Prenatal and early childhood experiences are important to a child’s well-being and future success because they form the foundation of emotional, social, cognitive and language development. Despite this being such a critical time in child development and brain architecture, Summit County does not have enough high-quality, affordable early care and education (ECE) options, and our parents are scrambling. Many families implored the Park City council to invest in our local ECE system at the April 4 Park City council meeting by adopting the Park City Cares About Kids proposal. We must support our families better.
Although PC Tots’ recently-announced tuition increase may be the first, it will not be the last. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, when the federal childcare stabilization grants end this September, 68.4% of Utah childcare centers will have to raise tuition and 36.7% report that their program will have to cut wages or be unable to sustain wage/salary increases. Another hard truth is that the ECE system in our country is collapsing because most families cannot afford to pay the full cost of high-quality care and extraordinarily little public funding is available for ECE.
The opportunity cost of doing nothing about our ECE crisis is high. Our community’s lack of high-quality, affordable childcare options damages not only our children’s future potential but it limits our existing workforce and further exacerbates inequities in our community. Inadequate access to childcare negatively affects family income, business productivity, and tax revenue. The Bipartisan Policy Center quantified the economic burden of Summit County’s childcare gaps on households, businesses, and tax revenues to be up to $32 million annually. Nationally, insufficient care for children under the age of 3 is estimated annually to cost each individual child’s parent $3,350, each business employing a parent $1,150, and each taxpayer $630.
High quality ECE benefits everyone: early learning opportunities lead to improved outcomes in school and later in life. The long-term economic gains and efficiencies resulting from a robustly funded, high-quality ECE system far exceed the costs. Investing in high-quality, affordable ECE in coordination with parental support and health programs helps: (1) close the achievement gap; (2) assist local employers in attracting and retaining their workforce; (3) strengthen our school districts; (4) break the cycle of poverty, and (5) maximize our collective return on investment.
We know we have a problem. We know how important this period is in setting the foundation for the rest of a child’s life and how desperate our parents are to find and afford ECE; we just need the will to act. As national childcare expert Elliot Haspel clearly outlined in the Deseret News when discussing the impending federal funding childcare fiscal cliff, “the damage from inaction is difficult to overstate yet easy to predict. … Quality childcare will become a luxury good, nearly impossible to find for all but the wealthiest.”
Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Please reveal our community’s caring soul by letting your local elected representatives know you want our community to join other ski towns like Aspen, Breckenridge, and Telluride by investing local funds in ECE, because every child deserves an equal opportunity to a quality educational foundation that will prepare them to grow, learn, and succeed.