The state of early care and education today is, in a word, unsustainable.
This is a recent survey of 10,000 early childhood educators revealed, and this is what providers continue to share anecdotally.
With the pandemic in hindsight – and accompanying funding This has brought the field now a decisive memory – many early education providers find that they cannot follow up rising costs, staff shortages and low morale.
In January, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (Naeyc), a non -profit advocacy group that strives to promote high quality early learning, questioned Early childhood educators in all states and parameters, including preschool center programs based on the center, at home, Head Start and Public.
“What we see in this survey is both alarming and non -surprising,” said Daniel Hains, director general of policies and professional advancement at Naeyc.
About a third of the suppliers of responses declared to pay more for the rent this year than the previous year, while almost half declared that they paid more for real estate insurance and liability insurance.
“Everything goes up all the time at a price,” explains Meredith Burton, director of the Furman University Child Development Center, a small two -classes program in Greenville, South Carolina.
Burton has the unique advantage of operating its program in a building belonging to the university, which does not charge its rent, but everything else – from public services to food cleaning supplies – has continued to increase since 2020, she said.
This reality makes it almost impossible to pay livable staff wages, and even less to pay them what they deserve, without forcing the programs to do, many suppliers have found.
After 28 years of work in early childhood, Jennifer Trippett's program experienced a budget deficit for the first time in 2024. In response, it had to increase the prices of tuition fees by 20% in January. More than half (55%) of the service providers interviewed by NAEYC in January said they had also increased tuition fees in the past year.
Even with this tuition fees adjustment, Trippett, who is the director of Cubby's Child Care Care in Bridgeport, in Virginia -Western – the largest authorized state program, serving around 450 children every day – is “seriously envisaged” to close some of his classrooms in August, when the children are registered in the next strip.
“I have a hard time with the staff every day,” she admits. “Every day, I walk on shells:” Who will cancel? ” Who should we cover? It's every day. This is not where I want to be.
In 2019, before the pandemic, Trippett paid its staff the same wages as the companies of Walmart, Target and Hospitality paid to their employees. This worked well, because some people preferred to be with young children, and they could guarantee regular opening hours, while other jobs required night and weekend quarter.
Today, this is not the case. According to Trippett, these same employers have doubled their starting salary, and “I could not follow,” she said.
Cubby's pays his staff between $ 12 and $ 16 an hour. The local service station, on the other hand, launches employees at $ 15.50 an hour, she says, and “my 15-year-old niece started $ 12 an hour at the shopping center”.
Trippett finds himself in the same wrestling-22 as so many other early education providers: she must really give her staff an increase to compete with other companies in the community, but she cannot ask families registered with her program to pay more than them. Already, she said, she charges more than many cannot afford it.
This is emblematic of what thousands of providers have shared in the NAEYCS survey. More than half have said that their programs had been underpinned about what they would like to see. When asked why, 41% said it was because parents could not afford the cost of care, and 37% said their compensation was too low to recruit and keep qualified personnel.
Burton, the South Carolina supplier, believes that after a momentary boost during the worst days of the pandemic, early childhood educators were again forgotten by the public.
Hains, from Naeyc, confirmed that many suppliers felt it. He described it as a return to a “difficult status quo”.
“It looks almost like a slap in the face of many suppliers,” says Burton. “We were here, finally recognized as an essential workforce, and now we are back” to work as hard as possible, as many hours as you can, for low wages and almost no advantage, and we always expect what you offer as high quality possible “. It is simply not durable for anyone.
Indeed, almost half (47%) of the survey providers said that their professional exhaustion had worsened in the past year, attributing their state to low wages, the physical and mental requirements of work and inadequate resources to deal with the challenges of children's development and behavior.
Burton can attest to all this, especially by sailing on the best way to serve children with “very specific needs that we have never encountered before”.
“This has definitely become more difficult,” says Burton. “I love what I do, (but) I am tired most of the time – not necessarily physically tired, just exhausted emotionally and mentally.”
She adds: “Much of this is the expectation that I have set myself. I feel a huge sense of responsibility towards my staff and the families we serve. I want us to succeed, and I want us to be able to meet our mission and provide the highest quality care and education to these children that we spend the majority of our time. It is an emotionally exhausting trip.”
Although it is not reflected in the investigation, Hains says that he recently had conversations with suppliers who experience “concern, confusion and uncertainty” around the burst of changes from the federal government.
The freezing of temporary financing in February caused some panic because it affected A number of Head Start programs, he admits. Many educators are also worried about the Medicaid fatewhich approximately 230,000 of them – or one in four nationally – count for health insurance.
Disruptions of financing and declines occur at a time when the field needs more public investment, no less, notes Hains.
“We are so used to the severity of things and the fight against people,” he concedes. “But that remains a crisis, even if we got used to the crisis.”
