nearing Pivotal Crossroads – State House News Service
By Michael P. Norton
With early education and child care policy talks approaching a critical juncture, the Healey administration on Tuesday laid out plans for a dozen sessions in July and early August to hear from people about the state of the sector.
The listening sessions are intended to help an Early Education and Child Care Task Force devise plans to deliver better and more equitable access to high quality, affordable child care. The Senate has already gotten behind a plan to accomplish those goals, and ongoing talks over a consensus annual budget are also likely to lead to a series of major changes that could reshape the early education landscape…
July is shaping up as a pivotal month for early education and child care. Both branches backed investments in the sector in the fiscal 2025 budgets that are being negotiated by a conference committee, and a Senate-passed bill expanding eligibility for state child care subsidies and capping subsidy recipients' child care costs awaits a House Ways and Means Committee vote. The Senate unanimously approved that bill (S 2707) in March, with Senate President Karen Spilka calling it "critically important" and saying she hoped the House takes it up…
The Common Start Coalition supports the Senate bill but also backs several early education measures tied up in budget talks.
In a letter to the budget conference committee, the coalition said lawmakers are on the verge of passing an annual budget that features "a historic level of funding for early education and child care" and also makes policy changes that represent a "major step" towards more affordable child care, better pay and benefits for early educators, stable funding for providers, and high quality programs for children.
Both budgets would codify the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grant program, allocate $475 million to fund operational grants in fiscal 2025, appropriate $774 million for ongoing child care assistance to families, and offer $20 million to increase reimbursement rates for providers who enroll children receiving child care financial assistance, the coalition said.
In a signal of how deep early education efforts run within the competing budgets, the coalition in its letter listed six measures in the House budget that it supports, and 12 initiatives in the Senate budget.