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ALT "I went on that journey where yes, I want you to think about who my kids were, but I also want to think about the statistics that continue to show us what is happening to Black boys in his educational system at every level. It starts so, so early. I think it is important for us to not only think about the individual expanse of our children but to think about the collective experience. I'll tell you that for me, it is something that has never gone away. Still, to enter a school feels a certain way for me. To receive a phone call, even though my kids are thriving, still feels a certain way for me. That has been the case in all of the studies I have done with families around the country."
ALT "A place to start is to think about how we are describing the work of early educators and how we are compensating the work of early educators as a true, skilled profession. Our country has backed into treating caregiving as an afterthought and as an unskilled source of labor. In fact, community-based preschool teacher's job is so much harder than my job in higher education and they will have so much of a larger impact on the lives of young learners than I ever will have with my undergraduate and graduate students. To really look the skills and how we conceptualize and compensate and value our educational professionals, starting at birth."
ALT "In Alabama, we have a manufacturing sector that is doing extraordinarily well, among the best in the country. What that creates for wage earners in Alabama is a very, very intense competition for labor. So in order to be more competitive, we revisited what we were paying and we increased it again. Now, throughout the rest of this quarter's payment, Alabama is for the first time able to augment salaries to the tune of $36,000 a year. So literally, salaries for early care and education professionals in Alabama doubled." - Bernard Houston
ALT "For our part we have really been working to scale up this family child care home model here in the region. We do live in a child care desert and we see this as a sustainable way forward to provide this critical service to working families while also providing quality care and education to our youngest learners in the most critical time in their brain development." - Kathleen Merritt
ALT "We do know one thing. If we can get a provider into a house, and we can lower the cost of that house, whether it is rent, rent to own, or buy, we can lower the cost of delivering care and increase the income generated for that provider, which is really the goal here. We are living in an era where the people taking care of the youngest kids are getting paid the worst, and are treated the worst in the entire system." - Paul Major
ALT " I think the beauty of early childhood particularly in this country is that it is not just about the ABCs and 123's but also about making sure that our kids are socially and emotionally getting the support they need, and on top of that we are also focusing on families. Because as Maria started out by saying, Latino families in general whether we are first-generation, second-generation or more, we still have a very wide extended family." - Yvette Sanchez Fuentes