April is Month of the Young Child – a time to recognize the needs and rights of young children and their families. According to the CDC: “the early years of a child’s life are crucial for cognitive, social and emotional development. Therefore, it is important that we take every step necessary to ensure that children grow up in environments where their social, emotional and educational needs are met.”
Ensuring that young children have a strong social, emotional and intellectual foundation to succeed in school has been the focus of Washington Area Women’s Foundation’s Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative. The Collaborative supports quality early care and education programs that are working to successfully close a “preparation gap” that exists among children entering school.
Research has shown that a particularly wide preparation gap exists between lower- and higher-income children, even before they enter kindergarten. And when they start behind, they stay behind. A child who can’t recognize letters when they enter kindergarten has lower reading skills in the first grade. And 88% of poor readers in first grade will still be poor readers in the fourth grade.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, “children who attend high-quality programs are less likely to be held back a grade, less likely to need special education, and more likely to graduate from high school. They also have higher earnings as adults and are less likely to become dependent on welfare or involved with law enforcement.”
The Women’s Foundation’s recent report, 2010 Portrait of Women & Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area (Portrait Project 2010), took a look at the achievements and needs of all women and girls in our community and shows that cost and availability are major deterrents in our area to providing young children with high-quality early care and education.
The high costs of child care are a major challenge for working mothers, a problem that’s especially acute for single women, according to Portrait Project 2010. In the District, the average annual cost of full-time, center-based infant care is 52 percent of the median annual income of a single mother. The cost is more than one-third of the average annual income of a single mother in Maryland and Virginia.
There is federal assistance available, primarily through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), but recent reductions have resulted in long waiting lists for subsidized slots. Portrait Project 2010 found that there are more than 13,000 children on waiting lists for subsidized child care in D.C. There are 3,800 on the wait list in Fairfax County.
The subsidies are so important because childcare in our region is expensive. One high-quality center in Fairfax County charges $360 per week. In spite of the high cost, child care centers still struggle to meet their expenses, and child care workers often do not make a living wage. The median annual earnings of child care workers in our region ranged from $19,270 in Virginia to $24,900 in D.C. “The fact that child care providers earn so much less than public school teachers in our region underscores the need to increase the status and earnings of these important professionals who care for our youngest children,” according to Portrait Project 2010.
Washington Area Women’s Foundation works with Grantee Partners across the region to increase the capacity and institutional stability of early care and education programs, enable these entities to develop and manage their resources more effectively, and improve these programs through grantmaking, training and technical assistance. In order to accomplish these goals, the Foundation recently made grants to CentroNia, DC Appleseed, Empower DC, Fairfax Futures and Voices for Virginia’s Children.
Click here to learn more about the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative. And click here to read Portrait Project 2010.
Photo credit: Michael Colella Photography
