Omaha, Neb., May 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- COVID-19 has jolted the country awake to the need for more and better child care. A new Biden Administration plan to pump billions into our faltering early childhood care and education system is taking shape.
It may be the biggest thing to happen for American child care in generations, and yet many states are facing this new reality in near-total darkness. They don’t know how much money is currently coming in for early childhood and how it filters through their systems. They don’t have good estimates for how much money is actually needed to deliver quality care to every child, or how to spend it in order to achieve that goal.
But the state of Nebraska has a flashlight. The state’s early childhood funding reality, and a potential path forward, are illuminated thanks to the work of a university researcher, a longtime policy analyst, and state leaders who encouraged that work.
It’s the sort of work that doesn’t often get headlines. But it’s key if we want to build an early childhood system that delivers quality early care and education to every Nebraska family who wants it. “There is no way we can move towards the systems-level change we want to see without this foundational starting point,” says Jen Goettemoeller. “This isn’t the end. This is the very first step.”
Cathey Huddleston-Casas, the Buffett Early Childhood Institute’s associate director of workforce planning and development, and Goettemoeller, a longtime early childhood policy analyst, spent nearly a year digging deep into federal and state budgets, mapping the byzantine ways that money currently flows from D.C. and Lincoln to child care providers in places like Omaha, Ord, and O’Neill.
What they learned: $138 million in federal funding and $77 million in state funding came into the state’s early care and education system in 2017 through 13 separate funding streams. It’s a confusing system, burdensome to child care providers who spend time and energy they can’t spare filling out paperwork and trying to understand it.
“The providers and the families are really at the mercy of what the government does or doesn’t do on this front,” says Goettemoeller. “It’s really the leadership at the state level that can make this a better functioning system.”
Huddleston-Casas and Goettemoeller provided their findings in a report that allows state leaders to know exactly how many public dollars we spend on early childhood, and where that money comes from. (Read the report at buffettinstitute.nebraska.edu/fundingreport.) Huddleston-Casas also calculated the gap between the amount we currently spend, and what it would cost to fully fund Nebraska’s early care and education system, using modeling estimates from a blue-ribbon national report.
Nebraska spends roughly $459 million on early care and education, most of it money from parents who often strain to pay for child care. But the state needs $911 million to fully fund a quality early childhood system. Put simply, we were half-funding early childhood in Nebraska long before COVID-19 struck.
“If we’re going to get money to stabilize early care and education, we need to recognize that the system we have wasn’t stable before COVID,” Huddleston-Casas says.
Huddleston-Casas’ work proposes a phased solution to this gap, including higher federal and state contributions and an injection of business and philanthropic money.
All this work in Nebraska also provides a model to other states, something that can be replicated across the U.S. as we try to move from a frustrating present for American child care into a better future.
“There haven’t been a lot of states who have done real thinking about this,” says Simon Workman, an early childhood funding expert and consultant who formerly served as the director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress. “Putting the governance piece together with the finance piece is really the sweet spot. And it’s something that Nebraska is leading on, to be quite honest.”
And the effort is already yielding results. Sen. John Stinner, Republican from Gering and chair of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, had been asking questions like, “How much do we spend now?” and “How much do we need to spend?” while serving on the Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission. The commission, a group of 40 civic and education leaders, encouraged the research to answer these questions and placed it in their final report.
Stinner and lawmakers from both parties added $5 million in state early childhood funding this year. They are working to unlock federal COVID relief money as it arrives in Nebraska.
Crucially, the funding report was ready when a global pandemic struck, revealing child care’s importance as parents struggled to work from home and others struggled to find child care.
The federal government under both the Trump and Biden administrations has invested heavily in the reeling early childhood system. Biden’s proposed American Families Plan is meant to invest more in growing quality child care and early childhood education in the future.
In 2021, there’s more focus on and potential funding for early childhood than ever before. Nebraska is now better prepared for that focus.
“The hope and the challenge have shifted,” says Workman, the co-founder and principal of Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies. “Now the hope and the challenge are really to figure out how this new funding could be used most effectively.”
Matthew Hansen, the managing editor of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, is an award-winning journalist tasked with telling the stories of the Institute's work and early childhood care and education in Nebraska and beyond.