When the groundbreaking report From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development was first released in 2000, people in the field of early childhood development rejoiced. Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who chaired the National Academy of Sciences report, had proven what they and parents everywhere already knew. The first years of a child’s life are critical to future health, development and lifelong success.

The most rapid growth of the brain occurs during the first three years of a child’s life. Early childhood experiences affect brain development and lay the foundation for intelligence, emotional health, and moral development. Healthy growth depends on nurturing and dependable relationships. How young children feel is as important as how they think, affecting school readiness.

Detectives Needed

About 6,200 babies are born in Vermont each year. The majority has parents who are working for a living. Child care for infants and toddlers in Vermont is notoriously scarce and expensive. Vermont’s regulated childcare providers serve, at most, a quarter of our youngest children in our neediest families.

So where are the rest of those youngest, the infants and toddlers whose early experiences will affect future healthy development? Who is caring for them, and what kind of care are they receiving? What are we doing as a state to reach out to families with young children to ensure that they have the resources and support they and their children need to get off to a good start?  

No state agency now regularly engages with families who are not in visible crisis. A network of private non-profit organizations assesses varied special needs. Federally-funded Head Start Centers and partially state-funded Parent Child Centers work closely with about half the neediest families—although recent news of federal sequestration will mean 22 fewer Head Start teachers and home visitors in Vermont this year, 199 fewer enrolled children.

Listening Tour

Kim Keiser of Fayston is on a “family listening tour,” traveling around Vermont, meeting families with babies and toddlers. From 1993 to 2009, Keiser directed Vermont’s Child Care Services and Child Development Divisions; she now is state project director for the Turrell Fund, which provides grants to Vermont non-profits to support “developmental and educational services, especially for the youngest.”

She wanted to know: Do resources vary in local communities? Do some communities make it easier to raise children? And if so, what do families say works for them? What doesn’t?

Keiser says her listening tour will help inform the foundation’s future giving “with the priorities families identify as helpful.” Vermont has a high national ranking among the other 49 states as a good place to raise children. But Keiser wonders how parents would rate their experience.

She admits that, in all her years of state service, “We invited families to come to meetings and join the system in ways that were driven by agency needs and priorities. It’s always been on our terms.”

Meeting with families on their terms, on their turf, just to listen, Keiser says she sees firsthand how unique each Vermont community is. One town differs from the next, and one neighborhood from another. For her, this solidifies the importance of community planning and community-driven services.

“Thinking about the Agency of Human Services and its 12 regions is too broad,” she says. “It’s a one-size-fits-all approach. We have to think about communities and neighborhoods and what their priorities are.”

A New Approach?

Keiser is not alone. She is on a 16-member planning committee of the upcoming Vermont Early Childhood Summit, to be convened in Montpelier at the Capital Plaza on Oct. 29. Gov. Peter Shumlin announced the summit in his state-of-the union address in January, along with a planned expansion of child care subsidies. Vermont Agency of Human Services Secretary Doug Racine hired consultant Kim Friedman as chief summit planner; Vermont Dept. of Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca is also involved.

On the one hand, it is fairly remarkable such a summit is being convened. Federal and state governments in many states are cutting supports for families, not seeking expansion. Vermont’s strong legislative rejection of Shumlin’s funding strategy for his child care increase, by cutting Earned Income Tax Credits for Vermont’s lowest-paid workers, shows resistance to nationwide trends.

On the other hand, none of those most directly involved, child care providers and parents, especially those parents who qualify for child care subsidies, are among summit planners. “It’s true,” Friedman said in a recent interview. “The planning committee is made up of professionals. It’s difficult for parents and child care providers and other consumers because they have another job.”

She said ten organizations were asked to identify parent leaders to serve on a parent advisory committee. “We faced the wonderful conundrum of having more parents who wanted to be involved than we can support,” said Friedman.

Vermont Woman had heard of complaints among unnamed child care providers, not well connected to the Internet. Allegedly some had missed registration deadlines and meeting changes. All ten pre-summit focus groups require online registration before you learn where exactly a town meeting will be held. All require the ability to travel long distances to daylong meetings on weekdays.

A pre-summit focus group for engaging parents as decision-makers occurred on Aug. 13, in Hanover, NH. And in response to growing awareness, Sept. 26, a Thursday evening meeting, from 6:00-8:30 pm in Randolph is now planned for parents and childcare providers. This is the single event that will include dinner and child care.

Friedman said she would be thrilled to see a diverse group of 15-20 parents and child care providers at the evening event. Funds don’t allow for more such groups, but there are other ways to be involved. There is an survey – online.

Meanwhile a single day-long Saturday meeting in Randolph will happen Sept. 28, its subject to be announced – online.

Getting to Yes

Why were no early education workforce among the summit planners? “Because of the politics around representation, we didn’t feel right to just ask one of them,” Friedman said of three representative groups: Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children, The Vermont Child Care Providers Association, which represents mostly home-based providers, and Vermont Early Educators United, sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers.

Couldn’t all three organizations sit at the table? “Then the early education workforce would have been a disproportionate part of the committee,” stated Friedman. Half the 16 planners represent state departments, four represent non-profits, three are foundation funders, one, business-related, with a second business coalition non-profit. Adding child care’s diversity would have enriched the mix.

Friedman said all three child care organizations would be represented at the summit meeting and can also be part of pre-summit focus sessions.

She explained summit planning and design began with a review of 30 early childhood planning documents already generated by Vermonters since 2000.

So what might be different this time?

“Vermont has “a lot of important services,” Friedman said, but the goal is to “create a comprehensive system, one that’s not so patch-work. We haven’t yet figured out how to connect the dots for young children.” Friedman called this early work a “gaps analysis.” To design pre-summit focus groups, planners next identified areas “in conflict with one another,” or “not yet in place, or where “there is no agreement on how to proceed.”

Six meetings have already taken place, posted with phrases like “intentional collaboration” and “aligned practice among diverse partners.” Friedman said, “We are particularly committed to creating an atmosphere at the summit that is conducive to parents’ meaningful engagement,” but it remains to be seen how inclusive its climate.

Fast Track

At the Early Childhood Summit on October 29, Governor Shumlin will present a rough framework based on what focus sessions produce, Friedman said. “The framework will have two main components. First it will present recommended overall big goals to help us realize our vision—to realize the promise of every Vermont child. It will also include a set of shared agreements.”

The summit’s afternoon will provide time for “more refinement—and then hopefully it will be adopted by all the agencies and organization at the summit.” The next step, Friedman said, would be “an action plan to operationalize…. Literally hundreds of people will have had input into the goals.”

“Just to clarify,” she said further, “the statewide early childhood framework that will be one of the tangible outcomes of the summit is broader than child care. It includes early care and education, children's physical and mental health, early intervention services for children with developmental delays or special needs, educational standards for infants, toddlers, preschool-aged children, and K-3 elementary education and all other major components of Vermont's early childhood system.”

Winning Allies

“This is big picture thinking,” Robyn Freedner-Maguire of Vermont Early Childhood Alliance, another summit planner, told Vermont Woman.

“This is everyone’s business,” said Sheila Duranleau, Head Start’s summit representative, associate director of Head Start in Central Vermont. She noted business representatives among the planners, including Mary Barrosse-Schwartz of Vermont Business Roundtable Research and Education Foundation and Andrea Cohen of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. “Many more people have something to do with this than they think,” she said.

Freedner-Maguire said Early Childhood Alliance was “trying to broaden the coalition. We have been promoting through our list-serve to drive people to the sessions. Organizations like Mamma Says, along with Head Start, the Burlington Business Roundtable, the Vermont Family Network, The Father Network, have committed to helping us distribute a survey for parents to be able to provide input,” she said.

A mother with children herself, Freedner-Maguire noted the difficulty of involving the parents of babies and toddlers. “Anyone who has young children would say it is difficult to do anything outside the normal family routine. It’s a challenge.”

The early childhood framework is a work in process, she said, as others had said. “The idea was to involve as many people as possible leading up to the summit, and then continue the work after the summit in a real concerted effort. The challenge is to know what action plans will be, or what the framework is going to be.”

Sticking Points

If Vermont participants agree that very young children have need of a wider community of support, if it takes a village to raise a child, then what exactly will describe state responsibilities? Keiser and others hope the framework will include the views of those closest to Vermont’s toddlers. For summit participants intend to achieve the governor’s mission to “realize the promise of every young child. “Then families have to be integral partners,” Keiser says.

State Sen. Dick McCormack (D-Windsor), who is not among summit planners, said that he had “full confidence in the sincerity and good intentions of state officials regarding early childhood care and education, and their willingness to listen to early childhood educators.”

But he also held that, without a collective bargaining position with the state for their contracts, early educators are in the “demeaning position of mere petitioners,” and not seen as “equal partners.” He noted the majority of child care workers are women, and called their situation “a women’s rights issue.”

Early educators see “top-down planning,” he said. “They are the ones with real world insights into the real needs of young children. Having a place at the table would allow them to negotiate from a more equal position for the best policies for young children.”

Money Matters

Funding regulations, eligibility requirements and separate revenue streams now drive state policies. State structures are not typically geared to actively engage citizens.
How can the Shumlin administration respond to what early educators, families and communities say they need? Can it frame local priorities?

McCormack is convinced an early educators’ union is needed for counterbalance; elder care workers who contract with the state, as do child care providers, were successful at winning legislative support for their union last session.

Keiser would like to see an early childhood line in every town’s budget and town-by-town plans that feed into a regional plan. State funding for early childhood programs might then be similar to a block grant, she said.

Block grants, first initiated by President Reagan to deliver federal funding, historically allow more flexibility to states in exchange for spending less federal money. Early Childhood Frameworks are another recent trend, adopted in seven other states. In a time of state and federal cutbacks, it is worth examining whether increased public spending on children and families accompanied their framework’s adoption.

One pre-summit meeting focused on funding, or to quote the summit: “Ensuring a sustainable and accountable early childhood financing structure.” Friedman said, “It’s very interesting to dig into this aspect.”

According to Friedman, Building Bright Futures (BBF), a private/public partnership organization, and Public Assets Institute, a Vermont research non-profit are assessing early childhood funding in Vermont.

“That will provide us with the first view, in at least 15 years, of where federal and state dollars are going in terms of young children.” Friedman said stage two will be “mapping funding gaps, funding mechanisms and creative financing ideas from other states. For example, in Illinois there’s a mandated set-aside for infants and toddlers, 0-3. In Louisiana, they passed school-readiness tax-credits.”

Who and What Matters?

Kim Keiser’s listening tour is still in progress, but she says common themes are emerging that reveal more systemic challenges beyond finding child care. Adequate, affordable and safe housing, reliable and affordable transportation, food security and public safety are concerns.

“I’m hearing that we have child care spaces, but people can’t get there because there’s no transportation.” She was surprised public safety seemed the top issue. Parents talked about not feeling safe in their neighborhoods, or walking home from work after dark, or letting their children play outdoors.

Keiser recalls working for the state and focusing on child care alone, without a larger context. “We left it to happenstance, or figured our Head Start and Parent Child Center programs would connect families to what they needed beyond our scope.”

Yet Head Start has never reached more than half of eligible families, according to Paul Behrman, chair of the Vermont Head Start Association. A family of three making more than $19,530 annually cannot enroll. More cuts are expected in 2014.

And Vermont unemployment rates spiked over the summer, while job creation has stagnated the past 10 years, the PAI reported recently.

Keiser said, “You can’t just look at what Friedman and others call the early childhood system. As a state and nation, we set up these isolated services that don’t address families’ needs holistically.”

Keiser says she will share what she learns with other early childhood summit planners. “I have been wondering for a long time where these youngest kids are, and who’s caring for them?” She welcomes anyone to join her listening project. To learn more, you can email her at keiserkim@gmail.com

To enroll in remaining pre-summit sessions, complete a survey or get involved with early childhood summit results, go to www.governor.vermont.gov/blog-governors-early-childhood-summit. Most Vermont libraries have computers for public use.

Frequent contributor K.C. Whiteley is a former Head Start and Parent Child Center Director and was Vermont AHS Head Start Collaboration Office Director for 17 years.

Rickey Gard Diamond’s “The Coming Care Crisis,” about women’s low-and-no-wages for child and elder care, won a National Newspaper Assoc. award in 2012.