Letter: Time to focus on child care spending – Gloucester Times
To the editor:
Thank you for your Feb. 2 editorial, “Shaping our post-COVID lives,” in which you reference state Sen. Bruce Tarr’s proposal to create a “recovery committee” as a means of remediating some our state’s lack of support for the most vulnerable. “With all due respect,, you write, “money cannot just be thrown at these challenges.” But, with all due respect, money CAN just be thrown at some of these challenges, in particular the challenge that you mention first in the same paragraph: affordable child care and wage increases for childcare workers.
Massachusetts has a robust infrastructure of child care options, both public and private, large and small, which is already well regulated by the Department of Early Education and Care. What Massachusetts lacks is a system to make this child care affordable to all and to encourage talented and educated staff with the guarantee of decent pay. For more than a year, the Common Start bill, which would do just that by addressing both aspects of our child care problem, has been bandied about the Legislature. It is time for this bill to move forward. See commonstartma.org for more information.
Martha Morgan, Gloucester