A.J. Johnson’s oldest son was born in 2019, the year residents of his home state of Washington could receive benefits from its newly passed paid family leave program. Johnson, a full-time firefighter, had to save up accrued sick leave to take time off around his son’s birth. He took six weeks off to bond with his son and said he was grateful for the time, though he felt he had to fend off his “grizzly, old, mustachioed” co-workers who bragged about taking just two hours to be in the hospital for their children’s births before returning to work. 

But it was very difficult on him and his wife. “It was certainly shorter than I wanted,” he said. His wife, a middle school counselor, was able to take a lengthy leave of absence from work and then had the summer off. But his son still wasn’t even sleeping through the night when Johnson had to return to work. “It was really hard,” he recalled. He worked 24-hour shifts and was anxious about leaving his wife and newborn at home alone for such long periods of time. 

Things were completely different when his second son was born in late 2021 and Washington’s paid family leave program was fully established. He was able to take about five months of paid leave total, including 12 weeks through the paid family leave program and an additional eight weeks of sick leave. He also added accrued vacation time on top to ensure he received his full pay beyond the state’s benefit cap and kept his benefits. “It was like nothing changed financially for us, but we got to have that almost six months of time together,” he said. “Having the ability to be there for my 3-year-old and my wife, but also being able to bond with my newborn, was the most amazing [few months] of my life.” He felt much more bonded to his younger son than his first after spending uninterrupted time together instead of “rushing off to go back to work and being gone for an entire day,” he said. “I was able to more quickly become a more confident parent.”

It was also particularly useful at a time when children still couldn’t get COVID-19 vaccinations. Johnson and his wife were able to figure out how to entertain and protect their children together. It allowed them to “just spend time together and navigate what it’s like to be a family of four, not having to worry about not going to work or one of us not being there when we’re trying to put a baby to sleep or bathe the kids,” he said.

By the time he took time off for his second son, the workplace culture around him had changed, too — which he chalks up to his state’s implementation of paid family leave. The men he works with now almost uniformly take the full amount of paternity leave available to them. They think, he said, “I have this opportunity to spend an extended period away from work and with my family and I’m going to take it.”

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., now have paid family leave. In most of those programs, fathers are now taking nearly equal shares of bonding leave to spend time away from work with their new children as mothers, according to a from Paid Leave For All, an advocacy organization. In two states, Colorado and Washington, men are actually taking a greater share of bonding leaves. And in states where men aren’t yet taking equal shares of bonding leave, they increased their share last year compared to the year before. 

“Dads really want to be able to take leave to bond with their children, and when presented with the opportunity through this public investment, dads are showing up, stepping up and taking advantage of this opportunity,” said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the Paid Leave for All report.

The findings track a trend in the rest of the country in which more and more men have been taking paid leave to bond with their new children in recent years. But in the that don’t yet have paid family leave programs, fathers still aren’t on par with mothers, according to by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. As of 2018, only of Americans worked at a job that offers paid paternity leave to all workers. Indeed, it is in the states with paid family leave where gender parity in bonding leave has advanced the most. “State paid leave programs are providing the opportunity for dads to do the thing they have wanted to do all along, but don’t necessarily have the ability to do elsewhere,” Williamson said. 

Men in states with paid family leave programs are also much less likely to forgo taking leave at all. Before any of the programs started up, three-quarters of fathers took no leave to spend time with their newborns, compared to less than 18% of mothers, according to the CEPR report. “There’s been a total explosion in the number of claims from men,” Williamson said. “Virtually all of the growth in bonding leave claims has come from this massive, massive increase in claims from men.”

That trend looks set to continue, Williamson said. Comparing numbers from this year to last, the share of dads just keeps growing. “That is really suggesting this is a lasting trend — we’re not seeing a blip,” she said. 

The Paid Leave for All report could only examine full data for programs that have been in operation for a year or more, which include nine states and Washington, D.C. But preliminary data from those that launched in 2026 is also promising, according to Paid Leave For All’s report. In Delaware, fathers took 46% of bonding leaves, compared to 54% for mothers, and in Maine it was 44% for fathers and 56% for mothers. The gap was wider in Minnesota — 36% of bonding leaves for fathers compared to 64% for mothers — but it was still off to a better start than California, the first state with a paid family leave program, where men took just 15% of bonding leaves in 2004, the program’s first year. 

Things have also changed greatly in California and many of the other early states to get to such equal numbers. California and New Jersey, for example, have increased how much money employees can receive while on paid family leave and added job protection so they can return to their positions when leave is over, Williamson said. That’s helped fathers take more advantage of the programs: In New Jersey, men accounted for 11% of bonding leave claims in the program’s first year, and 33% last year, according to the Paid Leave For All report. Last year, California fathers accounted for 50% of bonding leaves.

Research has revealed that there are a multitude of benefits when fathers take paternity leave. It can . The confidence fathers gain from caring for and bonding with their newborns has been found to when their children are older and help them with their children. Paternity leave also how heterosexual couples share childcare and paid work, with fathers more likely to at home. Research shows the benefit can and can . When fathers take leave, it benefits mothers too: it , improves their and increases . 

“Dads taking leave is good for everybody,” Williamson said. 

James Liu, who works for a small technology company in San Francisco, took his 12 weeks of leave in two batches a year ago when his daughter was born. For him, living in a state that has had a paid family leave program for over 20 years, the culture of men taking leave was already solidified. “Most families I know, both parents took leave,” he said. “I almost took it for granted: ‘Oh yeah, if we have a child, I’ll take leave.’” 

Liu’s employer topped off California’s program, giving him a bit more time than the state’s mandated eight weeks and covering his full pay while he was out. The first month he took off was mostly spent surviving the chaos of the early infant days, but he took the rest of his time when his daughter was 5 months old and his wife went back to work, and it was far more meaningful. “It really helped me grow in confidence as a dad,” he said. “Having that one-on-one time, I really felt like I’m a primary parent, too.”

Had he not been able to get paid while on leave, Liu thinks he would still have taken time off, but he said it would definitely have been for a shorter amount of time — possibly only for a week or two at the start of his daughter’s life. He’s grateful not just for the time with his daughter, but for the peace of mind bonding leave brought him. He was glad to have her cared for at home for so long before she started going to a childcare program and relieved that he didn’t have to worry about job security while he and his wife were on leave.

Liu and his wife started looking at childcare options when their daughter was just a few months old and realized that many Americans don’t get paid family leave and send their children to childcare just weeks after birth. “We felt really, really grateful for the time,” he said, while “almost mourning that this is not the default for many folks.”

Screen time limits for Los Angeles Unified School District’s youngest students begin in August.

“My hope and expectation is that most families will see a dramatic reduction in screen time during the school day, but also in the evenings, as mandated by school,” said Nick Melvoin, who represents the Westside’s Board District 4.

While LAUSD was the , the policy, along with , is part of a nationwide trend toward limiting young people’s exposure to tech during the school day.

Many parents have embraced — and advocated for— less technology in the classroom, but questions remain about how LAUSD will enforce the screen time limits and the potential for unintended consequences for students who have less access to devices outside of school.

What part of the screen time limits start in August?

The  eliminates digital device usage for students in early education (preschool), transitional kindergarten (TK), kindergarten and first grade.

There are several exceptions, including:

Students will not be automatically issued devices to take home. However, there is still a process for families to request one.

The policy also requires the district to block all students from accessing YouTube, social media and streaming platforms without teacher approval.

The type of work students bring home may change, too. The policy encourages educators to provide off-screen assignments.

“Homework should prioritize reading, writing, problem-solving, hands-on activities, observation, and other learning experiences that can be completed without the use of a device,” .

Andrés Chait, the district’s superintendent, said at a July 21 news conference that implementing the new policy will take time.

“On Aug. 12, you may not necessarily see in the immediate all of the changes that the policy calls for, but they will be implemented methodically and transparently,” Chait said.

Where did the screen time policy come from?

A group of Los Angeles parents organized a group called  in 2025 and started , collecting petition signatures and .

Melvoin brought forward the resolution that ultimately led to the new policy .

“We had not recalibrated or reset our relationship with technology post-COVID,” said Melvoin, at the time. “Six years ago, we sent every kid in L.A. home with a device, which was a lifeline. … But when they came back, I’m still seeing kids as young as preschool on devices all day.”

The board adopted the policy  after staff conducted research and outreach to parents, educators and community members.

How much does it cost to limit screen time?

District staff  up to $4 million in one-time funds to purchase carts to store laptops in elementary school classrooms and an annual $1 million to pay for software to track screen time and block content.

The district has yet to spend this money, according to a statement from a Los Angeles Unified spokesperson.

“Conversations with schools will take place in the early part of the upcoming school year to assess needs on a school-by-school basis,” the statement read.

Was there any pushback to the new policy?

The board voted unanimously to adopt the screen time policy with the exception of Board President Scott Schmerelson, who recused himself from the vote.

However, there was some discussion about whether the limitations would have unintended consequences for teachers and students.

Board Vice President Rocío Rivas cautioned that the minute limits may discourage teachers from assigning multimedia projects, and adds the burden of monitoring student technology use.

“Schools may end up focusing on counting minutes, documenting usage, auditing classrooms instead of evaluating learning outcomes,” Rivas said.

LAUSD staff’s  noted a “risk of slowing access to technology and its advancement for students to compete with the world.”

During public comment in June, Mireya Garcia, a mother and grandmother, told the board that her family shares a single computer at home.

“I don’t want them to lose access to tools that can help them read, to learn and to be successful,” Garcia said.

How are teachers preparing for the changes?

LAUSD adopted the screen time policy when most teachers and students were off-campus for the summer.

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson wrote in a statement that training has started with “dedicated sessions” for principals and administrators and that more resources will be available to educators before Aug.12 and throughout the school year.

“This approach allows us to be respectful of educators’ time while ensuring schools are prepared and supported for a successful rollout,” the spokesperson wrote.

The first opportunity for most teachers to return to their classroom is on Monday, Aug. 10, two days before school starts.

Stephanie Levinson, who’s taught at San Fernando Elementary for 28 years, said she has not received any additional guidance from the district since the policy was passed this summer.

This year, she’ll teach a combined first- and second-grade class. Under the new policy, first graders do not have access to digital devices and second graders can use them for up to 20 minutes per day this year.

“It’s stressful because we don’t know,” Levinson said. “It’s hard to plan a school day when we’re not sure what’s gonna be mandated, how things are gonna work.”

Levinson said that, in the past, she’d assign students to use interactive learning programs like ABCmouse while she worked with their peers in small groups. She also fundraised to bring laptops and tablets to her classroom, where most students come from low-income families, before the devices were widespread in the district.

“If a kid hasn’t learned how to even use a computer or type, how are they going to…not be disadvantaged against kids that have computers?” Levinson said.

How can families get access to a digital device?

Parents and guardians can request a take-home device  or through the district’s .

The Los Angeles Public Library has a for adults.

What’s next for screen time in LAUSD?

The policy requires the board to review the screen time rules at least once a year during a public meeting.

“One of the reasons we crafted this policy is because we didn’t see a policy that we could just adopt nationally,” Melvoin said. “But that also means that it’ll be iterative and that we’re working out the kinks.”

The district has also created an ad hoc committee to provide recommendations on how the district is using AI.

• District- and state-mandated assessments. 
• Students enrolled in the LAUSD Virtual Academy program. 
• To help students with disabilities learn, as mandated by their Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 Plan. 

This was originally published by .

The turning point came several years ago for Reed, who lives in Spokane, Washington, when she was offered transitional housing in an apartment building that happened to be co-located with a Head Start program. 

Reed, a single mom, enrolled her youngest child, an infant daughter named Evie, in Head Start.

The federal antipoverty program is best known for providing high-quality early care and education to young children from low-income families, but as Reed soon learned, what truly sets it apart is the slew of wraparound services that meet families where they are and help them build toward something better. 

Head Start provided Reed with essential goods like diapers, formula, clothing and food. Staff helped her navigate the public school system with her older son, who has autism, even though he wasn’t in the program. Head Start provided her daughter with free hearing and vision screenings and dental care. It empowered her to “find her voice” by giving her a leadership position with the policy council, a majority-parent group involved in each Head Start program’s decision-making, a step which she said has made her a “better mom and … better community member.” 

“I felt like they loved my children like they were their own and cared about all of our well-beings,” said Reed, whose daughter is moving on to kindergarten later this month. “They saw us as a whole and tried to help wherever they could. And if they couldn’t, they would sit down and research what would help.”

Some of the very services that proved to be transformational for Reed and her family, however, may now be at risk. 

In a proposed rule change on Aug. 6, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invoked the name of his uncle, Sargent Shriver, who led Head Start’s creation in 1965, saying his department was “removing unnecessary bureaucracy” that would return the program to its roots. Others say the changes will weaken or eliminate most of the standards that have long positioned Head Start as the “gold standard” for early care and education licensing and quality in this country. “Nothing else compares,” said Shantel Meek, founder and executive director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University.

The Trump administration is proposing that the of Head Start Program Performance Standards be reduced to about a dozen pages, eliminating requirements for standards such as low adult-to-child ratios; services such as medical, dental and developmental screenings and individualized services for children with disabilities; and requiring programs to conduct all education in the English language. The , which will officially be published to the Federal Register tomorrow, outlines the drastic reduction in standards. If passed, these changes would allow Head Start programs to adhere only to state and local childcare licensing requirements, which typically fall of the quality and safety standards long embraced by Head Start.

“It basically takes the country from the ceiling to the floor,” said Meek. “The kids that Head Start serves will bear the brunt of the impact, but it will go beyond. States and the field in general see Head Start as a north star we’re trying to build to, and they’re trying to tear that down and gut the heart of the program.”

In addition to removing many Head Start standards, this proposed rule would also change the cap on administrative overhead from 15% to 5% of a program’s total costs. Trump officials believe this, plus other cost-saving measures such as having fewer teachers on staff, serving more children in each classroom and spending less money on services such as home visiting and mental health supports, will reinvest up to $2.2 billion in the program, allowing Head Start to “preserve or expand” services to an additional 236,000 children nationwide. Critics, however, believe that reducing the quality of care for the sake of adding slots is a dangerous game to be playing — especially when quality has been a hallmark of Head Start throughout its history. 

“It feels like the Trump administration is saying, ‘Let’s see who can do this for the cheapest.’ That’s not what I think anyone wants — or should want,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start and the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program. “I see this rule as incredibly destructive. I see it as another attempt to dismantle the Head Start program.”

Ryan’s colleague Lori Pittman, chief strategist at the WSA and a former Head Start parent, said the 5% cap would be a “really, really scary thing.”

“To take away the foundation and the structures that build this house called Head Start,” Pittman added, “will only destroy it, and we’re not going to let that happen.”

The publication of the full proposal tomorrow will kick off a 60-day period of public comments, during which administration officials will receive and review feedback. The federal changes could also face legal challenges, many stakeholders told 91ɬ��.

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, said that the proposal would strip away the elements of Head Start that make it exceptional. 

“What sets Head Start apart from other programs are its quality standards, comprehensive services, parental involvement in shaping the program, and a commitment to welcoming all children,” Hamm said. “All of those things are undermined in the revision.”

Trump administration officials see it differently. The proposed rule is about cutting red tape and “trusting local leaders to make the decisions that are best for their local communities,” said Alex Adams, who leads the Administration for Children and Families at HHS, during a call with reporters, adding that “one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing the 1,600 grantees.” 

Later in the call, Adams referred to the proposed rule as a “right-sizing” of Head Start and emphasized that the flexibility these changes are meant to provide is “permission, not a mandate.”

Yet leaders on the ground fear that if it’s not required, it won’t hold up in most programs. 

“How quickly this affects families will vary by program, and that’s the problem,” said Hamm. “If the floor is gone, it comes down to whether each local decision-maker chooses to hold the line or start cutting corners. That’s happening against flat funding and rising costs, with pressure to serve more children. When a standard isn’t on paper, it becomes optional.” 

Head Start, a federally funded early childhood development program that turned 60 last year, has come under fire repeatedly since the start of the second Trump administration a year-and-a-half-ago. 

The program serving nearly has long been a target of the right, most recently with the conservative playbook calling for its total elimination and a leaked appearing to cut funding for the program altogether. Though that ultimately didn’t pass, the administration turned to what Hamm called “the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach,” repeatedly delaying funding and disrupting grants, closing roughly half of the program’s regional offices and eliminating a number of federal positions that supported Head Start.

The administration then unsuccessfully attempted to ban practices involving diversity, equity and inclusion and exclude scores of immigrant kids from the program, meaning preschoolers without legal status — and even some with— . And it the federal policy protecting childcare programs — and other so-called sensitive locations — from immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, last year’s government shutdown also locked thousands of the nation’s most vulnerable kids out of Head Start programming. And more recently, the administration a Biden-era rule requiring higher wages and better benefits for Head Start teachers.

This week’s proposal to overhaul Head Start’s regulatory standards will only further contribute to the widespread uncertainty and confusion, various stakeholders told 91ɬ��. And if the changes are confirmed, they will have enduring consequences for children, families and early educators. 

To middle and upper class Americans, the value of some of Head Start’s signature services may seem overstated, noted Nancy Baker, Head Start director for the Butler County Educational Service Center in southwest Ohio, which oversees 631 children in Early Head Start and Head Start across 16 sites in two counties. 

But the reality is that for many children in Head Start, the classroom setting may be their only opportunity for services such as oral care or a vision screening. 

“These families are in poverty,” Baker said. “They may not have transportation … If you are working in a low-paying job that may not offer sick leave, when the doctor’s visit comes due and you have to work that day, a parent will have to choose between, ‘Do I go to work, or do I take my child to the dentist and risk being fired?’” 

“Every day missed is money out of your pocket,” Baker added. “It becomes kind of a vicious cycle.”

Head Start’s comprehensive services are provided, in part, out of a recognition that families who are eligible for the program face resource constraints and other barriers that may prevent them from meeting their children’s basic needs. The program aims to address those needs so families can pursue stability and children can be free to learn, develop and thrive. 

Plus, Baker added, physical impairments in a young child can be mistaken for behavioral issues. A child with imperfect vision may be perceived as inattentive and unable to focus. With a pair of glasses, their entire learning experience — and classroom identity — can change. Head Start also tests children for lead, Baker added. They’ve discovered children in Butler County with high lead levels, which “can mimic ADHD-type behaviors,” she said, adding that “continuous lead exposure can lead to some pretty serious cognitive delays.”

“It’s a holistic program,” Baker said of Head Start. “It’s much, much more than childcare. It’s even much more than preschool. That’s where the standards start coming into play.”

Baker is proud of the services her community’s Head Start programs provide to children and families, from nutrition to family engagement to mental health consultations. And she is “disheartened” by this new attempt to “whittle down” Head Start. 

“Some things they’re looking to reduce or eliminate are not massive, budget-saving things,” Baker said. “They’re just good things to do for kids, particularly for children experiencing poverty.”

Most of the standards the administration wants to eliminate, she added, are “good, proven services that don’t break the bank. We’re not tied up in bureaucracy and red tape. These are health screenings. Why would you want to get rid of that?”

Meek feels similarly about the “cutting red tape” argument from the administration. 

“Brushing kids’ teeth and providing inclusive services for kids with disabilities and … using ratios that are manageable so adults can engage in the learning process with kids — none of that is red tape,” she said. “Those are all essential things to make sure kids are safe, healthy, developing and learning.”

Some parents have echoed these concerns. Reed, the mom in Spokane, worries about the elimination of Head Start’s low ratios, which allow adults to work with fewer children at a time, thereby giving each child more care and attention. 

If this proposal is confirmed later this year and Head Start programs do begin to align only with state and local childcare licensing requirements, many programs could see dramatic increases in ratios and group sizes. 

For example, Early Head Start, an extension of Head Start that serves infants and toddlers, allows one adult to care for up to four 2-year-olds at a given time. Only three states meet that same benchmark for 2-year-olds, according to an from the Children’s Equity Project. By contrast, in Mississippi, one adult is permitted to care for up to 12 2-year-olds, and in Texas and Florida, one adult can care for up to 11 toddlers. If a Head Start teacher begins caring for two or even three times as many children as before, they not only risk missing warning signs in some children — such as a behavioral issue or a physical need going unmet — but they are also much more likely to burn out and leave the position.

Meek, at the Children’s Equity Project, said this is one of the standards that she feels most strongly about. Another, she said, is the impact on dual language learners. 

Currently, Head Start standards include several provisions specific to children who are learning English alongside the language that is spoken at home. For example, if a majority of children in a program speak a primary language other than English, at least one staff member who regularly interacts with those children must also speak that language. 

That standard has been in place since 1975, when the original regulatory standards for Head Start were published, the Children’s Equity Project found. 

“It’s not something new and crazy and ideological that was added,” Meek said. “It’s been there since the beginning.”

The changes for dual language learners — including the requirement that all programs educate children only in English — would affect an estimated of children in Head Start.

Adams at ACF told reporters in the press briefing that he hoped the 60-day public comment period would lead to “robust engagement and thoughtful engagement with the community so we can get this rule right in broad strokes.” 

But at least some families and providers involved in Head Start worry that the major decisions around this rule change have already been made. 

“This is like a slow-moving disaster,” said Ryan, “a slow erosion as dollars fade away, people fade away and ultimately quality fades away. And that’s the real danger in this.”

Roughly 2,000 families received offers for a spot in the inaugural year of 2-K, New York City’s new free childcare program for 2-year-olds, officials announced Tuesday.

Around 5,700 families applied for the , which were restricted to priority neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

“Today represents a monumental step on the path to universal childcare here in New York City,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday morning in the Bronx. Mamdani made a key campaign pledge.

“We are writing a better chapter for … the generations of New Yorkers many years from now who will start families here in our city and who will not need to worry about leaving their job or moving out of the neighborhood they love to make it all work,” he said.

The release of the offers comes after city officials spent months spreading the word about the new program with events such as a “ in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and a judged by Cardi B and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The initial interest in 2-K comes as welcome news for Mamdani after his administration’s efforts to boost publicity for the city’s 3-K and prekindergarten programs Those programs, while wildly popular and oversubscribed in some neighborhoods, have in other parts of the city.

Officials didn’t share any details about how the initial round of applications and offers were distributed between the priority neighborhoods: Washington Heights and Inwood in Manhattan, Canarsie and Brownsville in Brooklyn, Ozone Park and the Rockaways in Queens, and Fordham, Belmont, Riverdale and other nearby neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Emmy Liss, the executive director of the mayor’s Office for Childcare and Early Childhood Education, said the “majority” of the children who received offers live in the priority districts. Officials prioritized applicants who have siblings at the program they applied to, or were already attending that program, and those who live in the same district, Liss said.

More than 80% of applicants got into one of their top three choices, and more than half got into their first choice, officials said. Families that applied and didn’t get an offer will automatically be added to waitlists.

In a press release Tuesday morning, officials said that the application results from this year would help guide the expansion of the program next year. Mamdani has pledged that the program will grow to 12,000 seats next year and expand citywide by the end of his first term, though Gov. Kathy Hochul has only committed funding for the first two years. A found that it will likely cost around $9 billion to provide free universal childcare for all children under age 5, about $5 billion more than the city is currently spending,

Officials haven’t yet shared where the additional 10,000 2-K seats for next year will be located, except that they will likely add seats in the priority neighborhoods and some of the new seats will be in Staten Island, the only borough not a part of this year’s 2-K rollout.v

Seats are split between center and . Unlike 3-K and pre-K, which mostly follow the K-12 school calendar, .

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California schools now have two screening instruments that use playful games and stories to test 4-year-olds’ language skills without making them cry.

The California Department of Education this spring approved two language screeners for use in transitional kindergarten to replace the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC), which lawmakers barred schools from administering to TK students two years ago.

All K-12 students who speak languages other than English at home are required to take the ELPAC within 30 days of enrollment to determine their English proficiency. But teachers and advocates reported some TK students fluent in English were identified as English learners simply because they were too young to be tested. Some teachers said the experience caused some 4-year-olds to down on their desks or simply refuse to answer questions. 

The ELPAC measures reading and writing skills that most 4-year-olds have not yet developed, advocates and researchers said. Researchers said screening instruments for this age group should instead measure speaking and understanding and use games, stories and conversation designed for young children.

A by New America and the American Institutes for Research found that 22 states and Washington, D.C. screen students to identify English learners before kindergarten. The two screeners selected for use in California are among the most common, with each used in nine other states. 

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of the state education department’s Multilingual Support Division, said the two approved screening tests are developmentally appropriate for 4-year-olds, can test in more than one language and can be administered across the state. 

The screeners “provide an educator insights so that perhaps they’ll use a different kind of scaffolding, or perhaps they’ll bring in additional resources, or maybe they’ll bring in literature in different languages and introduce them into their TK classroom,” said Moreno-Ramirez.

One of the screeners, Early Childhood, uses a story board and pieces, including characters and objects, to assess a child’s understanding and speaking through storytelling. In a demonstration video, an examiner reads a story little by little and asks the student questions.

“Sarah’s mother calls the children to come to the picnic table. So what do you think Jack and Sarah are going to do?” she asks.

“They’re going to eat at the picnic table,” answers the child.

The other screener, , uses colorful pictures to assess proficiency. In one of its four sections, the examiner shows the student pictures of eyes and ears and asks them to point to their own eye or ear. In another section, labeled “Art Show,” the examiner shows the student a drawing of children looking at paintings of a dog and cat and asks them to describe what is happening. Students are also asked to repeat phrases as well as listen to a story and retell it as the examiner points to the pictures.

“I feel very pleased that we’re no longer using an assessment that’s developmentally inappropriate for younger children,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy at Early Edge California, a nonprofit that advocated to exempt TK students from taking the ELPAC.

Texas has used preLAS to measure English language proficiency for pre-K and kindergarten students since 2019. Henry Castellanos, principal of Delco Elementary School in Austin, said he administered it many times as a bilingual reading interventionist.

“I definitely feel like it was a good read and measure on where students were,” Castellanos said. “All the components are very age appropriate.”

Castellanos spent his elementary school years in the early 2000s in West Covina. He spoke Spanish at home with his parents, but said he gradually lost much of the language as he became proficient in English and could not keep up with peers or cousins when he would visit Mexico.

At the time, California had severely restricted bilingual education, while Texas its bilingual programs.

“Knowing what I know now, I’m like, dang, I missed out on so many opportunities, because it was literally all English the whole time,” he said.

Both California screening exams can also be used to measure Spanish language skills, which advocates said is important for children who speak Spanish at home, so teachers can understand their vocabulary and expression in their home language. However, they cannot be used in other languages.

The two screeners will be piloted this school year in some California school districts, and then rolled out to all school districts in 2027-28. Moreno-Ramirez said the field testing is not intended to check whether the test is reliable or useful, but rather to inform guidance, training and access.

“It will help us identify any sticking points related to rollout,” said Moreno-Ramirez.

Under state law, the new screeners cannot be used to officially identify transitional kindergarten students as English learners, which means schools will not be able to get federal funding for those children until they enter kindergarten. To make up for the state funding that schools would have received for English learners through the Local Control Funding Formula, the Legislature made a temporary fix to allow schools to use the percentage of English learners in kindergarten to approximate the percentage of English learners in transitional kindergarten and receive similar funding, but only until 2027. In order to receive funding for these students after 2027, the Legislature would have to pass another law.

In addition, schools are not required by law to provide students who are not officially identified as English learners with language services. Nor are they required to report their academic or language progress on the California School Dashboard.

“We’re hoping educators feel compelled to support their students based on their understanding of their multilingual experience,” Moreno-Ramirez said. “We want to make sure that we’re not just thinking about providing supports and services for those students for whom it’s required by federal law, but also thinking about the opportunity for kids in the earliest years that we recognize their linguistic assets.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration is planning a dramatic overhaul of  that would gut its quality standards, upending the hallmarks of the early education program for impoverished children, two people familiar with the deliberations said.

Head Start, established in the 1960s to help fight poverty, has long been considered by experts to be a gold standard early learning program. Its regulations, which stretch more than 100 pages, outline requirements on everything from child-to-teacher ratios and child health screenings to family engagement.

Trump’s Republican administration would replace those regulations with around a dozen pages of rules, leaving most of the specifics up to state and local law, said the people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that was not yet public and because they feared reprisal.

In a post on X on Saturday night, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, said to expect a rule to be published this week. The administration “remains committed to strengthening Head Start by preserving federal investment in the program while advancing reforms that expand access, increase local flexibility, reduce unnecessary administrative burden, and ensure services are delivered effectively to children and families in need,” department spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Monday in an email.

The draft rules would require more documentation from parents who are homeless or unemployed, the people familiar with the deliberations told The Associated Press. An early version of the proposal also would have barred parents who are in the United States illegally from enrolling their children, even if the children are U.S. citizens. It’s unclear whether those provisions will make the final draft.

Head Start, which operates in all 50 states, has long enjoyed robust bipartisan support. But some prominent conservatives in recent years have called for , saying the federal government should get out of the education business at every level. Deregulating the program would deliver a win for them and aligns with the Trump administration’s goals of scrapping rules it views as onerous or unnecessary.

Head Start is designed to target poverty, experts say

Head Start serves more than half a million low-income babies, toddlers and preschoolers nationwide. For families that qualify, it offers free preschool and screenings to identify developmental delays. It also offers supports for families.

If the changes take effect, they could make Head Start unrecognizable, said Khari Garvin, who ran the Office of Head Start under President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

“We’d have the carcass of Head Start,” Garvin said. “You might have a program that’s called Head Start, but in substance it will not be.”

The proposed rules were originally reported in The Bulwark.

Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, said the organization has yet to see the proposed rules. But he said the potential for a massive overhaul has left the organization on edge.

“We’re very anxious,” Sheridan said. “When it does come out … we’ll be ready to fight back where we need to fight back.”

Still, he emphasized that Head Start centers might not be impacted for months, if the rules get on the books at all. Once the proposal is made public, federal law requires the administration to give at least a month for the public to weigh in on it. Then, once finalized, it may take more time for the rules to take effect. There’s also the potential for a lawsuit to halt implementation.

Current rules cover dental screenings and staff-to-student ratios

Head Start was created as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and targets the myriad challenges that low-income households face. It serves children and adults alike, coaching parents on reaching their goals, connecting them with services and even employing them.

Head Start operators, which include school districts and nonprofit organizations, are required to provide medical, dental and vision screenings for children and to monitor them for developmental delays. There’s also a curriculum framework and prohibitions on physical and emotional abuse of children.

Many of the features that make Head Start distinct from mainstream preschools are spelled out in 122 pages of performance standards. The Trump administration’s proposal would toss most of that rule book and replace it with a much shorter version that eliminates or loosens many requirements, the people familiar with the proposal said. But the proposal also calls for some new regulations, such as requiring all instruction in English.

Requirements around staff-to-student ratios and safety standards would be erased. Operators instead would be instructed to follow local and state laws, which are often far more permissive. And the new proposal also says nothing about suspensions and expulsions, the people said, making it easier for programs to  who are difficult to educate.

Head Start is under threat

Head Start, which has enjoyed robust bipartisan support for decades, has faced several threats since Trump . Project 2025,  authored by the official who is now Trump’s budget chief, called for the federal government to get rid of the program altogether. Last year, in a draft budget, the administration proposed exactly that, saying: “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.” After public outcry, Health Secretary , whose department oversees Head Start, told Congress the program’s funding was safe.

Funding for the program was disrupted not long after Trump took office, leading some programs to have to shutter temporarily. It was once again halted after  in October that led some centers briefly to close their doors.

Earlier this year, Trump officials also erased a Biden-era rule that mandated raises and greater benefits for Head Start employees. When the rule went in to effect in 2024, , the majority of whom have bachelor’s degrees, earned less than $40,000 a year on average.

The story was originally published by The Associated Press. Ali Swenson contributed reporting.

The research-grounded guide aims to help teachers intentionally select books for their students, centering age-appropriate books that present Black, Latinx and Asian culture as wellsprings of understanding. It also highlights titles that explore complex issues such as homelessness and poverty, and those that can help educators teach about historical topics like the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement. One chapter explores how scented books can be used as a vehicle for multisensory literacy development. 

Lacina’s book arrives at a critical moment, in a critical state. Texas ranked second in the nation for school book bans during the 2024-25 school year, with 1,781 instances of censorship, . 

The book features contributions from a number of early literacy experts on a variety of relevant themes. Jonda C. McNair, professor at the Ohio State University, wrote a chapter on the significance of African American children’s literature. “Aspects of identity can and do impact early literacy development, and teachers should be encouraged to think critically about them,” McNair wrote in an email. 

Natalia Kucirkova, who leads the , added, “This book responds to an urgent need in an age when texts are increasingly manipulated by technologies, generated by AI and shaped by algorithms for specific audiences and preferences. It reminds us that children need authentic literature that connects them to genuine human experiences beyond their own.”

In the conversation below, Lacina discusses the book, the challenges posed by censorship and the power of children’s literature. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this book originate?

Years ago, I developed a class when we did not have a children’s literature class at TCU, and my dean at the time wanted it to be a way to attract individuals from throughout the university into the College of Education. So I came up with this idea of a critical literacy and children’s literature class. … I wanted to develop a class where students could learn more about just being good human beings from reading through children’s literature that’s reflective of society. Sometimes those are very sensitive topics, like … homelessness and immigration. [We asked] how can we develop empathetic and kind college students and future teachers? We can do that by learning about other people and recognizing them not as the other, but as someone of value within our community … There’s never been a textbook that really addressed that particular topic. 

What does research show about the importance of inclusive literature and the role stories play in child development?

There’s been a lot of research published over the last 30 years, and I have an article coming out this summer in [a journal published by the International Literacy Association Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group]. [The research] really came to the forefront more than 30 years ago, with a professor at the Ohio State University, Rudine Sims Bishop, who coined the term as a metaphor. Mirrors reflect your own culture, identity and personal life and we need to read books that reflect our own experiences — but just as important are the [books] that are like windows that help us understand other people’s experiences in life and that help us build more empathy and understanding.

Reading helps us identify with the protagonist — with their feelings, with their actions, and it’s important to read about experiences that are similar to our own, whether they’re positive experiences or challenges we might face in life. Children in our schools are dealing with challenges, too. That could be divorce; that could be dealing with not having enough money. In preparing our young children, we want them to be able to face life’s challenges and problem solve and be resilient and also be joyful. 

How does children’s literature, especially for the youngest readers, function as a tool for learning and development?

It helps children at all ages as they move into the workforce as adults, because we’re not going to work with people who are necessarily exactly like us, from our own socioeconomic background, our racial background, our religious background. And it helps us better understand other people, so that we can be a productive member of the workforce and get along with others to solve problems in the workplace. 

Why do you think people get worked up about children’s literature? Why is this an issue at all? 

There are various reasons why, and this is nothing new. … We can look back through history and see that there’s always been censorship, and I think books have historically been targeted over a long period of time for anti-intellectual censorship efforts. Books are primarily a source for people to learn new ideas and to critically think about a variety of topics within our society. So books are powerful, and that’s what scares people.

What do you recommend for responding to censorship in our schools and libraries?

We need leaders in education to have policies and procedures, which many school districts do. However, what’s interesting is that the , and this is not surprising at all, but who is censoring books? It’s not necessarily parents at all; 92% of all books that are challenged were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers. And that was up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of the challenges originated from individual parents. So I think that tells us maybe we don’t need to publicize [censorship] any longer. We need these pressure groups to listen to parents and families. 

Another thing that makes early reading so powerful is that when books are read over and over again, the ideas and pictures really stay with children right at the time when their brains are forming. 

That’s a very good strategy for developing phonemic and phonological awareness, that reading over and over with a very young child. That’s really helpful for oral language and understanding how language works. 

In the book, there’s a surprising chapter about the role of smell in early reading, and the importance of offering children multisensory early reading experiences. How did that come about? 

Natalia Kucirkova, who I met many years ago at the United Kingdom Literacy Association, is an international powerhouse scholar. … That chapter is about a novel approach in Europe, and I think we need to listen to our European peers. They focus a little bit more on creativity and multisensory approaches, where we are focusing on different things here in the U.S. What Natalia talks about is that reading is much more than decoding a text. It’s about an affective and embodied experience. 

An educator I really admire, Nichole Parks, said something recently about how readers are built on laps and that reading to a child is a gateway toward them reading for themselves. 

That’s a beautiful way to phrase that. We lose so much when we focus too much on tablets and technology. There’s so much more to reading than just reading words on a screen. It’s that entire experience — the human interaction with a child, the interaction with a book — to be able to hold the book, turn the pages and, in some instances, smell the book. A robot can’t replace that. A robot can’t replace the interaction between a teacher or a parent or a beloved family member lovingly nurturing a child during their reading process. 

CHICAGO — A bipartisan group of state lawmakers is calling for an overhaul of the nation’s childcare system, which they say is failing children, parents and providers. 

The group of 13 Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who have spent the last year studying childcare access and affordability problems, offered an array of policy recommendations during the National Conference of State Legislatures annual summit in Chicago this week.

During a panel discussion Monday, lawmakers underscored the persisting challenge with childcare that costs families too much and pays providers too little. That has led to vast access gaps in many parts of the country as demand for childcare far outstrips supply.  

“Every state is experiencing a childcare crisis,” said Jenna Bannon, associate director in the Children and Families Program of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In its 33-page  laying out causes and potential solutions to childcare shortages, the lawmakers’ policy group  called for more private sector employer participation, higher pay for childcare providers and a reconsideration of childcare regulations that may be outdated.

“The childcare system is at a crossroads,” the report says, “and decisions made now will shape how well systems meet the needs of families and economies in the years ahead.”

Many of the policy prescriptions inherently cost money. But Maryland state Del. Aletheia McCaskill said states can’t go it alone. McCaskill, a Democrat and a childcare provider, said the issue requires investment from outside sources, including philanthropic organizations and businesses. 

“It’s going to take more than just taxes,” she told Stateline. “It’s going to take real investment by other folks. We have to do this with everybody playing their part. The government, absolutely, but we can’t do it all.”

During the presentation, McCaskill urged other lawmakers to reframe childcare discussions in economic terms.

“When you talk about childcare, you can’t talk about children. Imagine that,” she said. “You have to talk about the economy, pockets and how all this works together.”

South Dakota state Sen. Tim Reed, a Republican, said businesses are increasingly interested in assuring their employees have access to childcare. 

Reed was previously the mayor of Brookings, the state’s fourth most populous city. Before the pandemic, he said, businesses reported workforce challenges as their biggest constraint. And the lack of workers, they said, was directly linked to a lack of accessible childcare.

Reed pointed to a local bank that provided childcare for the children — and even grandchildren — of employees years before it became a prominent issue across the country.

“And you know what? They’re the first place that people want to work because they have childcare,” Reed said during Monday’s panel. “Once you get businesses involved in this — because they do understand the economic realities of it — that’s when you can become successful.”

In 38 states, the costs of childcare outpaces the average cost of in-state college tuition, according to , a nonprofit advocacy group. For 2025, that organization calculated an average annual cost of childcare of about $13,000, with average prices of infant care surpassing $15,000. Those costs vary widely by state, though, with center-based infant care ranging from $6,492 a year in Mississippi to $27,067 a year in Massachusetts. 

Monday’s discussion  where Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham last year announced the nation’s first free universal childcare system, funded by state investment earnings from oil and gas revenues. 

New Mexico state Sen. Linda Trujillo, a Democrat, said during the discussion that the new universal system doesn’t yet guarantee universal access. In her community of Santa Fe, for example, she said the city lacks about 1,200 spaces for infants to 5-year-olds. 

Several lawmakers noted the changing federal environment, which has raised funding questions about many social service programs, including healthcare and food assistance. 

Bannon, of NCSL, said the states are now leading the charge on childcare as Democratic and Republican state lawmakers increasingly explore new legislation to childcare access.

“Historically, the federal government played a really big role, and the states really kind of looked to the feds to guide them,” she told Stateline. “And I think now there’s been kind of a role reversal and states are stepping more into the space, and the feds are watching them to see what they do.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

A bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers from around the nation on Monday identified lack of facilities and high costs as two leading challenges states are facing in addressing childcare needs.

The bipartisan group, which includes a New Mexico lawmaker, presented their findings at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Chicago, along with several proposed solutions.

The report found that nearly 30% of the nation has a childcare gap, meaning more children require care than daycare centers can accommodate. Economically, the report found that childcare averages a cost of $13,000 annually — and that infant care, in particular, can run as high as $27,000, roughly equivalent to . And it found that the median annual wage for childcare professionals nationally is just $32,000.

The panel proposed seven solutions: expand access and availability; address affordability; invest in the childcare workforce; modernize licensing and quality-rating systems; strengthen small childcare businesses; find for the future; and elevate state early childhood governance and leadership.

Monday’s discussion often turned to New Mexico, where Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in late 2025 . Earlier this year, the state Legislature passed during specific times of economic decline.

State Sen. Linda Trujillo (D-Santa Fe) told a room of conference attendees Monday that work to create the universal program had been underway for years, although many people in and out of New Mexico hadn’t heard of it until late last year.

“New Mexico didn’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to provide universal childcare,’ ” she said.

In 2019, while a member of the state House of Representatives, Trujillo to create the , which now oversees universal childcare. The next year, state leaders with an investment of more than $300 million. The fund’s balance, which pays for universal childcare in large part, .

Jenna Bannon, associate director of the NCSL’s Children and Families Program, added that the very report conferencegoers discussed Monday was born in New Mexico. The bipartisan group of 13 state lawmakers first met in Albuquerque in mid-2025 to compare notes on their respective states’ challenges surrounding childcare access and affordability, she said.

The work, she said, was important because childcare has gone from being a family-based, private issue to a public, economic issue. Leaders in most every state are looking for direction on how to navigate the many issues childcare affects, particularly workforce development, she noted.

According to Bannon, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts about 160,000 job openings for childcare workers each year in the coming decade. If those workers can’t make livable wages, that can have an impact on households where both parents want to work outside of the home, she said.

“If childcare is the workforce behind the workforce, we have a problem on our hands.”

Trujillo said that problem is felt even in New Mexico, where every family is eligible for free childcare.

“Just because we say we have universal childcare doesn’t mean that we have universal access,” she said. “In Santa Fe, I have a working group of city councilors, county commissioners, community college and school board members because we have a shortage of 1,200 spaces for birth to 3-year-olds.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

Parents, early educators, childcare providers, labor leaders, business leaders, advocates and community organizations came together around a shared belief: Our youngest children deserved better than a fragmented system that asked families to shoulder impossible burdens while treating early childhood as an afterthought instead of the essential public infrastructure it has always been.

Together, they built , also known as the Children’s Health & Child Care Initiative for Alameda County. It’s a community-led, voter-approved half-cent sales tax dedicated to early care and education expected to generate $150 million annually. Measure C wasn’t created simply to fund more childcare. It was created to build the early childhood infrastructure that allows families to work, children to thrive, providers to succeed and communities to prosper.

In its first year of implementation, Measure C more than $135 million across Alameda County, reaching nearly 20,000 children, supporting more than 6,400 educators and caregivers, improving early learning facilities buildings and programming, helping childcare providers keep their doors open, connecting more families with the care they need, and building a stronger, more connected early childhood system.

Those investments matter because the need has always been profound. In Alameda County, which lies across the bay from San Francisco, who qualify for subsidized childcare are not receiving it. Nearly half of families live in what researchers call a licensed childcare desert, and two out of every three children are not fully prepared for kindergarten.

These aren’t individual failures. They are the predictable outcome of decades of underinvestment in one of the most important public systems we have.

Decades of have shown that a child’s earliest years shape lifelong health, educational success and economic opportunity. Yet historically, we have invested far less in those years than the evidence, and our families, have demanded.

I grew up between working-class New Hampshire and San Francisco’s Mission District, shaped by both the strength and the fragility of public systems. That’s the lens I’ve carried through nearly 30 years in public service, social services, economic development, federal regulatory work and now as CEO of First 5 Alameda County, the agency responsible for implementing Measure C. I’ve learned the difference between policies that make a splash and systems that actually change lives.

Funding matters. Implementation determines whether funding changes lives.

Public dollars become real opportunities for families only when communities have the capacity to put those investments to work. That means building partnerships, strong fiscal stewardship, workforce development, facilities, transparent accountability, modern data systems and public institutions capable of responding to what families actually need.

Because what families need is often more nuanced than the legislation, the art of interpretation for implementation is critical. In Alameda County, more than searching for childcare are looking for providers who speak a language other than English. 

More than one-quarter of working parents need care outside traditional business hours. Families raising children with disabilities continue to face significant barriers finding inclusive programs. These aren’t exceptions, they’re everyday realities that should shape how public systems are designed.

Responding effectively to those realities requires more than funding announcements or good intentions. It requires public institutions willing to partner with communities, listen to families, invest strategically and continually improve operations and program design based on lived experience.

This kind of stewardship rarely attracts headlines. It happens in community centers, church halls, classrooms, neighborhood meetings and around kitchen tables. It’s technical, collaborative and often invisible. Yet it’s the work that determines whether public investment succeeds or stalls.

Alameda County isn’t alone. Across the country, communities are reaching the same conclusion: Early childhood isn’t private family responsibility. It is essential public infrastructure.

That’s the same shift happening elsewhere. New Mexico has built one of the most ambitious early childhood systems in the country through sustained public investment. New York City has made universal childcare central to its economic future. San Francisco keeps expanding what it invests locally to close gaps in access. Different paths, same realization: Where a lack of national childcare policy and funding has left a hole, communities are stepping up to build the system themselves.

No single county can do that alone. But a system built well and built to be shared becomes something bigger than the place that built it. What we’re working toward isn’t just about helping the kids down the block. It’s an example to inform national policy and practice, to set a regulatory framework and funding to help the kids down the block — and the kids growing up on the Eastern Seaboard, too.

Measure C began as a promise to the children in our own neighborhoods. The question now isn’t whether that kind of promise can work, Alameda County is proof that it does. It’s how we can use local examples to demonstrate we can achieve national promise to all families and children, making the local implementation that much easier to achieve lasting results for kids and families.

Head Start, the federal program providing free early education for low-income children, has benefited from strong bipartisan support since its 1965 inception, withstanding funding cuts and political turbulence across 11 presidencies.

But more recent threats from the second Trump administration have thrust Head Start into the spotlight. Last year, its programs faced disruptions and threats of closure following funding freezes, a federal shutdown, staff layoffs across the agencies that oversee Head Start and attempts to exclude immigrant children. Now, the federal government could attempt to deregulate standards that Head Start programs are required to maintain, according to a program official.

At each turn, supporters — alumni, teachers, families, child development experts, community members — have rallied behind the program.  were filed and   halted some of the federal actions.  to block immigrant children from social benefit programs drew .

“On the positive front, Head Start is still funded. Head Start is still here,” said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California. “I think Head Start is one of those terms that people often know and have positive associations with without necessarily really understanding the depth of it.”

The program provides a wide range of services to the  enrolled in California. These include health and behavioral screenings, dental services, parent engagement opportunities, meals, transportation and more.

While these services are still in place, Head Start staff say it remains challenging to keep up with costs. A recent $85 million increase, to be shared nationwide, won’t cover rising expenses amid high inflation, supporters say.

Here’s what we know about the state of Head Start in California and at the federal level.

The origins of Head Start

Head Start is often referred to as a single program, but there are a few branches under the Head Start umbrella that serve vulnerable populations.

When the program was first established in 1965, it was designed by a panel of child development experts as an eight-week project to help disrupt generational poverty. The programs were created to be comprehensive, meaning they would aim to meet children’s emotional, educational, social and health needs while also engaging the child’s family. Congress soon made Head Start permanent, and it was developed into a full-day program.

Head Start is administered by the Administration for Children and Families, which is in the Department of Health and Human Services.

But it also includes other programs such as: American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start, Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Early Head Start.

Each Head Start program enrolls children ages 3 to 5. The exception is Early Head Start, which enrolls pregnant women and children from birth through age 3. Some of these programs are available in early learning centers. while others are home based. More information on each type of setting can be found .

Head Start programs are for families living below the federal poverty line. Eligibility can be met by verifying income or enrollment in other benefit programs, such as Cal-Fresh, CalWORKS or Supplemental Security Income. Children experiencing homelessness or in the foster system are also eligible.

How are recent disruptions affecting families?

As long funding remains relatively stable, children enrolled in Head Start will continue to receive services, said Cottrill.

“The experience for a family enrolled in Head Start will be the same as it always has been,” she said. “They’re still going to get all of the comprehensive services. They’re still going to have qualified teachers. Their kids are going to come out of that program way better prepared to succeed in school and beyond.”

If there are cuts, the question is how many children will be able to stay enrolled. Cuts have happened before, and have had an effect, Cottrill said. Cuts proposed in recent years, including , would have led to about 80,000 fewer Head Start spaces available for children nationwide.

“This is already a lean program. There’s not a lot to cut,” Cottrill said. “So, ultimately, what we often see is it means we have to close classrooms and serve fewer kids.”

If Head Start classrooms begin to enroll fewer children, California does have other early-learning options for low-income families. But the state’s options will not cover Head Start cuts, say experts.

“If Head Start funding is cut or eliminated, those families essentially enter the waiting list for our state systems, which are already oversubscribed and under-resourced,” said Laura Pryor, research director at the California Budget & Policy Center, a Sacramento-based nonpartisan think tank. “It really just exacerbates the existing challenges we have with state investment in childcare.”

Sometimes, a family with a 4-year-old might find it easier to enroll in transitional kindergarten, also known as TK, because it requires less paperwork and there are no strict income eligibility requirements.

But certain aspects of Head Start — including the medical screenings and strong emphasis on parental engagement — are not available to the same degree in the public school system.

“TK doesn’t do all of the wonderful wraparound services that Head Start provides,” Pryor said.

How would federal proposals impact quality?

Built into Head Start are  for parent engagement, developmental screenings and nutritional guidelines. This level of support was deemed critical in the that outlined what Head Start would eventually become.  was released in 1975.

In May, the federal agencies overseeing Head Start  to remove wage and benefits requirements in part to “restore needed flexibility and autonomy to local programs” while reducing paperwork. Cottrill, of Head Start California, said she and other supporters of the program are also expecting proposed changes to the regulations.

Alex Adams, who leads the federal Administration for Children and Families that controls billions in childcare and preschool funding, has allegedly  he wants federal childcare regulations to “fit on an index card,” according to the New York Times.

Why is Head Start vulnerable to instability?

Head Start’s funding structure is unique in the early childhood field.

Funding for these programs flows directly from the federal government to the programs administering Head Start. Other programs that offer childcare and basic necessities tend to be structured differently: federal dollars will typically be sent to the state or county, which will then distribute the money to local programs.

The direct line of funding allows programs to be more responsive to the needs of the families they serve, but also makes them vulnerable to instability within the federal government.

It’s part of what happened late last year, during the nation’s longest shutdown. The longer the shutdown went on, the longer Head Start programs went unfunded. Some programs were forced to temporarily shut down because furloughed federal staff were not able to process grants.

This story was originally by EdSource

For as long as anyone remembers, no childcare center on Kauaʻi has had a single opening for an infant or toddler. Not one.

On this tropical island lush with vegetation, the childcare landscape is desolate. Kauaʻi is the only major Hawaiian island that has gone without center-based infant and toddler care for most of the past 15 years if not more — the data just doesn’t go back any further. 

There are spots on the island’s military base, but those are reserved for military families. There have historically been about 22 licensed home-based childcare centers that could also take infants and toddlers, but they’re limited to only two children under 18 months; most choose to only have one infant or none at all. That amounts to about 10 to 14 seats for the 700 babies who are born on the island every year. And hiring a nanny on Kaua’i is a prohibitive cost for many: The going rate is between $35 and $40 an hour. 

On the mainland, if parents are in a childcare desert, they often get around it by driving to the next nearest town or moving neighborhoods to be near family. On Kauaʻi, there’s nowhere to go without leaving the tiny island behind. So parents have made it work because they had to. Families living intergenerationally relied on each other to help with the care. Grandmas and aunties stepped in to help. Moms took their kids to work with them or they found a job that they could do from home to give them more flexibility. In many cases, moms left the labor force altogether. 

This has gone on so long that it has become an accepted way of life. 

Across Hawai’i, of parents report leaving their jobs due to childcare challenges, according to a 2025 survey by the Chamber of Commerce Hawai’i. On Kauaʻi, “it is a very stressful situation, and in most cases it’s going to be the mother that has to to quit her job and stay at home and it puts on an additional burden to the family financially,” said Carol Wear, the executive director of PATCH, Hawai’i’s childcare resource and referral agency.

The situation came to a head during the pandemic, which decimated the scant childcare options on Kaua’i. Five home-based childcare centers had shuttered by 2023. Families’ finances got tighter after the island’s top industry, tourism, much of 2020. An already unwieldy housing affordability problem . Fewer families could afford to have one parent home not working to care for their child. 

Faced with a need that was growing more desperate, the island’s first known infant and toddler spots opened up by 2024. The Kauaʻi Montessori Project, a preschool in Līhuʻe, the county seat, opened 12 infant and toddler spots thanks to some grant funding that came through during the pandemic. Then an Early Head Start center serving the lowest-income children — — opened in 2025 with eight infant and toddler spots. Coming soon is a third center, a renovated grocery store space, that the county decided to turn solely into an infant-toddler center in response to the need. It will open with 32 seats for kids ages 6 weeks to 3 years old early next year. 

That brings the count of infant-toddler spots to about 30 currently — still only enough for about 4 percent of the island’s infants. For the Head Start center, the kids on that waitlist alone could fill three more centers, said Novelyn Hinazumi, the director of Kauaʻi programs at Child & Family Service, the nonprofit that operates Head Start programs on the island. 

“This shortage has placed enormous strain on families, contributed to workforce loss and increased community awareness of the need for systemic change,” said Natasha Perry, the county’s early childhood coordinator. 

For moms, it has put into question whether their families can continue to live on Kauaʻi at all. 

Aakara Wiegand, a single mom of a 2-year-old who has lived in Hawai’i for 15 years, has to take her daughter with her to work at a rental car company. With her other business running wellness retreats, she can only do about half as many events because she can barely manage it with her toddler. 

The nanny rates are unaffordable, Wiegand said. And even finding a nanny at the last minute is difficult. She had one nanny lined up for an upcoming colonoscopy, but the nanny had to travel, so Wiegand was forced to cancel her appointment. 

It has put severe strain on her life, she said: “I have basically stopped doing things.” 

Even more complicated is the fact that her toddler is receiving early intervention services for her speech and social emotional development. The very few options on the island don’t often cater to children who need additional support, Wiegand said. Last year, she was able to get her daughter a spot at a daycare, but she only lasted there four days. “She just couldn’t emotionally fit in that group, but it was the only option available. So that was frustrating at that time,” Wiegand said.

With no family or support on the island, Wiegand is starting to research a move to North Carolina in the next year. Becoming a parent has changed her experience on Kaua’i.

“It’s just not a very sustainable environment anymore,” she said. “It’s definitely taken a toll on me.”

Part of how Kauaʻi found itself with such a severe infant and toddler care shortage is a familiar story. In Kauaʻi, like much of the country, infant and toddler spots because no one makes money from them. Per Hawai’i’s licensing rules, there needs to be one teacher for every four infants in each infant-toddler classroom, which makes staffing expensive. 

But on this island, there’s also a space problem. 

Hawai’i’s licensing guidelines require of play or instructional space per child as well as 75 square feet of outdoor space per child, not unlike what most other states require. In most places that’s not a big constraint, but on an island 33 miles wide with a massive housing shortage, real estate is tight. 

Mandie Gibson, the principal of the Koloa Early School, a preschool on the south part of the island about 10 miles west of Līhuʻe, said she’s been trying to add an additional building to run an infant-toddler center for seven or eight years, but on the island, the process is lengthy. Even if it does come together soon, which she expects it may, construction is projected to take six to 10 months. Adjusted for Kauaʻi time — everything takes longer here, she said — it’ll likely be closer to a year and a half.

Gibson first sought to add infant and toddler spots as a workforce retention tool for her own staff. But the addition didn’t come together in time; she lost one full-time teacher last year when his wife had a baby and he had to move into a part-time position elsewhere. 

She’s seen families on both ends of the spectrum: those with the means to hire nannies to care for their younger children and those who had to move away to find care. 

“Here, it’s very transient. It’s three to five years for a lot of people. The island spits you up or embraces you,” Gibson said. 

Kauaʻi’s retention problem also extends to its teachers. If the island wants to continue to add more infant-toddler centers, it’s going to have to figure out how to recruit and train staff. Under Hawai’i regulations, infant and toddler teachers depending on their education level need one to two years of experience with that age group to qualify. How do you get experience on an island that has never really had spots to begin with?

Toni Fujimoto, the early childhood education program coordinator at Kauaʻi Community College, has been working on that side of the problem for years, including helping shape recommendations to the state to modernize the childcare licensing requirement. One of her goals is to set up apprenticeship programs for her students in partnership with the island’s centers. Some students can currently get experience at home-based centers or at centers like Gibson’s, which takes kids as young as 2 and technically counts as infant-toddler experience. But the options are severely limited. 

And it’s already hard to recruit students to early childhood because the positions are among the lowest paid jobs in the country; some students just choose to work in tourism or other industries instead of pursuing the education needed to work in childcare. Last semester, Fujimoto had only four graduates from the associate’s degree program. She is now recruiting as early as middle school, sussing out any students who may have interest. 

One of Fujimoto’s recent graduates, Alysha Palacio, grew up on Kauaʻi with her grandparents caring for her. But she did not have that option when she became pregnant her senior year in high school in 2021. Her fiance is a plumber and couldn’t bring their daughter with him to work. Her mother is a store manager who works from sun up to sundown with no days off. Her father is a waiter who often works double shifts. Her grandparents passed away. Already, Palacio’s sister-in-law had to leave the island because of lack of childcare.

Palacio chose to study early childhood education — hoping, at first, that it would also prepare her for being a mom — and kept her daughter with her while she did classes on Zoom or went to campus. It took her four years to complete her associate degree. She graduated in May hoping to go work at a preschool but is still waiting to hear back about a job.

Out in the community, she sees the struggle reflected in other moms. At a restaurant recently, she noticed her server’s young children sitting alone at a back table. 

“Another waitress comes in and she has her kids, and she puts her kids on this back table, and it clicked in my head that they’re bringing their kids here because they have nobody else to watch them, so their kids are literally going to work with them,” she said. “When I see that in public I feel really bad.”

At Kauaʻi Montessori, director Marci Whitman has had to weigh whose pocketbook she would hurt more. She recently lost two teachers because they couldn’t afford housing on the island; another two nearly became homeless. But to pay them, she had to raise an already high tuition. 

She chose the teachers, who are paid between $20 and $27 an hour. 

Over the past several years, Kauaʻi’s efforts to add more infant spots have butted up against a growing affordability crisis that is among the most severe in the nation. As much as some parents may want to put their youngest in childcare, few can actually afford it.

Tuition for infant spots at Kaua’i Montessori is $2,400 a month. On an island where the median household income is about $83,000, that price would swallow about a third of it. So though Whitman may have 12 spots for infants, only three are taken due to the high cost.

Statewide, the average cost of full-time, center-based infant care in Hawai’i is per year, according to an analysis by Child Care Aware. That’s second only to Massachusetts among the 47 states for which there is data. 

Businesses on Kauaʻi are as they can. Tamara Lawrence, a mom of three young kids, opened a play space in 2023 to try to offer some respite for stay-at-home parents or those working from home with their kids. But the business struggled to make a profit — people said the play space was too expensive. 

They recently moved into a new space on the main street in Līhuʻe and established a nonprofit arm that will help them take in some grant funding to lower costs. After their grand opening next month, they’ll start marketing the Play Hale’s drop-in childcare option: two hours a day for $25. 

“My goal is to eventually make it very minimal payment or no payment at all — that’s what our community wants and needs,” Lawrence said. 

The community also needs something really basic: childcare . Over and over again, the question of came up in more than a dozen conversations The 19th had with parents, providers and childcare experts on Kauaʻi. In a place where, for decades, people have relied on their family and each other for care, growing to trust more formal childcare options is a barrier in itself (for those who have the luxury of choice). Hawai’i also seriously in its reporting of incidents of serious injuries or abuse at childcare centers. Though the state is required by federal law to report such cases annually, regardless of whether there are any incidents at all, it hasn’t . 

Lawrence said that, culturally, trust was a big issue, which is why she always advises her staff to create a connection with every patron that comes through their doors. Even remembering someone’s name can make someone more likely to return.

Nora Gregg, a stay-at-home mom of a teenage daughter and two boys under the age of 2 said the philosophy among most of the moms she knows on the island is that mom should be home with their baby. Some moms put their kids in nature pods, unlicensed childcare options where kids learn outside, or they gather together to share the caregiving. “That’s actually how women have mothered for many centuries — that’s the village,” she said.

“Parents here, they don’t just give your kids to strangers,” said Gregg, who has lived in Kaua’i for three years. “When I think back to how I put my daughter on the East Coast in daycare that I didn’t know the person, isn’t that weird?” 

On Kauaʻi and elsewhere in the United States, a country that has now been in , so much of the experience continues to be shaped by what little choice parents even have in the matter. 

Connie, a single mom of a 4-month-old who has lived on Kauaʻi for five years, doesn’t trust anyone to care for her baby. So she brings her daughter along as she cleans Airbnb’s across the island. Cleaning is a lucrative job for women here; on any given year, 1.4 million tourists visit an island of 74,000 locals. She can’t afford to lose the job, which she needs to keep her health insurance. But Connie’s boss doesn’t know she brings her daughter to work. The 19th is only using her first name to protect her identity. 

“I’d be lying if I said it was a walk in the park,” Connie said. “I could be just about done with the job, and she gets really really upset or fussy, and sometimes there’s nothing I can do to calm her down until we can get in the car and she falls asleep in her car seat. Or I could be just about done with my job, and my boss is like, ‘Oh, hey, can you go here? Can you go there? Can you do all these extra things?’ ”

She doesn’t feel like she has options. She can’t afford a nanny. But as her daughter gets older, she is going to have to seriously consider asking her family to move to the island with her to help, she said. 

Until then, she sneaks her daughter’s bouncer and toys with her to work hoping her boss won’t find out.

“I have to take the risk every day.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Amid an often bleak landscape, Kentucky was recently able to pass with bipartisan support, making significant investments in childcare by improving subsidy reimbursement rates, codifying free childcare for childcare providers, requiring training to better support children with special needs and easing regulations that stand in providers’ way.

The state’s effort started in 2024 with the launch of the Kentucky Collaborative on Child Care. The project — a partnership between Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, the Kentucky Chamber Foundation and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Center for Policy and Research — convened 40 childcare advocates and leaders from across Kentucky to meet regularly in 2024 and 2025 to come up with policy recommendations for the legislature to ensure the state’s families have access to high-quality childcare. 

Convergence, a national nonprofit that specializes in bringing people together with differing backgrounds and opinions, facilitated the collaborative, which was able to come to consensus on a number of polarizing issues. The nonprofit is “designed for issues where progress has stalled,” noted Mariah Levison, CEO of Convergence. 

That was the case in Kentucky. It was among the many states that came to realize how many challenges plague the sector when the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into disarray. There was “a surge in advocacy around childcare,” particularly in 2022, said Charles Aull, executive director of the Center for Policy and Research at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. But while there was a lot of energy and activity around the issue, there wasn’t a shared set of goals. “There was an identified problem, we had a whole bunch of people who cared about the problem, but there wasn’t a whole lot of cohesion among those folks,” Aull said. He added that state lawmakers also understood there was a problem but, because they aren’t subject matter experts, told the advocates that they weren’t sure what exactly should be done to solve it. Some had “issue fatigue,” said Mandy Marler, a childcare lobbyist at Baldwin Consulting who participated in the collaborative. 

The group debated a number of childcare solutions over the course of 18 months. Marler came in prepared to fight tooth and nail against any efforts to deregulate childcare, noting that the state already has some of the child-to-staff ratio requirements in the country. 

“I had been in so many rooms and so many situations where it was, ‘We’ll just cut regulations and it won’t be a problem or unaffordable anymore,’ ” she said. But she found that “no one was trying to come for our ratios.” Instead, the conversation was about unwinding the red tape that really did get in providers’ way without changing health and safety standards for children, such as allowing microcenters that serve less than 24 children to skip some requirements intended for larger centers like having a playground or cooking meals in-house.

Meanwhile, Gus LaFontaine, another member of the group and co-founder of LaFontaine Early Learning Center — a childcare program in Richmond, Kentucky — was nervous about proposals that would have the government mandate specific training for his staff, rather than leaving the choice to owners like him. But he was eventually able to get on board with earmarking a portion of the 15-hour annual training requirement for childcare providers for helping staff better support children with disabilities. The group’s process required him to “choose wisely the hills you want to die on,” he said. “I came full circle on that topic.” 

The strongest disagreement the group had was over bonuses for childcare workers, Levison said. Members couldn’t come to a compromise on the issue, so it was left out of its recommendations. Instead, they prioritized pushing the state to cover the entire cost of childcare for childcare workers — something Kentucky started doing in 2022 and has since caught on in other states but had never been codified by legislation. 

“One of the things the group agreed on is it’s so important it should be in statute,” Aull said. “It should be permanent and should be funded.” And while such a program doesn’t offer childcare staff more take-home pay, it saves them a lot of money on the cost of their own children’s care. “We actually did accomplish some wage supplementation without that name on it,” LaFontaine said. 

In the end, the group was able to develop everyone could agree to. That included improving the state’s existing childcare subsidy program, streamlining burdensome regulations, improving care quality, and addressing the low pay and high turnover among childcare staff. But the collaborative’s members were clear that the report they eventually produced wasn’t the end of the process, but rather the beginning. They spent a lot of time meeting with state lawmakers and sharing the results of their work. When they gave the report to lawmakers, the process and wide array of advocates brought a lot of people on board. Marler, who has worked as a lobbyist on childcare for nearly a decade, said of the report, “I have never in all my years working on any policy had that kind of endorsement.”

The group’s recommendations deeply informed , which became law in April. The legislation free childcare for providers, changed state subsidy payments to reflect the true cost of care, required training for caring for children with disabilities and modified the state’s quality rating system to better take outcomes into account. It also eased the paperwork required for employers to participate in the state’s Employee Child Care Assistance Partnership, which pools state, employer and employee money to cover the cost of care, and launched a pilot program to create one-room microcenters caring for up to 24 children. 

That it was numbered six is significant, because the House saves its priorities for bills one through ten every year, Aull noted. “Even two years ago, if we had brought up the possibility of a House majority making childcare one of its top ten priority bills, you would have been laughed out of the room,” he said. The bill passed “with overwhelming bipartisan support,” Levison noted. 

The group’s work also informed , which directs the state’s auditor of public accounts to study statutes, regulations and policies that relate to opening and operating childcare centers with an eye toward streamlining them to make it easier on providers. It passed the legislature unanimously.

Kentucky has made significant progress through the passage of House Bill 6 and HJR50, but moving the legislative packages forward wasn’t all smooth sailing. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear allowed HB6 to go into law . He also vetoed HJR50, that the auditor of public accounts lacked “the programmatic and policy expertise” to carry out the study and that it would require spending taxpayer dollars to hire an outside auditing service, but the legislature overrode his veto, and Aull noted that it did so with bipartisan support. 

The legislature, for its part, blocked an effort that could have had a much larger impact on increasing parents’ access to affordable childcare. Last June, Beshear a “Pre-K for All” initiative and convened an advisory committee for the issue. But the legislature , refusing to include funding for it in the state budget, with Republican members citing worries about the cost of such a program and what effects it would have on private childcare providers. Instead, this May Beshear created pilot pre-K programs in two counties as a smaller-scale alternative.

The advocates who pushed for the reforms now enshrined in law aren’t done, however. “We never envisioned this as the final word,” Aull said. Next, the group plans to make sure that the legislation is implemented well. “Anytime you’re able to accomplish policy change, [there is an] importance of continued cultivation of that legislation,” he said. “You need to continue to work on its implementation phase — it takes a long time.”

It’s been a difficult year for Mary Moody, owner of the top-rated Silver Bluff Kids Early Learning Center in Haywood County. She said her business has struggled since federal pandemic funds used to keep childcare centers open ran out in 2025.

Moody didn’t want to cut staff salaries after the federal money ran out, she said in an email, but avoiding wage cuts and paying higher operational costs meant the center had to end contributions to retirement plans and employee health insurance reimbursements “because the money simply wasn’t there.”

The center also had to cut back on art and craft supplies and some activities. 

The new state budget tosses a financial life preserver to rural businesses like Moody’s that provide subsidized childcare, offering them some hope of stability after a long period of hardship.

The budget commits $97 million in federal funds to raise subsidy rates, and it also sets a minimum rate, called a “rate floor,” that will end up sending more money to rural childcare providers than they otherwise would have received. Subsidies help low-income families cover childcare costs. 

“This is what we have been begging for for years,” said Mandy Mills, executive director of the Southwestern Child Development Commission.

Rural providers collect fewer subsidy dollars per child than urban providers. Payments are based on market rate studies, as well as the quality of the childcare center or home and the age of the child. 

Rural providers have argued for years that the rates they’ve been paid fall far below their actual costs. 

Mills’ commission administers subsidies for 14 western counties and operates the childcare resource and referral service for 37 counties. The rate floor will make a huge difference in rural western countries, she said. 

“It’s going to be a game changer,” she said. “We have had programs closing right and left.”

It’s not just childcare providers who called for a rate floor. Child advocates and businesses did, too.  called the rate floor a “breakthrough” and “the single most consequential childcare provision in the budget.”

Establishing a rate floor was also a top recommendation from Gov. Josh Stein’s

Rural centers and home-based childcare operators that had been struggling are in line for significant increases.

A top-rated, five-star center in Randolph County receives a $867 subsidy per month for each infant, said Leanna Martin, director of early childhood education policy and research at NC Child. Starting in October, that same center will see subsidies increase by $500 a month for each infant.

In another example, reimbursements for five-star home-based care for 3- to 5-year-olds in Alleghany County will increase from $407 per month to $900 a month. 

The hope is that childcare options will expand in rural areas, with the increased payments encouraging centers and homes to accept more children. 

“When reimbursements were so low, they were losing so much money,” Martin said. 

There’s a tremendous need for infant care, but costs for providers are higher for babies because childcare centers need one staff member for every five babies. Staff-to-child ratios are higher for older children. 

Centers throughout western North Carolina closed classrooms because they could not hire or keep enough staff, said Mills. When centers needed to cut back, infant care was the first thing to go. 

Moody at Silver Bluff Kids is anxious to restore employee benefits and hire a new teacher. 

“The subsidy rate floor will, number one, allow us to avoid the big financial burden we have had. It will allow us to reinstate either a health insurance policy or a health insurance reimbursement plan with higher reimbursement rates than we were previously able to contribute to employees’ insurance. We will also contribute again to the staff’s retirement plans,” Moody said. 

The center is fully enrolled with 54 children. Moody couldn’t afford to hire a new teacher, so she and the assistant director have been filling in. Moody said she spends her nights and weekends doing paperwork. 

“The rate floor, in my opinion, will allow centers to thrive,” she said. “ I think it will be a game-changer for retaining highly qualified staff and recruiting additional staff. This investment will allow many centers like ours to continue providing the high-quality care we are known for, without the financial stress of trying to figure out how to fit it all into the budget creatively.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Laura Leslie for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.

With costs up, many are facing financial hardship at a level even greater than what was seen at the onset of the pandemic. That economic strain is taking a toll on the emotional well-being of children and their caregivers.

That’s according to that have asked families how they are faring. 

“It’s really clear that it’s a really difficult time to be a parent in America right now,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “I feel like we’re being squeezed in so many different ways.”

The administration’s approach to tariffs has forced up the price of many basic goods and services, she noted. The conflict in Iran has caused oil prices to spike. And federal legislation — namely H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — has led to the beginning of a pullback of social safety net programs such as SNAP and Medicaid. 

As a result, Americans are dealing with soaring gas prices, increased grocery costs, higher utility bills, and untenable healthcare premiums that have prompted some to “roll the dice” and go uninsured, Rodrigues explained. On top of all of those ballooning expenses, parents must also weather the costs of childcare; extracurricular activities for the kids; and food, clothing and medical care for their dependents. 

“All of these things compound and create this context of misery that we’re all feeling pretty acutely this summer,” said Rodrigues, whose organization recently released the results of a of parents of more than 1,500 K-12 public school students. 

Among parents of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, NPU found that about two-thirds of respondents expressed that they think the economic conditions in the country are getting worse, with an overwhelming majority saying that the costs of housing, basic goods, healthcare, childcare and extracurricular activities were each “somewhat” or a “very big” problem right now. Three in four parents of kids in grades K-5 said inflation had changed their summer plans. Trips have been canceled or dialed back. Summer activities, such as camp, have had to be reconsidered. 

Magda Zalewska, a mother of three children under age 6 in Romeoville, Illinois, is one of the parents feeling immense financial pressure this year. She wants to sign up her two older children — ages 4 and 5 — for soccer, but it’s not something she can afford. Trips to the grocery store and fueling up her car are crushing her right now, she said. She has no money in a savings account in case of emergency; she’s always hoping her air conditioner doesn’t go out, that her car keeps running. 

“I’m already working from sun up to sun down,” said Zalewska, who works as an early intervention therapist. “I’m already stretched so thin, and it’s frustrating because you want to give your kids this life but you can’t keep up with expenses.”

Her compensation, even as it has gone up, never seems to keep pace with inflation, she added.

“Everything is going up in price,” she said. “I keep climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder, [but] I’m always at this paycheck-to-paycheck scenario, no matter how far I advance in my career.”

Zalewska has benefited from financial assistance over the years, from WIC, SNAP and Medicaid, but she said she lost Medicaid coverage recently and has been told she’s going to lose her SNAP benefits as well. Already, she said, she can’t remember the last time she ate fresh fruit. When SNAP is gone, she said, “It won’t be produce I’m not eating, it’s going to be meals I’m skipping.” (She focuses on making sure her three children have enough to eat before she feeds herself.)

“How am I supposed to pour into their cups when my cup is not filling?” she asked. “The support is being taken from our fingertips. It’s just all gone.”

Zalewska takes some comfort in the knowledge that she’s not alone. She notices a “uniform struggle” in the families she works with. “If it’s not financial, it’s overall stress and mental well-being. Most families are burnt out.”

Her point is reflected in data from Stanford’s RAPID Survey Project, which has been gathering information monthly from parents and childcare providers for over six years. Indeed, 44% of families with infants and toddlers reported challenges paying for basics such as food and housing in 2025, according to a by the nonprofit Zero to Three, which compiled RAPID data from families with children under age 3. That represents the highest rate in the prior five years of survey data, including in 2020 when 42% of families reported the same difficulties.

By the end of 2025, families’ financial hardship seemed to peak, said Samantha Melvin, director of policy research at Zero to Three and author of the report. 

“Their struggles really grew throughout the course of 2025,” she said. “We can’t say discretely that one thing changed, but there is this kind of cascading, consistent onslaught of uncertainty and distress.” 

Families specifically mentioned the heavy burdens of affording food, housing and utilities, she said. Economic pressure often affected emotional and mental well-being, with parents reporting increases in anxiety, depression, stress and loneliness over the course of the year. 

Those stressors affect not just adults, but entire families, Melvin noted. 

“If you’re afraid of paying for rent, putting food on the table, it may impact how you’re interacting with your baby or [how] your baby is perceiving that stress,” she said. “It can have long-term consequences and harm for babies to be living in this constant place of uncertainty and deprivation, unstable and inconsistent relationships.”

Often, people will respond to moments of hardship by noting that children are resilient. And they are, Melvin agreed. 

“Families and the relationships are what creates that resilience,” she clarified. “Babies are resilient because of their parents.”

So when parents are taking on extra jobs to cover expenses, waiting in line at a Medicaid or SNAP office to access benefits they are eligible for, or visiting food banks to make sure their kids can eat dinner, that inherently pulls them away from quality time with their children. “How do relationships get formed?” Melvin asked. “It’s with that time.”

This resonates for Zalewska. She’s been taking on more and more work to help her family’s finances. She estimates that she works about 65 hours a week. 

“I barely see my kids,” she said. “I’m missing all their milestones.”

Her current circumstances have left her in “fight or flight mode,” she said. Her nervous system is “haywire.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I feel it in the bones of my body.”

Clara Busse, a mom in Philadelphia with an infant and a 3-year-old, doesn’t worry so much about meeting her basic needs, but she and her husband have to make some sacrifices to afford the annual cost of their childcare, which is around $35,000 for her two children, she said. 

“Every friend I have with young children is facing the same challenges,” Busse said. “We need policies that make sense for young families. It’s really basic stuff. People are really frustrated.”

These issues are not likely to improve in the near term, with major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid looming in early 2027. Rodrigues and Melvin both emphasized the need for policies that support families, rather than ones that continue to take programs away and make life with young children less affordable. 

“Families are having such a hard time,” Melvin said. “They shouldn’t have to be working so hard, but the way they keep showing up for their babies — we need our policymakers and elected officials to be showing up for them.”

Nearly every child in Hawaiʻi lives in a community that lacks adequate licensed childcare, with access rates falling far behind the national average, according to recent reports from the Center for American Progress. 

Challenges finding affordable childcare have also worsened for some families this year as they face delays with receiving state subsidies reducing the costs of preschool. 

 measure the percentage of kids in every state who live in childcare deserts — communities where at least three kids are vying for a single seat in a licensed program. These programs include options like public or private preschools, group childcare homes and Head Start, said Hailey Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress. 

In ​​Hawaiʻi, 96% of kids live in these deserts — more than double the national average. Of these kids, 86% live in communities with no supply of licensed childcare providers at all, according to the Center for American Progress report. 

The data highlights the need for greater investments in childcare programs, including more support for staff, Gibbs said.  mean that some programs that are already in high demand may need to cut back on the number of students they serve, she said. 

“Provider financial viability is essential to standing up a childcare system that can actually meet demand,” she said. “You really need to be able to attract educators into the field.” 

The study does not include unlicensed sources of care, such as grandparents, neighbors and , which allow kids to learn alongside their family members, said Malia Tsuchiya, early childhood policy and advocacy coordinator at Hawaiʻi Children Action’s Network. 

Even taking these options into account, she said, families need more access to early learning programs. The state has aggressively expanded its public preschool programs in recent years, adding more than 1,800 seats in traditional public and charter schools since 2022. But the capacity of private childcare providers has fallen by roughly 950 seats in the same time period, according to a  from the Department of Human Services and Executive Office on Early Learning. 

Hawaiʻi’s workforce of early educators shrank during the pandemic and never recovered, Tsuchiya said, leading some providers to close some classrooms and reduce their enrollment. 

“We’re blessed to have multi-generational families and aunties, uncles, cousins, grandmas that are willing to step in and help supplement childcare,” Tsuchiya said. “But do they have a choice?” 

State Aid On Its Way?

For some families, securing childcare has only become harder to navigate as they face delays with receiving state tuition subsidies. 

Operating under the Department of Human Services, Preschool Open Doors provides tuition subsidies for young children whose families make up to 500% of the federal poverty level. The maximum subsidy ranges from $1,200 to $1,500 a month. 

Typically, the application window opens near the  to give the department time to process families’ applications before the payment period begins on July 1. This year, the application opened on , giving the department just over a month before families expected their subsidies to kick in. Parents need to reapply for the subsidy every year. 

The applications opened later than usual because the Department of Human Services needed to update its administrative rules expanding Preschool Open Door’s age eligibility to 2-year-olds. The department was initially expected to expand the program to 2-year-olds back in January, but it instructed families to  applying at the time to create more time for the rule change. 

As of last week, the program received over 6,100 applications and had processed 1,282. Staff process 10 to 15 applications a day, Joseph Campos II, director of the Hawaiʻi Department of Human Services, said in an emailed statement. The department is exploring strategies to reduce the backlog, he said, adding that wait times are longer than usual because of the high number of submissions the department received as soon as applications opened in May. 

But the delayed release date has left families scrambling for answers. 

Parent Christine Russo said she submitted an application for her twin daughters the morning of May 29, hoping an early submission would secure a quick response time from Preschool Open Doors. But more than a month later, she doesn’t know if her daughters qualify for the program — and the subsidy she was receiving through June has stopped. 

Last year, Russo’s daughters qualified for Preschool Open Doors, meaning that she paid only $28 a month for their preschool tuition. But the program year ended on June 30, meaning that Russo is now covering the full costs of tuition for July — over $2,700 for both girls. 

Russo said she doesn’t want to pull her daughters out of preschool, since it would mean losing her deposit and two spots that are in high demand. Russo lives in ʻEwa Beach, a community with a scarce licensed childcare supply, according to the .

Expecting to cover the full costs of preschool this month, Russo is worried what will happen if the tuition payments don’t kick by August. Earlier this week, she learned her application is being processed, but she’s still waiting to hear if her daughters qualify for the subsidy. 

“My anticipation was if they open this late, they’ve got it under control,” Russo said. “It’s not looking good at all.” 

The Department of Human Services will retroactively issue tuition subsidies dating back to the date of children’s preschool enrollment or families’ application, whichever came later, Campos said. Families who applied for July benefits and enrolled their children in preschool will receive subsidies for the full month if their application is approved, he said. 

Even with the reassurance of tuition backpay, some families and providers are stuck in limbo. 

At Seagull Schools, which offers early learning programs at six Oʻahu sites, some parents have decided to withdraw their children for the month of July because their tuition benefits haven’t come through, said Chief Executive Officer Megan McCorriston. Other families who are new to the school are holding off enrolling their children until they know they can qualify for the subsidies, she said. 

It’s a difficult situation for working parents, she said, and it also puts more stress on providers. Seagull Schools will hold seats for families who are waiting to hear back from Preschool Open Doors, she said, but that means some spots remain unfilled for two to three months at a time. 

“It’s sort of a wait and see situation,” she said. 

This story was originally published by . Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy, and “Data Dive” is supported in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.

The mismatch between the childcare arrangements parents say they prefer and those that public policy tends to emphasize — which I call the childcare preference gap — was reinforced by two recent surveys. 

A administered to 1,000 parents with children ages 5 and under in December 2025 by GBAO on behalf of Third Way — a center-left think tank — found that around half of parent participants preferred having a parent stay home to provide care, with another 15% preferring a family, friend or neighbor caregiver. While families were generally satisfied with the care their children were receiving, only around half of those using home- or center-based care said it was their preferred childcare arrangement, compared to 80% of those with a parent staying home and nearly 70% of those using FFN care.

The largest U.S. of parents with children under the age of 6, released in May by New America’s New Practice Lab, echoes these findings. When asked about their ideal childcare arrangement, 49% of nearly 5,500 parent participants said they’d prefer to care for their child themselves or for the child’s other parent to provide the care. Meanwhile, 11% preferred an FFN caregiver, and just 15% listed their ideal as a formal setting.

Surveys conducted earlier in the 2020s by and reported similar results. Importantly, these preferences are dynamic: As children age, there is more interest in formal programs, such as licensed childcare centers.

It’s important to consider that most of the polls described above asked parents to envision their ideal childcare scenario, setting aside costs and the financial impact of having a parent stay home. But families don’t live in hypotheticals. There are real financial implications for decisions about childcare, and when opportunities to access free or low-cost licensed early care and education arise — like universal pre-K or childcare — . What’s more, the strong preference for parental care in the first year of life seems to implicate a need for better paid leave policy as much as childcare policy, particularly since .

There’s also the reality that what people say they want to do in a survey can differ from what they actually do when making choices. However, the data can still be meaningful and should be considered when designing family and childcare policies. It is no more justified to ignore the desires of parents who prefer their children in licensed programs than those who prefer to provide the care themselves. 

Doing so can give policymakers a false impression that all parents need is access to any childcare slot, regardless of its characteristics. However, from the nonprofit Child Trends found that among the 622 families surveyed, 64% of those that used any form of nonparental childcare said there was moderate or high “misalignment” between their current care setup and their preferences and needs. That misalignment reflected parents using programs that didn’t fit their budget, align with their quality standards, reflect their beliefs or match their ideal setting. This discrepancy can actually cause material harm: Studies have found that when parents feel uncomfortable about their childcare arrangement, it may lead to . 

Yet current federal childcare policy, as well as most reform proposals over the past 20 years, do a rather poor job of reflecting parents’ stated preferences. While public policy does not always match public opinion (if it did, the U.S. would have, for example, and ), there is clearly room for improvement here. 

When it comes to childcare, for example, receive most of the funding from the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that sends grant money to states and is a key source of funding for childcare subsidies. Families with stay-at-home parents are categorically ineligible for childcare subsidies, and the most recent reauthorization of the law governing the program, the , made it harder for FFN providers . The Build Back Better Act that passed the House during the Biden Administration did not make any fundamental changes to that orientation.

To understand the persistent preference gap, one must understand the origins of modern U.S. childcare policy. Because childcare became , the conceptual underpinnings of the CCDBG Act are grounded in the premise that childcare assistance can increase employment and earnings, ultimately (the reasoning goes) enabling families to move out of poverty.

The appeal of such an approach is understandable: It’s far easier for policymakers to wrap their hands around licensed programs caring for children during parents’ reported work hours than to engage with the messy complexity of actually ensuring that parents have the care they prefer in order to bond with and healthily raise their very young children. Closing the preference gap, then, requires politicians on both sides of the aisle to reframe the goals of childcare policy — and to get more comfortable with trusting parents.

America’s current approach to childcare policy isn’t the only pathway. In the past, the U.S. actually did experiment with that allowed eligible low-income parents to use subsidy dollars to pay themselves, though such efforts never caught fire. Other countries have also built examples to look to. A recent from the People’s Policy Project highlighted how Nordic nations have built a childcare system that couples affordable licensed options with support for informal care. While the financial support available in the Nordic countries is unlikely to be high enough to enable a parent to stop working entirely, it could be the key to unlocking greater flexibility in balancing work and family responsibilities.

A shift does seem to be underway in America. Some policies are becoming more inclusive. New Mexico’s universal childcare system, for example, allows and receive $750 a month per child, though it does still exclude stay-at-home parents. Politicians are changing their tune, too: Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna that would create new structures to compensate FFN and stay-at-home parents alongside licensed programs, while the Democratically-aligned Project 2029 recently that would guarantee parents the right to choose the childcare that works best for them by offering access to either free licensed programs or a monthly stipend of $1,000 to compensate stay-at-home parents or FFN caregivers.

More and philanthropic leaders are also speaking up about the need to meet parents where they are at. For instance, the WeVision EarlyEd initiative, led by the Bainum Family Foundation, reimagining childcare policy to support two pathways for families: high-quality licensed ECE, and “trusted caregivers” which include parents and FFN caregivers.

This evolution can’t come fast enough: All families deserve the freedom to get as close as possible to their ideal childcare arrangement. That would benefit kids, parents and society writ large. The more that public policy can align with family childcare preferences, the better off the country will be.

Disclosure: The Bainum Foundation provides financial support to 91ɬ��.

The classroom at the Northeast Community Action Partnership Early Head Start was part of a five-week program that uses the recorders — often called talk pedometers — to gather data on teacher-child interactions and train their educators to guide them toward longer, more in-depth conversations. The program is offered by the national nonprofit , or Language Environment Analysis, which uses the technology to research young children’s language skills.

The Buffett Early Childhood Institute, an education research center at the University of Nebraska, partnered with seven rural and urban Head Start locations to use Lena technology this spring with more than 1,300 children. It was Nebraska’s first statewide implementation, funded by a five-year, $1.3 million geared toward helping states create programming to improve child literacy skills.

Lena has existed as a research nonprofit for more than two decades, but its professional development program, Lena Grow, started about six years ago. Last year, Florida lawmakers to provide Lena Grow to more than 400 preschools. The program has been over the past two years with a $3.2 million grant. Tennessee currently uses the technology in more than .

“It’s such a huge opportunity to be able to utilize these grant funds because it sets a really wonderful foundation for [children] as they enter kindergarten,” said Paula Thompson, a University of Nebraska-Kearney professor and one of the grant project directors. “It will hopefully have positive outcomes as we look toward that ultimate goal of increasing third grade proficiency.”

The work follows decades of discussion over how preschoolers best learn language. 

A found a dramatic difference in the number of words heard by children, depending on their family’s income — often referred to as the 30-million-word gap. has found that it’s not so much the number of words children hear, but the quality of the language they are exposed to.

Researchers have that talk and interaction between adults and children in their first few years of life often impacts future cognitive development and academic achievement. This engagement is measured in “conversational turns,” or the back-and-forth exchange of words between children and adults. 

“The term ‘serve and return’ is kind of a basic analogy for these conversational turn-taking events,” Thompson said. “It’s been a foundation in language and literacy for years, and we just continue to strive toward better understanding it.” 

Lena records and collects data about conversational turns through the device in each child’s purple vest. Daycares, preschools and Head Start centers use the data and training to increase the number of conversational turns between adults and children.

Lena Grow was designed to be used by all children in a classroom, but it is especially helpful for kids who don’t talk much or are at risk of — meaning they get fewer than five back-and-forth exchanges with an adult per hour. An of 33,256 children using Lena Grow found that 13% experienced language isolation.

“The way to improve literacy is actually to invest in and support language development in these early years,” said Alexandra Daro, director of applied research for the Buffett Institute. “The more back and forth you can get in a particular conversation, the better children are able to pick up on the language that you’re using.”

A child’s use of conversational turns has been to early literacy skills, social development and IQ scores. 

A June shows that the 51 children who participated in Nebraska’s initial Lena Grow program increased their conversational turns by 21% over the course of five weeks — from 33.5 to 40.6 per hour.

Children in center-based childcare average 15 hourly turns, but an optimal early talk environment is roughly 40, according to Lena. Youngsters who began Nebraska’s Lena Grow program with fewer than 15 hourly conversational turns boosted their talk by 111%, from an average of 9.7 to 20.5.

During the professional development program, early childhood centers have the children wear their vests one day per week. The recorder collects the number of conversational turns per child, in whatever language they are speaking, while the teacher continues the day like normal.

Norfolk educator Cassie Niedig said the data brought attention to children the adults weren’t talking to as much, such as Elvis, a 3-year-old who is nonverbal. It also showed that some toddlers were vocalizing words but not creating conversational turns with adults.

“I thought I was talking to Elvis a lot,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much more we talked to Marlo versus the other [children] — he’s our best talker because he’s the oldest. But even though he’s talking a lot, it’s not necessarily with conversational turns.”

Niedig said the toddlers loved the vests when they were first introduced to them, but there have been struggles because the children are so young. 

“We’ve had a couple of issues just because they want you to let them play, and they don’t want to have to put them on. But otherwise, we’ve had a great time with it,” she said. “We just let them talk, and I do not treat it any differently than a normal day other than trying to focus on whatever goal we are focusing on that week.”

One student with sensory issues struggled wearing one at first, but got used to it within a couple of hours. Placing stickers on the front of the vests also helped the kids warm up to the idea of wearing them once a week.

At Dodge County Head Start in Fremont, Nebraska, the 5-year-olds in the Lena program were excited to wear their vests, said Brittany Brown, a Head Start education specialist. One boy said the bulky recorder on the front made him feel like Iron Man — the device reminded him of the glowing reactor in the center of the superhero’s suit.

“They feel a little empowered, and they really like having it — there’s no hesitancy to put the vest on,” Brown said.

After a day of recording, the data is uploaded and analyzed. Then, a Lena coach — often a local staff member trained by the nonprofit — teaches the educators participating in the program ways to increase the number of turns. 

“The teacher is able to see if there is a certain hour where there’s a dip, and they’re able to discuss with their coaches ways to increase those conversational turns throughout the day,” said Rocy O’Keefe, the nonprofit’s chief growth officer.

During the coaching sessions, educators choose strategies to implement in the classroom. For example, Lena recommends that while teachers talk, read or sing with a child, they should comment on what the student is doing, name things the child is interested in, wait for responses, imitate them or get down on the children’s eye level so interactions are face-to-face.

“The coaches will work with teachers to set a goal based on the observations of the data — either a classroom average goal, or they are looking at individual children who might need some individualized attention,” Daro said. “Then the teachers practice throughout the rest of the week.”

Amy Bloomquist, coaching coordinator and area manager, was trained by Lena to be a coach for the Norfolk Head Start program. She said teachers have responded well to working on a specific topic each week to increase conversational turns. They also talk to families about the program after parents have given permission for their child to wear the recording device. 

“Each week they’re sending an informational flyer home with the families, sparking some conversation between the teachers and the families,” she said. “They’re also giving them some tips on how to increase conversational turns at home.”

In Nebraska, 22 Head Start centers are eligible to participate in the program, and Thompson said the Buffett Institute hopes to work with as many as it can by the end of the five-year grant. Its main goals for the next few years are not only for Nebraska children to improve their conversational turns, but for Lena Grow to increase 4-year-olds’ literacy scores on an assessment of early childhood development called Teaching Strategies Gold, or TS Gold. Lena Grow has been to improve language and literacy scores on these assessments in other states, such as Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio and Washington, D.C. 

“The dream goal is to also eventually be able to work with the school districts that these kids are entering into to look at improvement in TS Gold [scores] as they transition into kindergarten,” Daro said. “So, big dreams, but that’s what we’re going for.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Lena and 91ɬ��.

Though it was only a few years ago, the fancy gadgets have gotten a lot more advanced since then, and now Suskind is back with her next (and, she promises, her last) book, addressing the promise and perils of the technological revolution coming for every element of society, including young children. 

In “,” which will be released on July 14, Suskind acknowledges that technology is swiftly mastering endeavors that were once considered uniquely human. “Artificial intelligence is eroding our supposed superiority in each area one by one. … It generates language with fluency that surpasses most humans. Al turns out art, music, poetry, software. It uses existing tools and builds new ones.” 

But she zeroes in on a distinction that matters: Unlike humans, “AI does not care.”

Suskind’s new book guides parents, caregivers and educators through navigating how to raise children in the age of AI by offering the HOPE framework, which offers four principles: human connection, owning imperfections, protecting the early years and enhancing adult-child interaction. She called it HOPE, she said, because “Having a child is an act of hope for the future, and the future is not predetermined, as much as it feels like it is.” 

A pediatric surgeon and the founder and co-director of , Suskind has been a prominent voice in early learning since the publication of her 2015 book, “” which popularized the concept of linguistic “serve and return” between babies and their caregivers. 

In the conversation below, Suskind describes her nuanced stance on AI and shares her thoughts on how AI shapes child development as well as what parents and early educators should consider when deciding how and when to use technology with young children.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does “Human Raised” fit in with your other books? 

My whole journey has been about the power of talk and interaction and relationships … to allow children to not just learn, but to become human. A couple years ago, when AI started building momentum, I was like, “Oh my gosh, wait a second.” Suddenly we have technology that can mimic the human interaction that builds a child’s brain, which has been the focus of my entire research. I was like, “Oh, we really need to be thinking about this in a really deep and thorough way.” Because not only was it going to come so fast and furious, but parents have no guidelines or guidance. There are no policy guardrails. And so I felt I needed to write one more book — I swear this is my last one! I wrote it to think through this whole thorny issue myself. 

What particular insights do you bring as a surgeon?

I’m a cochlear implant surgeon. The way I got into this field was [by examining] differences in early language environments among children who are deaf and hard of hearing and got cochlear implants, [versus] typically developing children. I saw interaction and language … as modalities for building cognitive skills, language and literacy. 

I’ve always been cognizant that and nurturing interactions are important for socioemotional development, but so much of my work has been focused on those hard skills. And in writing this book, [I see] that human connection is a way to become human, to build the social brain, to build our ability to connect with other humans and navigate the human world. 

How can parents and educators tell when a technology is enhancing connection versus replacing it?

The frictionless experience is what makes it so seductive, and so different than what we’ve met before. I mean, we’ve had technologic innovation throughout all of human history, but it’s always been sort of a one-way street. Even social media and the engagement economy has been about sucking our engagement, but it hasn’t been building an intimate relationship and that is what generative AI [does].

AI is not a monolith. … The generative AI and that intimacy building aspect of it is what is seductive for adults, and for young children and very young children. The younger you are, the more likely you are to both anthropomorphize this technology, to project thoughts and feelings onto these entities. So they’re more at risk. 

At the same time, I am not anti-technology. … I believe in the power of technology that allows human flourishing. And I do believe that if we use it in the right way, it could do the things that we want. Allow opportunity gaps to close, allow people to have more presence. So let’s use it to enhance the human condition, not to replace human connection. 

I love tech, but I don’t love tech to replace the powerful role that parents and caregivers play in building children. 

In your book, you talk about the importance of owning our imperfections. How does that make us more human?

One really amazing experience in writing this book was reflecting back on the imperfections of humans and our relationships. We’ve always looked at them as bugs. How can we be better and more perfect parents? But the truth is that “good enough parenting” is an evolutionary gift that actually teaches kids how to be human. … Those missteps and ruptures and repairs help us learn how to be good partners with other humans. 

In your new book, you wrote, “AI has the keys to unlock the social gate,” which you define as “the biological filter built into the infant brain that evolved to allow a particular type of teacher: a human one.” What are the ramifications of this breach? 

We may not know everything about the technologies that are being built, but we know a whole heck of a lot about how children develop and how they can best develop to their full potential. In some ways, this book was about understanding the interaction between technology and children and adults, but also understanding how the human brain is built. 

In some ways, evolution gave us a mechanism to ensure that baby’s brains develop through human connection. Kids don’t learn from TV. It affects their language development and social development, but it doesn’t actually teach them. The social gate has made sure that babies only learn from human interaction. It opens it up and allows the learning to happen. And now that AI can mimic that human interaction … it has the passcode to the social gate, and whatever flows through from that technology is actively wiring that child’s brain. 

Patricia Kuhl [professor at the University of Washington and co-director of the university’s ] is a goddess of early brain development. Her research … is probably one of the most important things [for understanding] how to navigate AI in the early learning space. The basic science of human development is incredibly important not just for parents to understand, but policymakers and the people who are building this tech. They need to understand how we develop, so that they build tools that don’t inadvertently lead humanity in the wrong direction. 

And how much faith do you have in the people building these AI tools? 

I’m not going to answer that question, other than to say that I wrote this book primarily for parents and caregivers — for anyone who loves children. But I want desperately for those who are building technology … to read and understand it, so that they can more intentionally design with developmental science in mind. 

How could you see AI technologies supporting the early years? 

Number one, don’t displace that human connection that supports the parents or teachers in the children’s lives. We know about the administrative burden and the invisible labor that makes caring for young children so hard, so let’s build tools to make it easier for parents and teachers so that they can be more present. Let’s build tools that allow us to understand better how children are developing when [they] are exhibiting delays, so that we can more quickly ameliorate those issues. And there are scientifically driven tools that support the early learning process, but I don’t think that they should be used as replacements for teachers. 

What are some promising areas of research?

Brian Scassellati, who’s a computer scientist at Yale [and director of the ], showed that social robots can help teach children with autism spectrum disorder to learn social cues and become more connected with other humans. In the same vein, [that when] children read to social robots versus humans, they were less anxious. Using the science to help guide us in understanding the best ways to support children’s learning is great, but [we should] never forget that it must not replace human connection, it must only support it. 

I’m a physician, I come from the world of medicine. When we create new biologics, let’s say a vaccination, it’s not like we say, “Okay, we’ve created it. Let’s see how it does out in the real world and then go back and tweak and fix it.” No, we do really rigorous studies to make sure it’s safe for the population. And right now everything is being put on parents like, “Oh, you decide …” It’d be like saying, “Here’s your car seat … let us know if it’s safe and we can go back and tweak.” These are really powerful technologies. We need a lot more science, not to stifle innovation, but to make sure our humans remain safe. 

We can’t wait for the research to happen to get guardrails in place so that no harm is done. We need longitudinal data in understanding children who are growing up with generative AI as a significant presence, in understanding the impacts on language, socioemotional development and attachment. We don’t have these. I want research on protective factors. What are the conditions in which AI tools generally support human connection rather than displacing it? It’s not just an academic question, it’s a design question that will shape the field. 

What are the skills that children are going to need to succeed in the future? 

Now that AI can do all the things that we were trying to optimize in our kids — like be the best at math and science — and all these hard skills now can be done by AI a million-fold better than humans, it’s those distinctly human edge skills that matter. The critical thinking, the social connection, the curiosity, creativity, resilience — those are going to be the skills that allow children to thrive in the age of AI. 

About two-dozen Hoosier childcare providers and advocates overwhelmingly opposed looser statewide staff educational requirements during a Monday public hearing.

“This is a profession. This is not just a babysitting job,” said Hanna Wetzel, the director of the Children’s Learning Center of Posey County.

She spoke to representatives of the Family and Social Services Administration, the state agency overseeing childcare providers around Indiana.

FSSA last month dealing with staffing, meals, sleep and more — which Gov. Mike Braun and agency leaders say will lower costs for providers and families.

The agency plans to adopt the finalized regulations July 13, according to dockets for childcare and . They’re expected to take effect October 11.

The directors of childcare centers would no longer need a bachelor’s or associate’s degree to do the job, according to . They would qualify with two years of experience and a child development associate credential — which is as a career “stepping stone” by the organization that issues them.

Lead caregivers would not need a child development associate credential or other higher education — just a high school diploma or equivalent. And lower-level caregivers wouldn’t need to have completed high school, although they’d still have to be at least 18 years old.

Austin Scales, a lead educator at United Day Care Center in Muncie, said many of the primarily low-income children served there have experienced “severe, significant trauma.”

“Without that education, I would not have been able to serve them,” Scales said. He has a bachelor’s degree in early elementary education and special education.

Multiple people argued the changes would not assuage the industry’s labor shortages.

“The root causes of high director and staff turnover is driven by low compensation and burnout, not by educational requirements. Lowering expectations will not strengthen this workforce,” said Amy Van Bruggen, the senior director of quality and compliance at The Westin School in central Indiana. She has also worked as a childcare inspector and referral provider.

Relaxed standards could lead to a temporary increase in job applicants, according to Erin Kissling, the president and CEO of Early Learning Indiana. But she said educators without early childhood degrees or credentials are less likely to remain in the profession over time, citing a University of Nebraska of eight states.

Other feedback

Several speakers supported “modernization” provisions, including those allowing for electronic records and dropping certain required postings.

Omar Khan, the leader of the Indiana Child Care Business Alliance, spoke in favor of provisions requiring caregivers to keep children within eyesight or hearing range — without using other devices — and within arm’s length around water.

He also applauded a proposed twice-annual active shooter and intruder drill mandate and proposed greater leeway in mixing age groups at opening and closing times.

But Khan and several others opposed relaxed regulations for sleeping and diapering.

FSSA’s draft would allow childcare centers to use sleeping bags, as long as they’re placed on carpet, instead of cots elevated off the floor. It would also broaden diaper-changing table provisions to “surfaces;” eliminate a ban on cloth, lattice or wicker parts; and scrap requirements for sanitizable pads and waterproof paper strips.

“Families deserve to know their children are receiving the highest quality care in safe, developmentally appropriate environments,” said Ashanti Ordone, the owner and CEO of Gifted & Talented Academy in Indianapolis.

Providers also spoke against allowing portable wading pools, citing drowning risks, and lower standards for the materials provided to children. The draft rules delete a list of required activity types, including art, literacy, math, music, science and more.

“Every regulation should be evaluated by one question: Does this help ensure children are safe, nurtured, and given the strongest possible start in life?

“As you consider all these proposed licensing changes, I ask that we do not view quality and accessibility as competing priorities, because Indiana’s children deserve both,” said Beth Wickham, representing Early Head Start programs across the state. “Every regulation should be evaluated by one question: does this help ensure children are safe, nurtured, and given the strongest possible start in life?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

He wanted the job, he said, because he thought he could make a bigger difference in students’ lives if he met them earlier in their schooling. But he didn’t know a whole lot about how kids in elementary school — particularly those in the early grades — learned best or what they really needed.

A few years later, when Kristi Dominguez became superintendent of Francik’s district, the Ferndale School District in northwest Washington state, she noticed that in his kindergarten classrooms, students sat at desks, often doing worksheets. 

“We had desks in rows,” Francik confirmed.

That, plus the way the 4-year-old classrooms in Washington’s program were sequestered in different school buildings in the district, set off “red flags” for Dominguez, who has a background in early childhood education. 

Dominguez moved quickly to make changes to the way the district approached the early grades. One of the decisions she made was to have principals at all six of the district’s elementary schools participate in a nearly yearlong leadership training program focused on child development and early learning. 

Like Francik, many elementary school principals come into the role any prior knowledge of — or experience in — early childhood. But not all districts have an early learning champion like Dominguez at the helm. As a result, some elementary school leaders never learn how to tailor their leadership style and school culture to meet the needs of their youngest students. 

The issue has only become more urgent in recent years, as increasing numbers of elementary schools now have co-located pre-K classrooms as well, creating an even younger population for school leaders to oversee. 

Francik and his principal colleagues participated in the , which seeks to help elementary school administrators develop and then deepen their knowledge and understanding of the early grades, with a focus on children in pre-K to third grade.

The program is facilitated by the , a think tank originally housed at the University of Washington in Seattle and now based at the University of Colorado Denver. The center launched an in-person version of the program in 2013 for Washington administrators before shifting to a virtual environment in 2021, making it more easily accessible to school and district leaders all across the country. 

The program seeks to help elementary school administrators develop and then deepen their knowledge and understanding of the early grades, with a focus on children in pre-K to third grade.

Most school leaders “go through certain preparation programs that don’t talk about child development,” said Kristie Kauerz, founding executive director of the National P-3 Center. The result, she added, is school leaders who take the same approach to kindergarten as they do fourth grade. 

Dominguez didn’t want that to be the reality in her district. 

As Francik went through the 10-month training program (it has recently changed to run for seven months at a time), he began to realize how important the early grades are to future outcomes. He talked to and heard from school leaders in other states about how they were integrating early learning into their buildings, how they were funding pre-K, what was working, and where they were struggling. 

“The biggest lightbulb for me,” Francik said, “was play-based learning. Play-based learning is the work of kids.”

He began to realize that, as children play, they use math concepts; practice communication; hone social-emotional skills by sharing, compromising and working through conflict; and sharpen their fine-motor skills by coloring and painting. 

Today, individual desks are nowhere to be found in Francik’s kindergarten classrooms. Kids sit in groups at tables, allowing for more collaboration and communication throughout the day. Students aren’t asked to sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time, since that isn’t developmentally appropriate for them. 

“We are not desks in rows anymore,” he said. “We are a classroom where students are able to move and flow based on needs. We have academics being taught still, just not in rows. There’s lots of movement, lots of choice.”

And in all TK through second grade classrooms in his school, students get one hour every single day to pursue their own interests in the classroom. At the end of the hour, they come back together to reflect, sharing celebrations and struggles. 

Next year, Central Elementary will bring that same model to its third graders too. Rather than the practices of the older grades being “pushed down” to the early grades, the early grades are now influencing the whole school building. 

A similar approach is being used at Chicago Academy Elementary in Chicago Public Schools. 

Principal Joyce Pae, a former high school teacher and administrator, had three pre-K classrooms in her school but little to no guidance about how to integrate them into the rest of the building. She joined the Building Early Learning Leaders program — offered by VOCEL, a Chicago-based early learning nonprofit — for elementary school leaders at CPS in hopes of learning more about how to serve children in the early grades. 

The was launched in response to the city’s universal pre-K rollout, after VOCEL staff heard elementary school leaders repeatedly expressing, “I don’t feel equipped for pre-K,” said Jesse Ilhardt, executive director of VOCEL. “We started talking to some principals, and they were pretty frank with us: ‘We don’t know anything about early childhood education,’ ” Ilhardt said. “Some even told us they avoid pre-K classrooms, steer clear to leave them on their own island.”

She added: “What we experienced was that leaders were hungry for preparedness earlier than the district was able to provide it.”

During the BELL program, principals, assistant principals and instructional coaches from across the city come together over the course of a year to build knowledge and skills about early learning. The most valuable piece for Pae, she said, was the one-on-one coaching. Someone from VOCEL walked with Pae through her school’s pre-K classrooms, pointing out what was happening that she might have missed. 

“To the untrained eye, what looks like kids playing in the classroom is actually lots of social-emotional development,” Pae said, reflecting on what she learned from that walkthrough experience. She also saw how math and literacy concepts were woven into play. 

Pae did those walkthroughs with a coach about once a quarter, she said, typically following some reading and discussion about developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood. During one of those walkthroughs, Pae asked her coach about something that had been bothering her. She’d noticed that preschool teachers had started using the interactive whiteboards in their classrooms for read-alouds. 

“I was like, ‘I don’t like that, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m stuck in a certain way of thinking,’ ” Pae recalled telling her coach. 

The coach confirmed Pae’s suspicions. By switching storytime to a smartboard, students were missing out on critical learning opportunities, such as holding a book, turning the pages and realizing that stories are read from left to right.

“Those were all things kids need to acquire that they’ll lose if they’re watching a story be read aloud and it just flips magically to the next page,” Pae said. “I had a hunch. She was able to name it, then take us back to standards.”

The BELL experience, and the new knowledge and understanding it left her with, has had a lasting impact on Pae. She is more aware of the needs of the youngest students in her building, she said. She sees the way pre-K teachers help students name their emotions and cooperate with classmates — and how that can “provide the building blocks for a child to be successful, not only in school but in society.”

“It’s totally changed the lens through which I viewed every grade level and also the adults in the building,” Pae said. 

During professional development meetings with staff, Pae now builds in “moments of play” and socialization. She’s seen how those practices — plus encouraging natural curiosity and providing real-world context — help young children thrive, and she believes it will have the same effect on adults too. 

“It turns out what works best for our youngest learners and what’s effective for them is actually good for everyone,” Pae said.

Even though many school principals are inexperienced with the early grades, an idea that came up repeatedly in interviews is that no school leader intends to leave out certain groups of learners. 

“Every principal wants to do right by children,” said Dominguez, the superintendent in Washington. 

But how a principal defines what is “right” is often based on their own experiences in school. And because school principals are already stretched thin, managing facilities and staff and an ever-expanding list of responsibilities, they can be genuinely interested in better serving their youngest learners but unable to make early childhood development a priority. 

“There’s an understandable desire in school leaders that [they] want to know more and do better but have so little time to devote,” said Ilhardt. 

Pae, who has actually devoted the time, said she understands why the focus just never makes it to the top of the list for some school administrators. In Chicago, because the pre-K program is state-funded, those classrooms can feel very separate from the rest of the elementary school, even when they are in the same building. “It can easily be the last thing you think about,” Pae said. 

Since Kauerz launched the National P-3 Leadership program, others like it — mostly local spinoffs, she said — have cropped up around the country. The programs aren’t intended to be a heavy lift for leaders; they are designed to offer a time and space for elementary school administrators to learn about and discuss early learning practices, free of judgment. 

In the early days of the National P-3 program, Kauerz said, it was full of leaders who either already prioritized their youngest students or were being urged to do so by superiors who did, Kauerz said. As the years have passed, that’s shifted. 

“We’re starting to penetrate into the ranks of non-believers who are changing their minds,” she said, noting that the program has served about 500 principals across the U.S. “But there’s a lot of principals to go.”

The BELL program has so far worked with leaders in 53 of Chicago’s 473 elementary schools. It has a long way to go too, but the work is meaningful, worthwhile and full of “aha moments,” Ilhardt said. 

“There is so much focus and responsibility put on parents, caregivers and families to prepare young children for school,” Ilhardt said. “We have a responsibility, also, to ensure that schools are ready for young children, and that schools are really designed for children to be their best selves in those school buildings. That looks different than the design for children at older grade levels.” 

The decline was cited in the an annual report released by The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which uses federal data sets to measure national childhood well-being across more than a dozen indicators. The most recent report finds that only 46% of 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in preschool between 2020-24, a 2 percentage-point drop since the years between 2015 and 2019. 

For the past decade, the figure has hovered within this same range, and experts warned that any five-year estimates that include data from the pandemic should be examined with caution, as extended school closures likely mask long-term trends. 

Still, the numbers come as states across the country have worked to expand access to early learning, so even a flatline has set off alarm bells for those on the ground — especially in areas that saw even greater declines.

Janice Barlow is the director of Kids Count in Delaware, which saw the second-largest drop in early learning enrollment nationally during this window, from 51% to 45%. Barlow said that while it’s possible these numbers partially reflect pandemic closures, “our score is low enough that we know that we need investment in our early care and education system.”

Barlow said at least in part, Delaware’s drop is due to the climbing costs of early childcare which “is rivaling the cost of other basic needs, things like housing, transportation, health care, food.” 

And, across the state, she added, “We don’t have enough care for the kids who need to be served,” which has led some parents to reduce hours at work, change jobs or drop out of the workforce altogether. 

In all, the Kids Count Data Book uses a number of federal data sets to measure 16 indicators over four areas: economic well-being; education; health and family; and community. The Casey Foundation, a private philanthropy group founded in 1948 to improve economic opportunity for children, then uses these indicators to score states out of 1,000 and rank their performance. 

Consistent with their last two data books, the greatest setbacks nationally were within education, where three of four indicators saw declines: preschool attendance and both math and reading proficiency. The only education measure that saw slight improvement was the four-year high school graduation rate, which improved by 1 percentage point between 2019 and 2024, up to 87%. 

Nearly all states (47) had worse education indicators in 2024 than in 2019, according to the report. Overall, New Jersey and Massachusetts scored the best in education, and only two states — Mississippi and Louisiana — saw significant improvements since 2019.

The report’s authors relied on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to measure the percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in school. A kid is counted as enrolled if they attend nursery school, preschool or kindergarten, including those sponsored by federal, state or local agencies, such as Head Start.

The American Community Survey disseminates this information in so-called one-year and five-year period estimates. The lead data expert on this year’s Kids Count report, Flo Gutierrez, noted that while the one-year estimates are more responsive to and reflective of recent changes, they lack reliable data for 13 states and D.C., forcing the report to rely on five-year estimates, which she called “the next best thing.” 

While Gutierrez said this data was still reliable and accurate, it does include some noise from the disruption caused by the pandemic which leads to “some masking of progress” at both the state and national levels. For instance, while the five-year national estimates show a decline by 2 percentage points in enrollment, the one-year estimates for 2019 and 2024 show enrollment held steady. 

Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, who has spent decades studying this data, expressed much stronger skepticism around using the five-year estimates, arguing the pandemic-era numbers muddy the findings beyond reliable use.

“If we want to know about 2024, I wouldn’t use it,” Barnett said. “If we want to know about kids’ experiences during the pandemic and up to 2024, then you could make a case to use it. But you have to realize, this is about kids losing out during the pandemic and not what happened to them during 2024 — much less where they are now.”

Barnett added that this methodology actually penalizes states with public preschool options, which he argued were more likely to close during the pandemic. He said this leaves the state-by-state comparisons “colossally off.”

Still, in his own research, Barnett said he has seen declining participation in state-based preschool enrollment that began even before the pandemic. He attributes this to a number of factors, including an increase in homeschooling rates, rising childcare costs, falling Head Start enrollment and declining trust in public institutions generally.

Christin Harper, policy director at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, has witnessed these challenges in her state, which saw the greatest decline in preschool enrollment, with a drop of 9 percentage points, from 50% to 41%. Like Barlow in Delaware, Harper pointed to both affordability and access issues; neither state has universal, publicly funded preschool.

showed that of the 75 counties in Arkansas, 50 face a gap of 40% or more between the number of kids under age 5 and the number of available, regulated childcare seats.

“And not surprisingly,” she added, “those who are more affected are going to be your rural counties.”

Harper said it’s important to look at systems outside of education as well. Nationally, there was a 3% increase in the percentage of families spending more than 30% of their income on housing between 2019 and 2024, according to the Kids Count Data. But for Arkansas residents, the number putting that much of their paycheck toward rent or a mortgage spiked by 15% during that same period.

“Now, we’ve got 1 out of every 4 kids in Arkansas living in a high-housing, cost-burden household and so that just shows us that wages are not keeping up with basic needs,” Harper said.

And she fears this landscape will only worsen in the coming months and years. This past fall, the state’s office of Early Child Care announced sweeping changes to the School Readiness Program, including cutting rates to providers and increasing co-payments for parents. That’s in addition to federal funding reductions, neither of which are reflected in the Kids Count data. 

“More and more, we’ve heard the Trump administration talk about the need for states to take on more costs, and for poor states like Arkansas that’s going to impact us more,” she said.

Imagine operates as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, giving staff the unique opportunity to become co-owners of the organization and participate in company decision-making. In a profession often marked by , minimal benefits and , the model stands out: Imagine is the only childcare program in the country that is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit organization supporting the ESOP community.

At first, when she became an employee owner, Zamorano thought, “whatever, I don’t own anything.” But once she participated in the company’s ESOP education programs to learn more about the benefit, she said, “I started to figure it out, and it feels great … like you’re the CEO of the place you’re at.”

Could this business model be part of the solution for some of the sector’s longstanding challenges that make it tough to retain staff? And as New York City explores pathways to recruit and retain the staff needed to expand childcare access with its , could Imagine’s approach offer inspiration?

Breaking down the ESOP model

An ESOP is a retirement plan that allows employees to build ownership in the company through shares granted over time. The longer an employee stays at the company, and the better the company does financially, the more workers earn. The value of the ESOP is realized when an employee leaves, retires or if the company is sold. 

“It feels nice to own something, especially nowadays when you can’t own anything,” said Zamorano, adding that the ESOP is a critical tool for her future, particularly because she believes “social security is not going to exist” by the time she retires.

According to Laura Tulchin, Imagine’s chief executive officer, the nearly 200 educators at the company get a salary that ranges from $37,000 to $90,000 depending on seniority and tenure and have ESOP accounts with balances that range from $1,484 to $167,000.

The center, which has operated since 2002, became partially employee-owned in 2018 and it transitioned to 100% employee ownership in 2026. Because Imagine is fully employee-owned, any gains go directly to employees instead of to outside shareholders. 

The ESOP model isn’t new: The . But it’s gained steam in recent years: Well-known companies like and are both ESOPs.

As of 2023, there were in the United States, with 15.1 million participating employees, according to the NCEO.

There’s evidence that the ESOP model has plenty of workforce benefits. According to research from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, companies that adopt an employee ownership model have when compared to non-employee-owned companies. More from the institute suggests that ESOP workers enjoy higher work autonomy, are more satisfied and feel less futility with their participation in workplace decision-making than non-ESOP workers.

That appears to be true at Imagine. “Whatever your position is here,” said Tijuana Jackson, a lead teacher, “because we’re an employee-owned company, you also have a voice in the direction of the company. That’s what I love.” 

“What I appreciate about Imagine is they trust my insight … I help with the school aesthetics, I helped develop the curriculum for the week of the young child,” Jackson said, noting that lead teachers are also given a credit card to make direct decisions on classroom supply purchases.

Jackson’s experience is what Imagine leadership was going for when they transitioned to the model. 

“Our hope is that we have a competitive advantage from a business sense, by centering our employees and being a more resilient, stable childcare company in an industry that is unstable,” said Tulchin.

To be a more stable business, Imagine hasn’t just worked to improve employee retention, but it has established a unique structure, which Tulchin describes as “multisite, not tiny and not a huge chain.” 

And that makes a difference when it comes to the program’s ability to leverage the ESOP model. The childcare sector includes a mix of for-profit and non-profit models, with center- and home-based programs that range from small operations to large organizations. 

Imagine’s size puts it in a unique spot, Tulchin said. “The culture is still the mom-and-pop personal feel with the benefits that come from a larger company, where we have a recruitment manager and finance person.”

Can this shared ownership model help attract and retain childcare workers?

As an ESOP, Imagine is in a better position than most to meet the demands of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s initiative to increase access to childcare in New York City.

At the beginning of the year, the state and city of New York jointly announced the . The program is planned to roll out in phases with opening in the , 12,000 seats expected to be available in the fall of 2027, and by 2029, when the program is fully built out, advocates estimate that nearly 55,000 children will participate.

To create the spots the program promises, Lauren Melodia, director of fiscal and economic policy at the Center for NYC Affairs and one of the leading voices on the structural economics of child care in New York, said the city needs to address a core issue: retention challenges. 

Melodia, whose area of focus is explained that childcare programs face significant staffing challenges and are often “forced into a situation where they’re hiring temps, early career people, training people up, hoping that they’ll stay with them long-term, then they move on to higher wages in the public sector.” This creates a vicious cycle, she added. Centers invest in training staff only to lose them to better-paying K-12 positions.

Leaders at Imagine are working to disrupt this cycle. According to Imagine’s annual employee survey, 83% of staff report being satisfied with their jobs, and 81% of staff say they see themselves working at Imagine in two years. Despite employees’ high satisfaction rate, the business still competes with the public school system. 

Imagine gets its revenue from multiple sources, including a mix of private tuition, publicly funded child care subsidies and employer-sponsored child care agreements with government and university institutions. In a time of federal and state budget cuts and rising costs for families, childcare centers like Imagine are at the mercy of legislators and the economy, while public schools have less risk.

Even as an employee-owned childcare center with a diverse revenue model, Imagine isn’t immune to the challenges of running a childcare business.

The economics of childcare may prove challenging for ESOPs

The retention power of employee ownership lies in its promise of something wages alone don’t offer: wealth-building. 

“It lifts you up to know that you own something and you want to make sure that it grows bigger and bigger,” said Zamorano.

Owning a share of a profitable business can greatly increase a worker’s wealth and financial security, but owning a share of a struggling business that doesn’t have a reliable cash flow cannot. 

“The one factor that all successful employee-owned businesses have from their outset is that they are starting from a place of profitability,” said Tim Garbinsky, head of communications at NCEO. 

For Imagine to make good on the growth of employee ESOP account balances, the company has to remain profitable enough to have cash on hand to reinvest after covering its financial obligations. 

For many childcare centers, profitability remains a challenge. Melodia recognizes the business realities that could limit the expansion of childcare access. 

“Small business owners are always facing risk,” she said. “Any childcare center is going to have a hard time guaranteeing job quality and job security if they’re not able to charge what it actually costs to run these programs, which none of them are able to.”

New York City leaders are looking at ways to enable providers who contract with them to charge what it costs, said Emmy Liss, the executive director in the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education. “We have to take care of the people who provide this essential service.” 

Liss acknowledges that “folks who work in childcare programs face challenges when it comes to wages and benefits,” and that across the industry, teachers don’t make enough to “live and thrive,” and providers don’t have the resources to change the equation. It’s a problem that needs to be solved if care is going to be expanded across the city, and as more states like New York and New Mexico seek to provide residents with universal childcare. 

In a field rife with workforce challenges, notably low compensation and poor benefits, the ESOP model offers providers an approach to building their wealth over time. But the model’s promise as a solution to the sector’s longstanding retention challenges hinges on reliable revenue — and for most childcare programs, that requires systemic change.

For Tulchin, the economic challenges are hard to ignore. “It’s still a very low-paid industry,” she said, and while the goal of shared ownership is to do right by employees, the math is difficult when workers are “living paycheck to paycheck, and the value that you’re talking about is 40 years down the road.”

The first step to solving a reading delay is knowing it exists.

Decades of research have found that all children learn to read by developing the same core skills. This applies to children with dyslexia, English language learners and those reading well beyond grade level. Per the science of reading, some kids just need more targeted and explicit instruction — more time building whichever specific reading skill (and there are several) isn’t growing as fast.

But to do that, teachers need to figure out which skill is lacking. It takes a particular kind of training and the right tools — and until recently, many Connecticut schools lacked both.

That started to change with the 2023 Right to Read law, which compels districts to use K-3 literacy curricula aligned with the science of reading. Some are already seeing improvements in their ability to detect and address reading delays.

At the same time, a growing number of parents are seeking to screen their kids for such delays themselves.

The Southport School — a private school that has used science of reading-based instruction since long before Right to Read — has for years offered free reading screenings to Connecticut parents through its outreach arm, The Southport CoLAB. This spring, CoLAB partnered with Sacred Heart University to expand capacity for the screenings amid skyrocketing demand.

“It’s twice as many as last year,” said Southport Executive Director and CoLAB founder Benjamin Powers.

Powers said it’s all too common to see kids with reading delays pass undetected through school until fourth or fifth grade. By that point, he said, it’s much harder for them to catch up to their peers. To make matters worse, fourth grade is typically when kids start “reading to learn” — meaning if they can’t read, their other learning will suffer, too.

“From a developmental standpoint, we are much better off — exponentially better — by flagging these kids early,” Powers said.

That’s where reading screeners come in.

How to screen for a reading delay

Powers said the screener Southport uses lasts between 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the age of the child. It takes place on a tablet and runs kids through activities that gather data on different cognitive processes — things like “rapid automatized naming,” which tests how quickly a child can retrieve the names of a variety of familiar objects from their memory.

At the end, the program produces a “teacher and parent-friendly report” identifying whether the child in question is at risk for something like dyslexia. Powers said it doesn’t diagnose the condition itself; rather, it “gives us an early marker so that we can just be proactive with the child, the teacher and the family.”

Being proactive, he explained, is largely a question of dosage.

“Some kids just need a lot more exposure and practice,” he said. “And we do need to be targeted … So, if it’s a child who’s really struggling with certain letter patterns or sound symbol relationships, we want to make sure we’re targeting those specific attributes.”

“But,” he emphasized, “every child really needs the same kind of scope and sequence to build the reading brain.” Some may have to work at it a bit longer than others, but overall, “the vast majority — vast majority — of kids can learn to read.”

Through Right to Read, that same principle is now being disseminated throughout Connecticut’s public schools. Although the screeners they use may be shorter — the popular DIBELS assessment, which many districts employ, takes under 10 minutes — the strategy is the same: Guide each child through a series of prompts, use the data to flag specific skills they may be struggling to develop, then respond with targeted intervention.

Stratford Assistant Superintendent for PreK-6 Diana DiIorio explained how the DIBELS screener works.

“The teacher sits one-on-one with the child. It is on a Chromebook. … It’s very self-explanatory. They hit a button that starts, they have prompts of what to ask the child and the child responds on the Chromebook according to what they feel the answer is. A lot of it is timed,” DiIorio said.

Before Right to Read, DiIorio said, Stratford’s screening regimen was much more focused on comprehension.

“What we were missing was the really systematic and explicit teaching of all of those phonemic awareness and phonics skills, which is the basis and the foundation” of more advanced reading, she said.

Consequently, DiIorio said, they would miss students who arrived in kindergarten already reading but who lacked the building blocks for multisyllabic words — a deficiency that wouldn’t become apparent until the students suddenly hit a wall in fourth grade.

New Haven Supervisor of Elementary Reading and Language Arts Jennifer Novelli gave an example of how a teacher might test younger children for “phoneme segmentation fluency,” a skill they develop before they actually learn to read. Phoneme segmentation means breaking down the individual sounds within words kids hear.

“So, if I say ‘mop,’ the child would be expected to take that word and segment it” into its discrete sounds, Novelli said — those being the “mm” sound, the short “o” and the “p.”

In this case, “they’re not looking at letters. We’re just testing to make sure they understand and know how to break words apart,” Novelli said.

Phoneme segmentation, Novelli explained, falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness, which she described as “a precursor skill to reading.”

The schools CT Mirror spoke with all said they screen three times per year, with some employing other forms of progress monitoring in between. Initial results from two very different districts suggest it’s having an impact.

In relatively affluent Fairfield — predominantly white, with under one-fifth of students receiving free or reduced price meals — 74% of kindergarteners in the 2023-24 school year were already proficient in reading. There were concerns that the district’s new science of reading-aligned curriculum and screening regimen (done through Acadience, not DIBELS) would cause a dip as teachers and administrators got acclimated to the new material, but the opposite happened: By the time those same students left first grade the following year, the number had nudged upward to 78%.

“You do expect implementation dips. We did not see them,” said Janine Goss, executive director of PK-12 literacy at Fairfield. That applied to every cohort receiving the new Right to Read instruction.

The story is much different in New Haven — predominantly Black and Latino, with roughly three quarters of students receiving free or reduced price meals. There, the vast majority of students already have substantial reading delays by the time they start school. In 2024, for example, 61% of first graders were “well below” grade level, according to Novelli.

But the science of reading-aligned programming she helped institute has still had a notable impact: By second grade, only about 51% were still testing “well below,” and the percentage of students in that cohort reading at or above grade level increased.

Novelli said the dreaded “summer slide,” a decline in reading ability that typically occurs over the long vacation, has also diminished.

Nevertheless, the results still leave about half of New Haven’s second grade class seriously behind in reading. This despite the fact that, per Powers, the vast majority of them can learn.

Much room for improvement

Novelli said one of the reasons many kids in New Haven are still behind in reading is a shortage of pre-kindergarten education.

“Our students that go to our preschools in the city are definitely better equipped and more ready with the literacy skills,” Novelli said. “If we were able to open more classrooms and have more seats … it would be better.”

She added that New Haven’s director of early childhood, who joined the district three years ago, has implemented “a very strong phonemic awareness and phonics program” for 3- and 4-year-olds.

The kids who don’t get that early education — those who begin school in kindergarten and haven’t built (English) reading skills at home — are more likely to start at a disadvantage. In theory, they can still catch up, but that requires having enough teachers with the right training and the time to administer the needed interventions.

Therein lies another problem.

Although Connecticut has firmly embraced the science of reading, at least for K-3, few new teachers graduate from college with the skills to interpret and act on the results of a screener. It often falls to individual districts to train these new hires — not to mention all the existing teachers who were never taught these skills when they started.

Stratford’s DiIorio said this is where much of the real work of converting a district to the science of reading takes place.

“We spent all last year looking at the data [from the reading screenings],” DiIorio said. “How to analyze the data, and then what to do with it. And then it was a whole ‘nother module of planning lessons based on what data was in front of you.”

DiIorio said Stratford was in one of the first cohorts to attend state training on the science of reading, meeting about once a month, “five or six times out of the year.” Since then, the district has partnered with HILL for Literacy for online training, in-person coaching and data analysis.

The challenge, DiIorio said, is “bringing that knowledge to the entire district.”

“There’s eight schools. We only had a handful [of staff] that went to that first cohort,” DiIorio said.

Goss said many of her efforts in Fairfield have also gone toward teacher training. Under her leadership, Fairfield created district and building-level literacy teams across its elementary and middle schools.

With 200 classroom teachers at the elementary level alone, “there was no way I, one person, was going to be able to get to each and every teacher,” Goss explained.

She also praised her staff for taking new staff members “under their wings.”

“We feel really good about knowing that even though they may not have the experience they need coming straight from college, they’re going to get that support when they come into our schools,” Goss said.

DiIorio said getting new teachers into shape is a challenge that extends well beyond the science of reading.

“I went through it myself,” DiIorio said. “I have a teaching degree. Nobody shows you how to handle management of students, the behaviors of the students, the social emotional skills. You learn about it. You learn that there’s trauma in children. … But the training is not there.”

There is an implicit issue of equity here. Because of , those located in wealthier towns typically have far more resources than those in cities like New Haven or Hartford, where the local tax base is stretched thin (Gov. Ned Lamont initiated a Blue-Ribbon Commission this year to find ways to ). More resources can mean more robust training for new hires.

DiIorio said she experienced this firsthand, too.

“I started in a very affluent school district, a couple miles away. My training as a new teacher was so different from when I came to Stratford as a principal. It was so eye-opening … the difference in new teacher training and what they get,” DiIorio said.

Novelli said New Haven has literacy coaches in each building to provide professional development on the science of reading to teachers but would benefit from having more dedicated reading interventionists. A reading interventionist, she explained, spends all day in targeted small group instruction.

“Last year, we did lose two positions … and we don’t have enough people as it is,” Novelli said. “If we could have a certified reading interventionist at each school, it would be so helpful.”

There’s a shortage of these certified specialists. That issue came up at of the General Assembly’s BERGIN Commission, where University of Connecticut literacy professor Rachael Gabriel shared data showing so-called Tier 2 interventions (which includes targeted group instruction) can actually create worse outcomes for kids if done poorly.

“There was a shortage in this area [of literacy specialists] when I moved to Connecticut 16 years ago, and the programs [to train them] have shrunk, not grown,” Gabriel said.

She told the commission members the program she oversees at UConn has only 11 students, prompting an exclamation of shock from one of the listeners.

“[This kind of training] is largely inaccessible. Our program is … over 18 months, and it is 21 credits, like the state requires. And so, that’s almost a master’s degree,” Gabriel said. “That is super expensive. So, for a practicing teacher to say, ‘I’m gonna take my evenings and my weekends and do this for two years and pay $30-$40,000 for it,’ is a really significant ask.”

Powers, meanwhile, has his own concerns.

“If you would ask me 10 years ago, I would have been bullish on the science of reading movement, because it is, you know, it is an important movement,” Powers said. But “when I look at the reading scores, we’re really not moving the needle.”

He said something else now keeps him up at night: a steep decline in students’ executive function over the last 10 years or so.

“Ten years ago, somebody could focus on the screen for about two and a half minutes before they got distracted. Today, that’s down to about 40 seconds,” Power said. “We have kids who can pay less attention, are less focused, you know, just aren’t able to have that same uptake.”

And executive function, Powers said, is directly tied to reading outcomes.

“When I go in, especially now, like K-5 schools, what I hear from them is alarming,” Powers said.

As to why kids’ executive function is declining, Powers said he has a few ideas.

“Qualitatively speaking, you see, going to the grocery store, parents are just giving kids their phones to keep them occupied. Or even on the playground, you’ll see parents pushing kids on the swing set, and they’re looking at their phone,” Powers said. “Kids just don’t have the same reading exposure they used to.”

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