In doing so, it will become the latest in a wave of states that have established standalone departments for early care and education in recent years, joining the ranks of , and .

The shift toward unified governance structures comes at a time when the sector is getting more attention and, in some states, more investment. That, plus an effort to improve families’ experiences in accessing public programs for them and their young children, seems to be driving this trend.

Whether a state’s governance structure can make a meaningful difference in how its system of early childhood education functions, though, is a question worth asking — and it’s one many early childhood policy leaders are trying to answer.

. . . . . 

Every state has a unique organizational framework, but historically, programs and services for young children and their families have been housed across several common agencies, such as an education department, a department of health, and a department of welfare and social services.

That was the case in Colorado before it launched its Department of Early Childhood in 2022, explained executive director Lisa Roy, and it made for a disjointed experience. 

“Having things scattered across different agencies just makes things confusing for families,” Roy said. 

And that is the case in Illinois now, said Teresa Ramos, secretary of the new department that is slated to on July 1. 

“What excites me, over time, is building a system that can more seamlessly serve parents and providers,” Ramos said. She wants to lift “some of that burden” off of families and educators who have to keep track of “which 12 people to call” and ultimately simplify their experience of engaging with government services. 

The other consequence of programs being spread across different departments is that it creates a leadership vacuum in early care and education, said Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer who has studied early childhood governance and recently wrote a on the topic.

“It’s a complicated ecosystem,” Regenstein said. “When oversight of that ecosystem is splintered across multiple agencies, with none as their primary expertise, it shows.”

Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University, which , used the pandemic as an example. During that time, a state education secretary’s focus was likely on reopening K-12 schools, even though their department also oversaw Head Start and pre-K programs, while the health secretary was probably thinking primarily about hospitals and health care, not child care licensing and quality. 

“What you had in early childhood was a system entirely run by middle managers,” Regenstein said. “Halfway up the org chart, they may or may not be empowered to interact with the legislature. Their orientation was to run a grant program, rather than think systemically about how those pieces fit together.”

He added: “That’s not a knock on those people. But when it was literally nobody’s job to think about the system as a whole, it just made everybody’s job harder.”

The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center has identified 13 states that have established standalone departments or offices of early care and education. In those 13 states, there is a senior leader whose entire job is to think about, organize and prioritize issues affecting early childhood. That change is both symbolic and actual — or it can be, when managed thoughtfully. 

Another dozen or so states — while not going as far as creating a new department — have made meaningful changes around early childhood governance and leadership, Regenstein added. 

“The question I’d ask,” he said, “is has a state taken action to elevate leadership in early childhood and done something to unify oversight? Even if they haven’t gotten all the way there, I want to give credit for progress.”

Of course, the formation of a new government agency, and the appointment of a senior official to lead it, is not in itself a victory. Only once those pieces are in place does the hard work begin. 

“Early childhood programs are historically under-resourced. Putting them all together doesn’t give you some kind of economy of scale — ‘oh, good, we’re all here and we’re all under-resourced,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, acknowledging the challenge these departments face. 

She added: “We’ve focused on building a system of programs and services that are well connected and aligned. We’ve done a really good job. We still have much work to do.”

. . . . . 

One thing all of these states seem to have in common is a governor who is willing to prioritize young children and families and make early childhood education a signature part of their platform. 

Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico all ran campaigns that emphasized early childhood education and later stewarded the creation of a standalone department. That is no coincidence, Osborne of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center said. 

For this organizing structure to be successful, she said, “it has to come from the governor.”

Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, made a similar point. “What matters more than any org chart or structure is leadership. Full stop,” said Stebbins. “When you have a strong governor, it is like wind in the sails.”

That significance doesn’t evaporate once the department has launched. These governors appoint cabinet-level officials, such as Roy in Colorado and Groginsky in New Mexico, to lead the new agency and work alongside them as they make decisions that are relevant to early care and education providers, children and families. 

In practice, these states end up with a dedicated early childhood advocate attending cabinet meetings with the governor and other department heads.   

“It’s not just symbolic. It’s really important,” said Osborne. “The secretary of early childhood is sitting side-by-side with the secretaries of … education and health. They can make decisions at that level, think about how to work together and leverage resources, in real-time.” 

That’s an enormous improvement over the “middle manager” dynamic that Regenstein described.

“It is much more likely that you’re going to be able to get the resources that you need,” Osborne added. 

In Colorado, that has had a real impact, Polis shared. 

“It certainly elevated the discussion about early childhood education in our state,” Polis said. “Dr. Roy attends every cabinet meeting. We talk about early childhood education every week. Before, no one owned it in the state.”

That access has given Roy opportunities to communicate directly with the governor about nuances in the field and to get a broader perspective of his competing priorities, she said. 

“The governor is a partner with me in thinking through these things,” Roy said, adding that “having that access and having his ear has been so important.”  

That kind of centralized leadership and governor’s support have been essential in enabling New Mexico to make groundbreaking progress on early care and education in the last several years, according to Groginsky. 

“There’s no way this kind of rapid, system-building growth could’ve happened with three different agencies, middle-level managers and staff working cross-departmental,” she said, referring to the recent transformation of early childhood education in the state, including the launch of the first statewide universal free child care initiative in the U.S. 

It is much more efficient and effective, she added, to channel all that time, energy and resources “in one direction, under one leader.” 

. . . . . 

This recent burst of activity in the development of early childhood education departments has precedent. In the early 2000s, a trio of states — Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington — each created a new agency to focus on early childhood. 

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, , is considered to have been the first state-level early childhood education department, said Amy M. Jacobs, the agency’s commissioner since 2014. She said her office has received numerous requests and questions from leaders in other states who are now trying to stand up a similar governance structure (which she describes as a “one-stop shop” for families). 

To those leaders, she typically tries to impart a few key lessons. 

One, she said, is to take their time. It’s OK to go slowly, especially if it means getting it right. Georgia’s department underwent many iterations before the final pieces were in place in 2017 — a full 13 years after it launched. 

Another, Jacobs said, is to create a system that makes sense in the context of their state. “There’s no ‘right’ way to create your agency. There are no ‘right’ set of programs,” she explained. “Every state is going to have their own pathway.”

In practice, that means that New Mexico’s department may have more programs and services under its umbrella than Colorado’s, and that shouldn’t be a critique of either agency. 

Finally, Jacobs said, it’s important to understand that anyone involved in this work may need patience if they want to see ideas about the field of early care and education meaningfully change. 

“Culture change will take longer than you ever think it will,” Jacobs said, noting that after more than two decades, she believes that the perception of early childhood educators as “babysitters” has changed and that the field is now highly valued by Georgia state leaders and policymakers. “It’s been a long process. … It just takes a lot of time to change that mindset.”

The formation of these departments is in itself momentous, many policy experts said, because it signals that early childhood is an issue that’s so important it deserves — literally — a seat at the governor’s table. But their existence does not guarantee their long-term success. 

Many of these agencies are still very new, having been ushered in by the sitting governor. One of the major tests is whether they can withstand leadership change — a new governor, perhaps from an opposing party, who maybe isn’t as keen on putting early care and education toward the top of their platform, said Regenstein. Some states, like Georgia and Massachusetts, have survived that type of leadership transition. 

“We still cannot answer the question to states, ‘Is this something we should do?’” said Osborne. “But we think there are models of these new departments that really can make it so you’re prioritizing early childhood, so you can use funds more efficiently, and decisions can be made that will enhance programs.”

In the past year, Christian King, a doula based in Kansas City, has supported more than 40 mothers enrolled in Medicaid through their pregnancy, birth and postpartum.

In that role, she helps educate and support families about birth and babies, but her work also takes on a more nontraditional approach.

When one mother’s water was shut off at four weeks postpartum, King helped her find reconciliation services to turn the utilities back on. When another mom couldn’t afford car repairs, King found an organization in Raytown that provided financial assistance. She helped one client secure a car seat from the local health department and another fill her closet with baby clothes.

King, 35, hopes that soon, “just like going to the dentist and going to the eye doctor, obtaining a doula and having a doula present is also one of those things that you just have to have on your team as part of services for maternity.”

Doulas do not deliver babies. They advocate for the physical and mental wellbeing of mothers and their families.

For the past 15 months in Missouri, anyone enrolled in Medicaid while pregnant and postpartum can have a doula by their side for free. Now, a group of bipartisan lawmakers are hoping to expand the program in an effort to continue combating the state’s poor infant and maternal outcomes.

“The statistics tell a devastating story of the lives lost that could’ve been saved if we put in the proper measures,” said state Sen. Barbara Washington, a Democrat from Kansas City who proposed one iteration of the . “There are third-world countries that have better maternal mortality rates than we do.”

The bill is estimated to cost around $300,000. While substantial amid a predicted state budget shortfall, state Rep. also filed legislation to expand the program, said she believes the long-term savings of having fewer Missourians who require medical attention will make up for the cost.

On average, 70 women die each year in Missouri during childbirth or in the first year postpartum. Of those deaths,

In Missouri, than women on private insurance, according to a 2024 report published by the state’s Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review that looked at women who gave birth between 2017 and 2021.  A 2023 and also pointed to doulas as a solution.

In fall 2024, the Missouri Department of Social Services issued an , citing “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare of pregnant women in Missouri.”

Since the program’s inception, there have been about 625 participants insured through Medicaid who accessed doulas during their pregnancy and postpartum, said Baylee Watts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services. As of this month, 108 doulas were enrolled in the program.

“The department is encouraged by the level of engagement so far,” Watts said in a statement. “And views the doula benefit as an important component of broader efforts to improve maternal health outcomes across Missouri.”

Legislation filed by state Rep. Tara Peters, a Rolla Republican, has moved the farthest this year, clearing committee in February as part of a  Her bill seeks to increase the number of covered doula visits from six to 16.

The average out-of-pocket cost for a doula in Missouri is about $1,500, according to the Missouri Doula Association.

“I’ve just noticed how much extra care a doula can provide, especially for women in high need situations,” said “Doulas can provide some great education and support for people who maybe don’t have the extra support.”

This support can also look like serving as an interpreter between medical professionals and pregnant people, navigating insurance, ensuring access to nutritious food or coordinating transportation to medical appointments.

, who previously served as executive director of Monarch Family Resource Center in Farmington, said expanding the number of covered visits can be particularly helpful for women who experience postpartum depression in the year after giving birth.

Her legislation, like Peters’, expands the number of reimbursable visits from six to sixteen, and includes access to doulas for prenatal, birth, postpartum and lactation support.

She said the legislation also hopes to correct some issues doulas have had getting full reimbursement after being in the room for a scheduled c-section, listed as a scheduled surgeries, a classification she said muddled the reimbursement process.

The Department of Social Services previously said the reimbursements could lead to savings for the state in the coming years, including by potentially reducing the Cesarean rate. Watts said it’s too early to get an accurate look at this result.

said doulas can be a lifesaving set of eyes and ears in homes where women experience domestic violence, a leading cause of pregnancy-associated deaths in Missouri.

“The doula birth worker can also have a voice in those situations and see what’s going on outside of that medical office,” she said. “And maybe be able to provide some rescuing relief from dangerous situations for mom.”

To be eligible, and certified through a national or Missouri-based doula training organization. From there, they will be added to a list of eligible doulas overseen by .

Sandra Thornhill, a social justice doula who has advocated in Jefferson City for better legislation for doulas, said it was beautiful to see this policy issue reach across the aisle. And she was happy to see some of the proposals pushing for increased visits, especially in postpartum.

She said it’s not a question of if doulas should be reimbursed, but of how the state honors the traditional practices and values of doulas in that process. She is wary of any policies that place community health workers under medical or state authority. Instead she hopes to see more collaborative models.

”My concern is not with recognizing doulas in the Medicaid policy, but with how the bill structures authority and governance over that work,” said Thornill, who describes herself as a womb warrior and policy griot. “The question is whether the policy structure strengthens community birth workers or will it place unnecessary burden or medical authority that doesn’t reflect the roots of the work.”

But she said the progress made in acknowledging and supporting doula’s work in the past few years is striking, especially as many doulas live “birth to birth” as they struggle to pay the bills.

Prior to the state’s Medicaid reimbursement plan, to help families in need for free as they navigated growing their families.

“They do it because they love their people and their community so much that they’re willing to make this great sacrifice,” Thornhill said. “
However, it is not healthy. And it is not fair for the community to have to suffer like that when there are resources available to change that. But again, those resources cannot come with a slap on the wrist. They cannot come with a backlash of ‘now you’re under our thumb.’”

A representative with America’s Health Insurance Plans voiced opposition to Washington’s bill in a committee hearing last month.

“We are very concerned about issues with education, standardization and making sure doulas are all on the same page and we know exactly how they’ve been trained,” he said. “There seems to be some resistance out there and a lot of independence within the organizations.”

Washington’s legislation also seeks to ensure health benefit plans offer coverage for midwifery services. She said this is especially crucial in rural parts of the state, where families don’t have access to nearby hospitals with maternity wards.

“Currently, our law does not explicitly require private health plans to cover midwifery. This would close that loophole,” Washington said, adding that this change would shift power back to patients to choose their own provider, especially in rural communities “where the hospitals are closing at alarming rates.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

A new analysis from NWEA, an assessment company, suggests that these children are experiencing learning disruptions even now. 

While kindergarten achievement levels in math and reading largely held steady during and since the pandemic, by first and second grade, students are performing below pre-pandemic averages, according to an of NWEA’s Map Growth assessment data from spring 2017 to spring 2025. In math, at least, first and second graders have shown slow, incremental progress. Gaps in reading achievement, however, seem stubbornly stalled. 

The performance dips in first and second grade are similar to those seen in older grades, said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA, who co-led the research. 

“The general pattern of stagnation and lack of recovery in reading is very similar in first and second grade as grades three to eight,” Kuhfeld said, adding that a slow recovery in math is also observed in the later grades. “It’s very parallel across, basically, all the grades except for kindergarten.”

So what’s happening to students as they matriculate from kindergarten to first grade to cause a performance drop?

“That’s the big mystery of the results,” Kuhfeld said.

She was willing to speculate about the cause, leaning on anecdotal evidence from kindergarten teachers and elementary school leaders. 

Chronic absenteeism rates in kindergarten, which are often higher than in any other grade before high school, may mean some students aren’t getting adequate instructional time, Kuhfeld offered, ultimately standing in the way of them grasping the foundational reading and math skills typically acquired in kindergarten.

And many kindergarten teachers have reported that students are showing up with more nascent social and emotional skills than their peers in prior years. They have less experience with important life skills such as sharing, cooperating and self-regulating. 

“Teachers are spending more time having to teach how to behave in a kindergarten classroom — that would normally be the purview of preschool teachers,” Kuhfeld said. “This time spent on behavioral management and behavioral regulation, cumulatively, could be affecting achievement.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Fort Worth, Texas, where students’ MAP Growth assessment results generally align with what NWEA has found nationally, principal Andrea Johnson said both factors could be at play. 

“We’re seeing kids who, if they don’t reach immediate success, we see them dysregulate,” said Johnson, whose school serves students in pre-K through first grade. “They struggle.”

At Western Hills Primary School in Texas, kindergarten and first grade performance in math and reading on NWEA’s Map Growth assessment generally mirror national trends. (Courtesy of Andrea Johnson)

She believes that may be a latent impact of the pandemic on these younger students. Many of them had extra time at home with parents and caregivers, when early care and education programs were closed. 

“They’re used to someone being close and someone solving their problems for them,” Johnson said. “We talk a lot about productive struggle. You’ve gotta let them do it. Give them that mentality, where they’ve gotta connect to that struggle.”

She has definitely seen high rates of absenteeism among students in pre-K and kindergarten, she added. 

“I think they think, ‘pre-K and kinder, they don’t really matter that much,’” Johnson said, adding that she often finds herself trying to communicate to families how crucial those years are for future learning and development.

Most measures of post-pandemic recovery have examined the impacts on students in later grades, making NWEA’s analysis a rare snapshot of students in grades K-2. 

Curriculum Associates, a curriculum and assessment provider, has also evaluated math and reading performance among students in the early grades, finding some similarities and key differences from NWEA’s results. 

NWEA’s Map Growth assessment and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Inform assessment are both widely used in U.S. schools, reaching a combined 19 million K-8 students. Both measure student achievement in math and reading, but they differ in approach.

Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, pointed out that these two assessments have distinct designs and methodologies — and that they are administered to different samples — which may account for variations in findings.

“From the big picture, we’re seeing the same thing,” Huff said. “Students today who were not in school — some were babies — when the pandemic hit are not performing at the same level as their pre-pandemic peers in either reading or math.”

But in a published in July 2025, Curriculum Associates actually found that students in kindergarten are seeing achievement level drops in both math and reading, and that declining math performance in the early grades is “more drastic” than in reading. 

At a high level, she said, both sets of findings send a similar message, which is that America’s children are not seeing the type of recovery needed to reach pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

“It opens up the question of what is happening,” Huff said. “We can no longer, in my opinion, say that that disrupted learning in 2020 and 2021 is the sole or primary cause of what we’re seeing. There is a larger, systemic issue — or issues — that are impacting this.”

In fiscal year 2025, 1.59% of all federal spending was dedicated to supporting children from birth to age 3, down about 20% from its peak of 1.98% in 2021, when adjusted for inflation. 

That’s according to , an annual report from First Focus on Children, a nonprofit, bipartisan advocacy organization that seeks to elevate children and families in federal policy and budget decisions. 

For the 2025 edition, the authors tracked nearly 150 federal programs that invest in infants and toddlers, including mandatory programs such as Medicaid and SNAP and discretionary programs such as the Child Care and Development Fund, Head Start and Preschool Development Grants. Their findings, they said, confirm that the U.S. can and should be doing a lot better when it comes to babies.

And with major funding cuts to Medicaid and SNAP looming — programs which help to meet the basic needs of America’s youngest population and make up about half of all federal spending on babies — the next few years are only expected to be worse. 

“All the research shows this is the best investment you can possibly make for any age group, and yet we shortchange it,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus and one of the report’s authors. “We make far fewer investments for kids — but particularly babies and toddlers — than we actually should be making.”

Is there a magic number of dollars to invest in young children? In an interview, Lesley and his co-authors said no. But they did note that while the world’s largest economy spends $1.59 out of every $100 on babies, it spends about $13 on defense.

Lesley also pointed out that children from birth to age 3 make up about of the U.S. population, meaning federal spending on them is not even half of their population share. And some would argue that infants and toddlers, being an especially vulnerable, wholly dependent group, warrant more than their fair share of spending. 

“Many things about human infants and toddlers are expensive,” said Elizabeth Gaines, founder and CEO of Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that works with states, communities and Native nations to support and expand funding for children. “They’re vulnerable creatures. We should be spending more of our resources on the most vulnerable of us.”

Many countries have better infrastructure for supporting children and families than the U.S. does, said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a national nonprofit advocating for infants and toddlers. Most have paid family and medical leave and universal health care systems, which the United States does not provide. That leaves many populations, including the youngest, to fend for themselves. 

“It’s paltry,” Boteach said of federal investment. “Babies are 100% of the future. They’re in a period where their brain development is so rapid, the investments have such a long-term impact, and yet we continue to underinvest in babies.”

While overall spending on babies is down about 20% over the past four years, discretionary spending has fared even worse. Since 2021, investment in programs that support child care, early learning, environmental safety and health for babies has declined by more than half — from 2.05% in 2021 to 0.96% in 2025. 

Many of these programs received historic levels of funding in 2021 as part of the , in response to the pandemic, making it an outlier year, acknowledged Chris Becker, vice president of budget policy and data analysis at First Focus and an author of the report. As a result of all that spending, he said, the child poverty rate in the U.S. was , lifting nearly 3 million children out of poverty and illustrating what could be possible if the nation invested more in its youngest citizens. 

“Child poverty exists. Food insecurity exists for babies. Homelessness exists for babies,” Becker said. “I don’t know what number solves that, but it is solvable.”

H.R. 1, also referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025, may only increase the child poverty rate in the country, the authors of the Babies in the Budget report said. The legislation includes an estimated $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which will gut the largest sources of federal spending on children from birth to 3. It will then be up to individual states to decide whether to make up the cost difference in those programs or let benefits lapse.

Trump has cast himself as a “” president, promoting rhetoric about boosting birth rates and supporting parents — a message by Vice President JD Vance and other allies. But the legislation tells a different story: Federal investment in babies and toddlers remains limited, and the largest funding streams for young children face steep cuts.

“I don’t even like to think about what is going to come from SNAP and Medicaid cuts,” said Gaines of Children’s Funding Project. “Kids in states that step up may end up being OK. Kids from states that largely voted this administration into office may not be OK.”

The president’s — though not in any way binding and merely used as a blueprint so Congress can see what the administration wants to prioritize — included program and funding cuts across the board, said Becker of First Focus. But “babies are hit especially hard,” he said, with proposed elimination of dozens of programs serving babies and a reduction of more than $2.5 billion in discretionary spending.

There is a dichotomy between the administration’s words and actions on children and families, added Boteach. 

“Budgets are moral documents,” she said. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are. You can say your priorities are whatever you want, but the words are empty if they’re not reflected back in a document that actually puts resources into what you say your priorities are.”

Some leaders in the Trump administration have argued these programs for children are too costly, but Gaines doesn’t accept that as an answer.

“The resources are there. This is a nation of abundance,” said Gaines. “When people say the money is not there — it clearly is. Choices are being made about where we invest our dollars publicly.”

To illustrate her point, she noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included a expansion of immigrant detention facilities. In 2021, the federal government spent on child care relief, and it was transformative for the field, she said. 

“I think if we asked the public whether they want their money on ICE detention centers or child care centers,” Gaines added, “they’d say child care centers.”

Could those two trends be related? New research and surveys indicate yes.

In , Boston University economics Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dow finds that when child care prices increase, some American families decide to put off having more children, and many don’t have more children at all. 

Dow looked at child care prices across the country in a compiled and published by the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor with data from 2010 to 2022. 

She then isolated a “shock” to child care prices — an event, unrelated to something like a recession or a spike in inflation, that made the cost of care go either up or down. The shock she identified was that when states mandate smaller group sizes and/or lower child to staff ratios, child care prices rise, so she studied what happened to fertility decisions when states passed such regulations.

“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow said. She found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to 2 years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. Her research also found that the price increase leads to women delaying when they have children: a 10% increase prompts women to push back their first birth by four months and to extend the time between a first and second child by half a month. Dow found that women’s decisions about whether to have second and third children were particularly hampered by high child care prices. 

The findings are strongest for women ages 30 or older. This is, Dow posits, because they have more to lose if they can’t get child care: they’ve invested more time and resources into their careers and likely earn more, making the cost of having to give up on work to care for more children in the absence of affordable child care higher. Younger women have less to lose by having a child and dropping out of the work force if child care can’t be secured.

The research is novel: while there have been studies in European countries which suggest that women rethink having children when child care prices rise, Dow knew that those situations may not be applicable to the U.S., where the government spends much less on child care, it’s a primarily private system, and there is no guarantee of paid family leave. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow said. 

Dow noted that child care prices aren’t the only factor dampening the country’s fertility rate — other research has found that things like housing and health care prices also make an impact. But it’s clear that the cost of raising children is top of mind for American parents when they’re thinking about the sizes of their families. In of 3,000 nationally representative respondents by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News released in November, a record share of participants — 71% — said that raising children is unaffordable, a 13 percentage point increase over 2024. That high cost of raising children was listed as the single most important reason survey respondents offered for why they’ve limited the children they either had or planned to have. That response was twice as prevalent as the next two reasons they gave — a lack of personal desire and a lack of a supportive partner — and for the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, it was the top reason respondents gave.

The survey also found that support for government resources aimed at parents through direct payments and better programs had increased since 2021, and opposition to such interventions was 10 percentage points lower. A majority favor universal day care, while just 18% oppose it. Survey respondents also supported increased tax credits for parents.

“If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.

The situation is poised to get worse for Americans considering whether and when to have children. Dow’s data only goes through 2022. Since then, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector has disappeared. In its wake, states like Arkansas and Indiana have cut back on support for the sector. Indiana stopped enrolling new children in its child care subsidy program, and the state has reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading more than 100 providers to shutter. Arkansas has also cut provider reimbursement rates, put new subsidy applicants on a waitlist, and instituted new copays for parents who receive vouchers. More of the cost burden will now fall on parents in states that pull back.

Dow cautioned that her research shouldn’t be interpreted as an argument for relaxing regulations in order to bring child care costs down and boost births. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she pointed out. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” But, she said, her research makes it clear that parents, and particularly mothers, make decisions about whether to have children and how many to have based at least in part on whether they can afford child care. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” she said. 

In late November, the leader of a Native American Head Start program on a reservation in Western Washington State opened an email from the federal government to see that her annual application for funding had been denied. 

The government shutdown had already delayed the much-needed funds by weeks, threatening a closure of her center, which serves toddlers and preschoolers in a tribe of less than 1,000. And now, a week after the government had re-opened, her application had been “flagged for containing language that is not allowable under current federal guidance.”

The culprit? Two trainings for teachers — one focused on inclusionary practices for kids with autism and the other on tools to support young children as they process trauma. Integral to both — and also part of the rejection — an acknowledgment that Native American children would receive priority enrollment in her Head Start classrooms and programming, as federal policy stipulates. 

“But we’re supposed to do those things,” the education director, who asked not to be identified because she fears retribution from the Trump administration, told The 74. “So for them to pull them? I’m just — I’m not understanding.”

Ultimately, although she deeply believed the training sessions and prioritizing indigenous children were inherent to her center’s success and part of its stated mission, she wiped the offending language. Her updated grant was almost immediately approved.

Until last week such existential calculations were being forced on Head Start programs across the country by the Trump’s administration 2025 executive order banning practices involving diversity, equity and inclusion. On Tuesday, a federal judge issued temporarily halting the administration’s anti-DEI edict. 

“This is a huge victory for kids!” Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Head Start & Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program, said in a statement. “When a Head Start program has their funding withheld because of their efforts to provide effective education to children with autism, serve tribal members on a reservation, or treat all families with respect, it is an attack on the fundamental promise of the Head Start program.”

The federal early education and support program for low-income families turned 60 last year, a milestone that coincided with perhaps its most challenging and chaotic year. In 2025, the Trump administration  froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. And during the government shutdown, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services.

The administration also took aim at Head Start’s of better preparing young children in poverty for school by forbidding providers from overtly addressing issues of race, gender or disability, experts said. The banned word list for grant applications included “disabilities,” “underprivileged” and “Native American.”

The Washington State Native American Head Start director said on reservations “just about every one of our children have been touched by trauma” that relates to their race and the painful history of indigenous people in the U.S. 

“If we don’t know how to work with kids where things are being triggered,” she added, “then how are we going to move forward and have the best education for these kids so they are not shutting down all the time?”

Thrilled but cautious

The Jan. 6 injunction was part of a lawsuit filed in April 2025 against Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials, alleging that the administration was attempting to illegally dismantle Head Start, which serves roughly 700,000 children and families a year.

Roughly 80% of Head Start’s funding comes from HHS and it has long been a stated goal of the right wing to eliminate the program.

The ruling means that for the duration of the ongoing case, the administration can’t enforce the DEI ban nor can it punish Head Start providers for including DEI-related language in their applications or practices in their programs. The judge also ruled the administration cannot fire any more employees at the Office of Head Start, though the sweeping layoffs that have already occurred stand. 

Back in September, the same judge granted a temporary injunction halting the administration from banning undocumented preschoolers and other groups of immigrant children from enrolling in Head Start programs.

In a mandated announcement Friday afternoon, the federal Office of Head Start acknowledged the court’s ruling, saying, certain actions against “DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) … may not be implemented or enforced” for the time being, though they didn’t provide any guidance for providers who were forced to remove training and programming in past applications.

The Office of Head Start and HHS did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether further guidance was forthcoming. 

The Washington grantee expressed cautious optimism in response to the ruling, paired with significant anxiety about what comes next. Her approved application is a binding contract, she said, and since it does not include the trauma and autism trainings or prioritization of native kids, she fears she’ll be deemed out of compliance and forced to pay back the money if she proceeds in that direction anyway. 

She said she could try to re-submit an updated application that includes the previously banned words, but “that would be calling more attention to us, and I really am afraid of the retaliation,” especially given the non-permanent nature of  the injunction.

“Whenever you put ‘temporary’ on something, I’m always cautious,” she added. “Yes, if more things come out I feel like there will be support and it’ll take care of this, but you can’t be certain of that in this political climate.” 

It’s possible the Trump administration could appeal the injunction and it’s not clear how long it will take the underlying case to work its way through the courts.

In the meantime, Ryan, executive director of Washington’s Head Start Association, emphasized that the Trump administration “can’t enforce a contract that is going against the law.” But, he acknowledged, “what that means on the ground is different, because there’s so much fear of retaliation.”

“I’m getting a sense that people will move with a lot of caution at first here to see what happens,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re going to want to make wholesale changes right out of the gate.”

Linda Morris, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and one of the attorneys who filed the suit,  said that while this ruling “doesn’t undo those harms that the administration already inflicted,” it’s still “a huge win for families and it’s a huge win for Head Start providers.”

“We’re thrilled with the decision,” said Morris.

The initial DEI ban, she said, had put Head Start providers in “an impossible bind,” since they were being required to remove programming and words from their grant applications that were required by the statutory text of the Head Start Act. 

They were “in constant fear of being forced to comply with an unlawful directive and potentially be out of step with their mission and their obligations under the Head Start Act or,” she said, “they risk being punished and losing their funding and even being forced to close.”

‘If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious’

Morris and her ACLU colleagues first filed the lawsuit last spring on behalf of a number of state Head Start Associations as well as parent organizations. Initially, the complaint challenged the mass layoffs and restructuring of the federal Office of Head Start as well as the DEI ban, alleging all were causing irreparable harm.

In July, they updated the complaint following the Trump administration’s unprecedented move to exclude families from Head Start based on immigration status.

The complaint was again updated after the executive director of a Head Start agency in Wisconsin had her Jan. 1 grant application returned with instructions to remove 19 words and phrases, including “institutional,” “historically,” “equity,” “belong” and “pregnant people.” Later that morning, the Office of Head Start followed up with a “complete least of [nearly 200] words” banned from Head Start applications.

In response, senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) issued a Dec. 18 to RFK Jr. expressing “outrage.”

“The chaos you are creating is already jeopardizing services for nearly 700,000 young children across this country,” they wrote, adding that “the ambiguous policy was not accompanied by clarification on what the Administration considers ‘DEI,’ and Head Start programs were left with no meaningful guidance on compliance.”

Ultimately, the Wisconsin provider updated her application to fit this new criteria, but, she wrote in a court record, “compliance is challenging because many of the words on the list are integral to Head Start programming requirements.” The grant application itself, she noted, “already includes some of these prohibited words in pre-populated text … and application questions specifically request responses that include these words.”

“This has put me in an impossible situation,” she continued.

Jennie Mauer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, said this grantee was one of three in her state serving roughly 860 young children to have their applications returned this month because of the DEI ban. Another was accused of non-compliance for writing that they would make an effort to “utilize small businesses, minority businesses, and women-owned businesses.”

“If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious,” said Mauer. “There are things that are in the form like, ‘Tell us how you’re going to serve children with disabilities,’ but then you can’t say the word ‘disability.’ How do you wrap your head around that? It’s infuriating. I’m just wringing my hands over here.”

The latest ruling, she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is better, but it means that these worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come to fruition,” at least not immediately.

And while she’s hopeful the government will comply with the judge’s order, damage has  been done to Head Start communities, she said, leaving program leaders, providers and families worried.

“You feel like we’re in this sort of Cold War environment where people are afraid,” she said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of your government.”

Note: The 74 replaced two of the photos that ran in an earlier version of this story.

“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). 

A handful of early care and education experts noted that 2025 did herald in a number of key victories in the field. 

Some states in policies shaping child care and early childhood education. In 2025, , and were among those that made new investments in the field. New Mexico took its gains in recent years a step further by free universal child care for all families, regardless of income, beginning last November. 

Alongside those wins for early learners and their caregivers came some challenges. Head Start was caught in political crosshairs more than once throughout the year — first when it was for elimination, then when many of its regional offices across the country were , and later when programs serving thousands of children nearly lost access to services during the prolonged government shutdown. And some states, such as Indiana, by the end of federal pandemic relief dollars, began to for families and programs, slashing provider reimbursement rates, instituting co-pays for families who use subsidies, and changing subsidy eligibility, among other actions. 

Now, those experts say, the that many states have experienced as historic pandemic-era investments expired is going to run headlong into another kind of budget shortfall in 2026. That’s one of four main issues they said they’ll be watching in early care and education in the new year. 

1. Child Care Spending: States Begin Tightening the Belt

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law in July 2025 includes significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The cuts effectively shift the costs of those programs from the federal government to states. If states decide to pick up the tab, they’ll likely have to pull back on other services.

Most of the cuts won’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterm elections, but states will start planning ahead. 

“It’s less painful to do it slowly than all at once,” explained Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at ZERO TO THREE. 

Unlike the federal government, states can’t spend more than they earn; they have to balance their budgets. So they’ll be looking for ways to increase revenue, such as through new taxes, or cut costs by eliminating or scaling back programs and services. 

“Uncertainty is the word,” said Aaron Loewenberg, senior policy analyst at New America. “There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty at this point about what the next year or two could look like.”

As states look to reduce costs, they will have fewer dollars to invest in early care and education. Certainly the prospect of bold new projects and initiatives seems less likely, experts said, but it’s also possible that existing programs could be scaled back. 

What will emerge, said Hains of NAEYC, is a divide between states that have the will and resources to fund ECE, and states that don’t. 

“We’re going to be looking at two very different countries: States that have revenue to invest in child care and early learning — [like] Vermont, New Mexico, Connecticut, Montana — while other states are going to be in more constrained and challenging situations.”

Ultimately, funding cuts will be felt by children, families and early educators. 

“There’s no way to nickel and dime investing in children,” Boteach said. “At the end of the day, if we’re going to really transform outcomes for children and families, it requires resources. … Children in this country are going to suffer because we are disinvesting rather than investing in their future.”

2. Expanding Access: Can Promises of Universal Child Care Be Fulfilled? 

New Mexico’s pledge of free, universal child care has buoyed the spirits of many early childhood educators and advocates. 

“It’s an enormous bright spot in an otherwise very difficult year,” Boteach said.

The initiative is in its early days — the income limitation was lifted on Nov. 1, 2025 — so this year will offer state leaders a chance to make good on their promise. Early childhood policy experts will be watching closely. 

Loewenberg of New America said he’ll be looking at how leaders navigate in the system, whether families feel it’s successful, and how such a policy could be replicated in states that don’t have the oil and gas revenues that New Mexico uses to fund universal child care. 

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on New York City as Mayor Zohran Mamdani settles into his new role and pursues his own for universal child care. 

“I’m holding out excitement or negativity to wait and see what happens,” said Loewenberg. “I think we’re past the point of saying, ‘This is great because people are talking about it.’ The difficult work is being able to make it work. That remains to be seen.”

One critical step is working out the funding mechanism for universal child care, which will likely require from the state government. 

Hains does find the policy pledge in itself encouraging. 

“Reflecting back on the last decade or two in this work, how amazing is it that we are at a place where mayors and governors are putting forward real, meaningful proposals of child care as a public good that’s available to everybody?” Hains said. “As a whole, looking at the big picture, it’s exciting that child care feels like something that elected officials can deliver on.”

3. Workforce Instability: Immigration Enforcement Creates Chilling Effect

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement, which has had deleterious consequences for early childhood educators and, in turn, the families who rely on them.

An estimated early childhood educators are immigrants. In large urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, immigrants make up of the child care workforce, Boteach pointed out. 

New America, a left-leaning think tank, released a in December that found a strong association between the increase in ICE activity and the number of foreign-born child care workers: Between February and July 2025, as ICE arrests increased after President Trump took office, there were 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers than the same period in 2024. 

With more funding for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the trend is expected to continue in 2026. 

“Immigration enforcement, to me, right now, is the number one disruptor both to parent behavior and provider behavior,” said Renew of Home Grown. “It is hugely disruptive.” 

Because arrests have been , they have created a culture of fear among immigrants, even those with legal status in the country, New America found. And now that are fair game for ICE activity — prior to Trump’s second term, they were protected under a “sensitive locations” exception — many educators and parents worry about what may unfold before children’s eyes. 

“The amount of stress, the amount of worry about targeting in your community, can affect providers’ mental health and then the health of those kids in their care,” Boteach said. 

In effect, the escalation in immigration enforcement may impact both the availability and the quality of early care and education, she added.

4. Bright Spots: Solutions Emerge Amid Challenges

Even in a challenging political and budgetary environment, there are bright spots to keep an eye on in 2026. 

For one, Loewenberg pointed out, Head Start is still a viable, funded federal program. A year ago, that was not a sure thing.

A second is that a number of states with protected revenue streams for early care and education, including New Mexico and Vermont, will continue to invest in the field. Others are jumping in to commit more dollars to the sector — , and among them.  

Finally, early care and education is proving to be a viable campaign issue. In addition to Mamdani’s victory in New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia both won their gubernatorial races by talking about child care. 

“You’re seeing in the elections that candidates that ran on child care, ran on helping families and children, won,” Boteach said. “These are winning political issues, which means both parties should be vying to talk about these issues and govern on these issues.”

Indeed, Hains feels that the country is moving from a place of “whether” child care is a government responsibility to “how” and how much the government should be involved.

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

But when filmmaker Rob Reiner latched onto the science about how young children develop, he not only used his moviemaking platform to convince the public of the importance of kids’ early years, he became a real-life policymaker to champion the cause. 

After successfully steering the passage of a 1998 tobacco tax in California to fund programs for kids from birth to 5, he chaired the statewide commission overseeing how some of the funds were spent. The entertainment community remembered Reiner’s legacy as a director this week, after he and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. But others reflected on how he kept early-childhood development in the spotlight. 

“There are plenty of Hollywood actors, directors and leaders who engage in politics, write reasonably sized checks and do their best to make a difference. That was not Rob,” said Ben Austin, a former Clinton White House staffer who handled communications for the California Children and Families Commission and quickly rebranded it as First 5. Twenty-seven years later, the work continues. “This was not a side hustle.”

For an education reporter, it was a big deal. I first interviewed Reiner and his wife in a suite at what was then the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in 1997. Early-childhood education was my beat, and he was there to talk to the nation’s governors about his I Am Your Child campaign. He wanted to start a movement and had the high-level connections to do it. The effort kicked off earlier that year with and a featuring celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal. With big-name corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and AT&T, the initiative included a special edition of Newsweek and a series of parent-focused videos that translated the latest science on early brain development to a general audience.  

As a new mom, I couldn’t help but feel a personal connection to the topic. I reported on the policy goals of the campaign, like parent education and improving the quality of child care, while taking in the advice about reading and having back-and-forth conversations with my infant daughter. 

It was a 1994 report called , from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, that sparked Reiner’s activism. The authors explained how the first three years of life were a critical period of both risk and opportunity. 

“An adverse environment can compromise a young child’s brain function and overall development,” the authors wrote. “A good start in life can do more to promote learning and prevent damage than we ever imagined.”

Michael Levine, a co-author, remembers sitting in the Reiners’ home theater in 1995, presenting the research to a small group, including actor Warren Beatty, actress Kate Capshaw and then-Disney Channel President John Cooke. Reiner, Levine said, wanted to replicate a Hawaii program called , which promoted understanding of child development and parents’ relationships with their babies. Then Beatty spoke up.

“He said something to the effect of ‘I’ve been listening to this whole conversation about programs and philanthropy. What we can do is sell early childhood to America,’ ” Levine recalled.

That pivotal moment took place in the same home where police said the Reiners were stabbed to death. The Reiners’ young children were there at the time, Levine said. On Sunday, their son , 32, was arrested for the murder. On Monday, police said their daughter found their bodies.

Despite being a far-left Democrat, Reiner found agreement with Republican governors, like Pennsylvania’s and of Ohio, over early-childhood issues, Levine said. 

While I Am Your Child was a nationwide effort, Reiner kept his political strategy focused on California. In November 1998, voters narrowly passed his ballot measure, creating a 50-cent tax on tobacco products, beating back a $30 million effort from cigarette makers to defeat it. The revenue would fund programs to improve the health, school readiness and well-being of young children.

Reiner’s ability to combine his creative talent with political mobilization was “unprecedented in the early-childhood field,” Levine said. 

, I met Reiner in his Castle Rock Entertainment office in Beverly Hills, where posters of his hit movies, like “A Few Good Men,” and “When Harry Met Sally” line the walls.

First 5 was facing legal challenges, including a repeal effort sponsored by the president of a business called Cigarettes Cheaper. An author, , was also poking holes in the whole idea behind First 5, arguing that Reiner was oversimplifying the science and creating stress for parents about making the most of their kids’ early years. Reiner brushed off the criticism.

“Let’s say there is no evidence,” he told me. “Would you then say, ‘Let’s not invest in child care for young children; let’s not invest in health care for young children?’ ”

The repeal effort failed and until 2006, First 5 occupied almost as much of Reiner’s time as his movies. He presided over statewide commission meetings, and could “code switch” between directing a scene and handling First 5 business, Austin said. In 2002, Austin remembers grabbing some time with Reiner on the set of “Alex and Emma,” a love story starring Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson.

“We’d schedule with the producer like 15 minutes for me to talk to Rob in his trailer about early-childhood policy,” he said. 

One of Reiner’s biggest wins during that period was getting First 5 leaders in Los Angeles County to toward expanding preschool.

“This is a historic day for the children, not only of L.A. County, but of the country,” he said at the time. “This is going to be the model.”

He didn’t want to stop there. In 2006, he got a measure on the ballot that would tax California’s wealthiest residents to pay for pre-K for all 4-year-olds. With “strong will and enormous confidence,” he had little patience for those who might hurt the initiative’s chances of passing, said Bruce Fuller, a University of California Berkeley professor who advised Reiner’s team on the proposal. 

“Reiner was not necessarily the world’s greatest listener,” Fuller told me. The plan called for the California Department of Education to set standards for the program and county school superintendents to run it. Fuller thought that was a mistake because it would take kids away from private providers — an opinion Reiner’s team rejected. But Fuller described Reiner as someone “who committed a ton of time and had a big heart to advance the issue.”

Voters rejected the pre-K plan. But today, despite , First 5 continues to fund the statewide commission and 58 county-level agencies. They pay for a broad range of services, from home visiting for teen parents to training preschool providers. In 2018, I wrote of articles marking the 20th anniversary of the ballot measure. 

Reiner didn’t agree to an interview that time. But First 5 L.A. shared some of his as he reflected on what drew him to become an early-childhood education advocate. 

He was partly motivated by his own early experiences.

“As somebody who went through therapy, I started thinking about my early years and how they affected me,” he said. 

But he also saw a political opportunity. 

“Goals 2000 had just come out,” he said, referring to the . “The first goal was ‘All children will start school ready to learn.’ And I looked at all this and I said, you know, it seems to me if you could meet that one goal, if you could just make sure that every child has what they need to be healthy and ready to experience kindergarten, maybe all those other goals would kind of fall into line.”

Milo has been coming to work with Wiseman since he was 8 weeks old. He started in the infant classroom, and now he’s in a classroom for 1-year-olds. Wiseman said having Milo in a nearby classroom with teachers she knows and trusts has been a great relief.

“I knew I wouldn’t stop working after I got pregnant and I couldn’t imagine not working, but I also couldn’t imagine putting him in a different space than where I was,” said Wiseman. “It helps to not have to be paying for it.”

Milo’s child care tuition is covered by (CCAP), which was to employees working in a licensed child care program, like Wiseman, the benefit of free child care. Under the program, anyone who works for or more as a licensed child care provider in the state of Kentucky is automatically eligible for full child care assistance, regardless of their total household income. The program was designed to help recruit and retain child care workers amid facing the industry as temporary child care relief funds from the American Rescue Plan were coming to an end.

“The purpose of this program was to increase staffing in child care programs when wage inflation was causing child care providers to leave for more lucrative positions in retail and hospitality industries,” said Sarah Vanover, policy and research director at Kentucky Youth Advocates. Vanover was previously the director of Kentucky’s Division of Child Care and was the force behind expanding CCAP’s traditional income-based subsidies to include early childhood educators. Vanover points out that in the U.S., child care workers make , and that low wages make recruitment and retention of staff a constant struggle. 

Kathy Donelan, the owner of Aunt Kathy’s Child Care & Preschool, knows all too well that would-be hires can easily go to a nearby Amazon warehouse, or even the gas station across the street, and make more money “doing less work” there than working in child care. “It takes a real special person to come here,” Donelan said. Before CCAP covered the child care tuition for her educators, Donelan had always extended the offer for each of her educators to enroll their own children in the program, but the teachers who utilized this benefit would earn a reduced wage. In 2022, when the CCAP assistance kicked in for her teachers, Donelan was able to change her policy so that her employees could get free child care and get their regular salary.

Stephanie Milleck, the director of Aunt Kathy’s, said she saw her salary go up when the CCAP began covering the cost of her daughter’s child care. Both of her kids are now in elementary school, but she is still able to take advantage of the CCAP benefit during the summer when they participate in a summer camp program at Aunt Kathy’s. Milleck works with Donelan on hiring for new positions and says the free child care makes the job more attractive to candidates with young kids and helps with retention. “If it’s a mom of a new baby, we know we will have them for at least five years,” Milleck said. 

New data provided by Beth Fisher from Kentucky’s Division of Child Care shows that as of 2025, 5,510 families have utilized the program that provides free child care for child care providers, and that has included 9,657 children. Another 4,000 child care providers applied for the program, and were found to be income-eligible for child care subsidies for low-wage workers, and Vanover explained they were routed to that program instead. 

For Megan Senn, a preschool teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, this program has been “life changing.” Senn, who has a master’s degree in early childhood education, said she loved teaching but couldn’t make ends meet on the low wages she received when she was a Head Start teacher a decade ago. At the time, she was making less than $30,000 a year working full time, and had to rely on food stamps. In 2016, she moved into a series of management roles at Head Start and later the YMCA, where she oversaw six child care centers, at a significantly higher salary. She was making over $70,000 a year, but Senn said she missed working directly with kids in the classroom. 

It was CCAP that allowed Senn to go back to teaching. She found an early childhood teaching position that would pay her close to $50,000. She estimated that the cost of child care would be between $20,000 to 25,000 a year for her twins. “If you take that off the table, I could take a pay cut and go back to the classroom,” she said. Senn began working at Virginia Chance, an independent school in the Louisville area. When her twins turned 2 years old, CCAP paid the full cost for them to attend preschool there.

Being a teacher and being able to afford to send her own children to the same school she teaches in, has been game-changing,  said Senn. “They get a beautiful education and I don’t have to think about tuition costs and worry if I am bringing in enough money.”

The program is showing results because the math makes sense. Vanover explains that best practice is to have . “If the state pays the child care expense for one of those ten children in order to attract the child care provider, that still opens spots for nine more children who will have parents and caregivers working in the community and providing income tax,” Vanover said. 

have seen the success of Kentucky’s program in retaining child care providers and shoring up their early childhood workforce and are trying to follow suit. In August, Rhode Island launched a based on Kentucky’s model and Vanover said she’s been invited to speak to the Ohio Legislature about setting up a similar program, and has received interest from Utah as well.

While the program has garnered attention for its impact, there are still some areas for improvement. Although the it’s benefitted a majority of licensed child care centers in the state, not all early educators are eligible. Providers who care for their own children in a family child care program that they own are excluded. Vanover explained that the federal laws governing child care payments through Child Care and Development Block Grants from receiving payment to care for their own child, and Kentucky has modeled their program based on those same rules.

But many home providers go into child care because they want to care for their own kids, in addition to those in the community, said Natalie Renew, director of Home Grown, a national collaborative supporting home-based child care providers. “If [owners of] home-based providers could participate in this policy, it would support supply building and encourage more start up,” Renew said. As it stands, the policy is “prejudiced against home-based providers because staff in centers can work in the same place as their children, but those [who run] home-based care cannot.” 

“It’s challenging,” said Vanover, in addressing the ways owners of home-based programs are excluded from the program. She said the legislature is considering modifying the program so that more home-based providers may be able to access the benefit in certain instances, for example, if their child attends a licensed after-care program at another location. 

Some providers have also critiqued the enrollment process. Donelan said four out of her 24 employees are enrolled in CCAP, adding that a fifth staff member has been trying to access the benefit for over a year, but has been unable to do so due to bureaucratic hurdles. One challenge is that although the program doesn’t require income eligibility, applicants must provide extensive paperwork requiring up-to-date paystubs and income verification for all adults living in their home — and any delay in processing the applications requires that new paystubs are submitted. Donelan said she’s had to intervene with CCAP on behalf of teachers during delays. 

Another issue is that providers who have the summer off must withdraw from the program at the end of May and reapply in July. Senn’s school closes during the summer, and she said the reapplication  process takes about two weeks and involves multiple follow up phone calls adding that it can take up to two and a half hours to get through to someone.  

But this July could be the last time Senn needs to reapply since her 4-year-old twins will move into kindergarten.“I am truly thankful and it could bring me to tears how this [program] has just helped me. We have quality teachers that want to be in the classroom but choose not to be because it doesn’t bring enough to the table for their family,” she said.  “It’s heartbreaking because we need it so badly. Every state should have something like this.”

Some states and localities have created a source of dedicated funding, meaning a revenue stream that’s designated specifically to be used for child care, creating more stability for providers and families. And according to a recent published by the Children’s Funding Project (CFP), a national nonprofit that helps states and localities secure money for children’s issues, these funds have helped states navigate the turbulence.

Dedicated funding tackles a simple, yet bedeviling problem: year after year, advocates must fight for state general funds, but it’s frequently a losing battle since too many factors are outside of their control. The health of a state’s economy, the priorities of constantly rotating elected officials, and the actions taken by Congress and the president all shape how much available funding a state has during a given budget cycle — and how it will be divvied up. Since states are legally required to maintain a balanced budget, the squeeze is real. And unfortunately, even states that are very friendly toward early care and education issues will cut them when faced with tough math. 

Dedicated funding sidesteps the general fund scrum. The CFP report explained that “state dedicated funds are distinct streams of public revenue that are set aside for specific purposes, typically dedicated through action by a legislative body, approved by voters via ballot measure, or a combination of these approaches.” Because they have their own built-in power source, they are relatively insulated from the vagaries of state governance.

There’s no singular model for advancing a dedicated fund. The funding source and path to enactment vary by state and locality, depending on what taxes can be levied, how existing revenues may be used, and the political feasibility of potential legislative or ballot measures.

According to the CFP report, 22 states have some version of a dedicated fund to support children and youth — and the rate of adoption has increased in recent years, including at the local level. The report notes that jurisdictions have tapped a range of funding sources including taxes on nicotine, marijuana, gambling, payroll, sales, and capital gains, and, in the case of New Mexico, oil and gas revenues. The mechanism for establishing funds is also diverse, as some states have a fairly low bar for citizen-initiated ballot initiatives, while others don’t allow propositions at all and instead require legislative action. Increasingly, states are that hold the revenues , allocating an annual percentage for early childhood services.

The value and viability of dedicated funding sources was borne out in last month’s elections. In Colorado, for instance, — including a consortium of three ski-heavy mountain counties, and one politically mixed county in northern Colorado — voted for dedicated funding measures via lodging or sales taxes. Those revenues will be especially important as Colorado wrestles with statewide funding challenges that are leading to in many counties.

Other states established their dedicated funding practices years ago. California, for example, has one of the longest-standing dedicated funding sources due to the 1998 a campaign famously spearheaded by filmmaker Rob Reiner. Proposition 10 levied a 50-cent tax on tobacco and the revenues built a network of early childhood programs operating under hub organizations known as the First 5 Initiative.   

Of course, simply establishing a dedicated fund is no panacea. To create a successful solution, the funds have to be adequate. Kentucky, for example, established a fund sourced from its Tobacco Master Settlement agreement, which draws down around $26 million a year. This amount isn’t insignificant, but it’s not enough funding to majorly transform its early care and education system. Where and how the funding flows, and who has a say in deciding that, is also key. 

Additionally, precedent shows there can be a risk of uneven results if the funding source itself is variable, such as tapping so-called “sin taxes.” This has been proven most dramatically in states like California that rely on tobacco taxes. As fewer individuals smoke (which, most would agree is broadly a positive development), the revenues from tobacco taxes have steadily declined, provided through First 5 programs across the state.

As a majority of states face down what is likely to be years of budget pain, dedicated funding sources for early care and education should be a top-tier strategy. State experiences to date suggest that champions would do well to identify funding sources that are both relatively stable and can generate substantial revenues, such as payroll taxes or income taxes for high-earning households. Whatever specific tactics are chosen, the more that child care funding can be taken out of the Hunger Games arena that is state budgeting, the better.

“The bigger, the better, because the children depend on one another,” said Principal Susan Engdall. In a Montessori classroom, “the teacher is sparse, so children have got to be creative and figure things out.” 

It’s a philosophy that not only teaches kids to solve problems, but fosters stronger reading and memory skills by the end of kindergarten than other models of early education, according to from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research. The first nationwide study of public Montessori programs shows that they also achieve more positive outcomes at a lower price tag, mostly due to those larger class sizes. Over the three-year span, public Montessori programs cost $13,127 less than traditional preschool and kindergarten programs, the study found.

Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the report, attributed the findings to Dr. Maria Montessori’s theory on how children naturally learn through imitation, choice and the use of that teach practical skills and academic concepts.

“This is a method that a really brilliant Italian physician made up by watching children,” she said. “She studied them in free environments and said, ‘What are they like and how can we help them?’ ” 

The findings add more complexity to a long-running debate over whether the benefits of early childhood education fade out over time. Some studies show that children who don’t attend preschool often catch up to those who did, leading whether such programs are wise public investments. A found that students who attended Tennessee’s pre-K even had lower test scores in elementary school than those who didn’t participate.

In the new study, the results were particularly strong among children from lower-income families, but Lillard stressed that only programs that stay true to Montessori principles are likely to see such positive results. 

“I see all these schools that claim to have Montessori when what they offer is just a shadow of it or ‘Montessori toys’ sold on the web,” she said. “I expect most of the folks implementing ‘Montessomething’ are also trying to help children, but without [taking] time to understand the model.”

‘For all children’

Publicly funded programs make Montessori education, long preferred by wealthy families who can afford , more accessible to low-income and working class parents. They include charter schools in a network of Montessori microschools called Wildflower, and district programs like Milwaukee’s seven Montessori schools. The district was among the first, over 50 years ago, to offer Montessori in the public sector.

One of the district’s “passion points” is ensuring that Montessori is not “only for certain kinds of people, but for all children,” said Abigail Rausch, the district’s Montessori coordinator. 

Rae Johnson, whose son is now 16, said she could never have afforded a private program in Milwaukee as a single parent working at Starbucks and picking up freelance writing assignments. But Montessori seemed like a good fit for Elijah.

“He always marched to his own beat,” she said. “I knew that traditional school just was not going to work for how he operated.” 

At first, Johnson didn’t understand Montessori’s emphasis on “practical life” skills, like pouring water without spilling or cutting with a knife. At 5, he would come home with a loaf of bread he baked at school.

“I’m like ‘This is what you did all day?’ But then he would be like ‘Oh mom, can we bake?’”she said. “That turned into a math lesson, like ‘OK, if you want to make a cake, let’s do some fractions.’ ”

The Montessori model is among the curricula used in 11 state-funded pre-K programs, according to the . Students traditionally enter Montessori at age 3, but most state-funded pre-K programs begin at age 4. That means districts often face the challenge of paying for the extra year.

The Phoenix Elementary district, which recently because of , began charging $500 per month this year for 3-year-olds entering Shaw Montessori because funds supporting the program were “needed elsewhere,” said Engdall, the principal. The waitlist to get in dropped to zero, but at town hall meetings, she heard requests from parents for things like more field trips and hands-on learning that “already encompass” what Montessori offers, she said. She expects demand to bounce back.

In addition to allowing children more freedom in the classroom, the Montessori method is in sync with the , Lillard said. Classrooms emphasize phonics, and their materials, like , make learning letter sounds and sight words a more concrete activity. In the study, students who won a spot in a public Montessori program through a lottery had “significantly higher scores” on a standardized reading test than those who didn’t get in. 

Montessori students also performed better on an that asked them to do the opposite of what the researcher said. If the adult told them to touch their head, they were supposed to touch their toes. 

Lillard speculated that the results for Montessori students might have been even stronger if the researchers hadn’t started the study the year after the pandemic, an unprecedented disruption that led to in children’s development. Because students were at home in 2020, they didn’t have an opportunity to interact in person and learn from older peers. 

“COVID impacted all classrooms, but it might have had especially strong impacts for multi-aged, peer-learning models,” she said. 

Classrooms don’t have duplicate copies of the same materials, so children, Rausch said, have to practice patience and negotiation if another child is already busy with something they want to use. “How do you plan your day? How do you communicate with someone else? You don’t just grab it out of their hand,” she said. “We’re teaching these really complex skills to 3-year-olds.”

In the study, Montessori students scored higher on a test of understanding other children’s perspectives than those who didn’t attend. But kids who went to more traditional preschools, or stayed home, were a little better at getting classmates to share. 

The fact that social-emotional learning programs are common in public schools, and likely teach topics like sharing, could account for the slight difference between the two groups, Lillard said.

On another test, non-Montessori kids were more likely to keep working on a difficult puzzle when Montessori children gave up — a finding that surprised the researchers. Montessori teachers encourage students to stick with a challenging task until they master it. 

‘A high payoff’

Overall, the results back up earlier research on public Montessori, like in South Carolina that found higher growth in math and reading among Montessori students than among those in traditional schools.

But like all studies, this one has limitations. Comparing kids who did and did not win a seat through a lottery isn’t the strongest research design. Families who apply don’t necessarily represent all families; more tend to be white and financially better off.

“It may be that there were other features of the schools that parents found desirable,” said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. He also questioned whether high absenteeism following the pandemic could have affected the results for either Montessori students or kids in the control group. 

He still thinks the results are promising, and said even non-Montessori programs could adopt multi-age classrooms that include 5-year-olds. But what the field needs is more evidence that the benefits last beyond kindergarten, he said. 

“None of this is to suggest we should ignore or discount the results, only to be cautious,”​​ he said. “Certainly, Montessori deserves more attention. There would be a high payoff to additional rigorous research.”

In December, Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration that, due to the end of pandemic-era federal relief funding, it would stop enrolling new children in its main child care subsidy program, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), and institute a waiting list. The number of child care vouchers available per month dropped by from last December to September, according to the state agency. The waitlist now has over 30,400 children and the state has it won’t issue any new vouchers until 2027. 

Miller’s program is one of many that’s feeling the strain. All of the families with infants at Room to Bloom rely on subsidies to afford care, but those infants have aged out and moved into toddler classrooms. Because families can’t enroll new babies, she’s had to completely shutter her infant classroom. That took a big toll on her financially. “Your highest rates of pay comes from your infants,” she said. “We no longer have that stream of income coming in.”

Then, on Sept. 4, Miller received an from Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration’s Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning (OECOSL) with even worse news. The department was drastically cutting CCDF voucher reimbursement rates. “These adjustments address a $225 million funding gap through 2026 created by the prior administration’s unsustainable use of temporary COVID relief funds and ensure continued compliance with federal requirements,” the email stated.  

According to the email, providers would see a 10% decrease in the vouchers that pay for infants and toddlers from birth through 3 years old, 15% less for children ages 3 to 5, and a 35% drop for school-aged children cared for after school and during the summer. To arrive at these cuts, OECOSL said it had surveyed 25% of licensed providers and calculated reimbursement levels “that reflect current operating realities.”

“We did not have any warning whatsoever” that the reductions were coming, Miller said. “We were blindsided.” Since Miller’s program serves children from birth through age 5 during the day and provides after-school care for older children, she knew she’d be impacted by cuts across all the age bands, so she reworked her budget to be able to absorb the cuts without having to ask her families to pay any extra. She eliminated field trips and programming like baby sign language and STEM.

But about three weeks later when she went into the system to view her reimbursements, she discovered that the state had cut deeper than the email suggested. She found that her original rate of $155 a week for a school-aged child was not in fact being reduced to $100.75, which would have been a 35% cut. Instead, she received $49 per school-aged child, which is about a 68% drop. At first she thought it was a mistake, but then she made some calls and eventually was told that the percentage cuts were taken from a new, lower base rate. 

That $49 a week is supposed to cover everything Room to Bloom offers school-aged children: transportation from school, a teacher who offers homework help, an established curriculum. She said her reimbursement rate for children ages 3 through 5, meanwhile, has also been reduced by $68 dollars a week, while the rate for the youngest kids decreased by $14. Miller can’t afford to absorb that kind of cost on her own. She’s reduced staff hours, dropping some to part-time status, which may make it harder to retain quality employees. 

Even that is not enough. “Unfortunately now we have to ask our families to pay a CCDF shortage just so we can stay afloat,” she said. She’s not asking any parents to pay the full amount that she’s losing, but she’s asked most to kick in something. Those with school-aged children have been asked to pay $51 a week. “I will tell you, that’s hard,” she said, adding that before the cuts, parents didn’t pay at all. Some families simply don’t have that kind of money. For them, she’s just eating the cost. “We have to take care of them,” she said. “I cannot allow these students to be left hanging. I cannot do it.” 

Miller is far from alone in her experience. The cuts Indiana has implemented in its child care program since the end of last year are wreaking havoc on providers across the state. The state did not respond to a request for comment on the number of child care programs that have closed this year. According to Hanan Osman — executive director of the Indiana Association for the Education of Young Children (AEYC), which is gathering data on closures — more than 100 child care programs closed in September and October following the steep reimbursement rate cuts. Of those closures, 49 were due to economic hardship, while 16 were because of low enrollment. “Those programs are done forever,” Osman said. 

The decrease in vouchers means that collectively, providers are losing an estimated $1.9 million a week in revenue, while the reduced reimbursement rates have led to an estimated $1.8 million weekly loss, according to Early Learning Indiana, a state-level nonprofit that’s on the impact of the CCDF cuts on revenue.

More child care closures are expected to come. In an of 443 providers conducted by Early Learning Indiana, nearly 80% said they were receiving decreased funding from CCDF vouchers. Just 16% said they were fully enrolled, about 19% had closed at least one classroom, and 11% said they believe they will have to close entirely over the next year.

Indiana is not expected to be the only state to experience this crisis. All states have been grappling with a severe decline in federal funding. In 2022, the American Rescue Plan sent states $39 billion to prop up the struggling child care sector, but the grants stopped flowing at the end of 2023. The Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” legislative package, which included $100 billion for child care, was meant to ensure continued funding, but when it failed to pass it left an enormous, unfilled hole. “All of that is coming down,” said Jennifer Wells, director of care at Community Change, which organizes child care providers to advocate for policy change. 

The events unfolding in Indiana illustrate “an example of what happens when this funding gets cut,” Wells said. “But it’s not going to be isolated to Indiana. We know it’s going to spread.” Already Arkansas has followed suit; on Sept. 19, the state that it was cutting reimbursement rates for providers and instituting new copays for parents, although after the reimbursement change was paused for 30 days. Its voucher waiting list is . “We know it’s going to snowball across the country,” Wells said.

“Indiana is in crisis,” said Martha Rae, a former Indiana child care provider and current advocate. “Dumpster fire in a flood zone — that’s how we feel right now.”

Indiana has now potentially poured gasoline on the fire. On Oct. 10, OECOSL sent an email, shared with The 74, to families who receive vouchers that said, “We understand that some families may be noticing higher out-of-pocket costs since the recent provider subsidy rate adjustments.” After noting that providers set their own rates, in bold it told parents that they “have the right to choose a provider that best fits their family’s needs and budget.” It added, “Your child care voucher belongs to you, and you may use it at any eligible CCDF provider.” Advocates and providers fear this message will prompt parents to move to programs that are charging less or aren’t charging any extra at all. It will “create competition amongst providers,” Rae said. 

Alyssia Thompson, who runs the Agape Learning Academy, a child care center in Merrillville, Indiana, is already watching this happen. It’s become “survival of the fittest — shark tank,” she said. Thompson said she knows of providers who are charging “the bare minimum” to try to siphon children from other programs. “Parents are going wherever they can afford,” she said, even places that “might not even have a license.” The only reason she hasn’t lost families, she said, is because so many of them have been with her for so long. 

As with Miller, Thompson has experienced a far larger reduction in her reimbursement rates than the OECOSL email indicated. Typically, she would be reimbursed $160 a week for a school-aged child, but that’s dropped to $48, a 70% reduction. The rate for her preschool-aged children was reduced by 24%. “We were given false information,” she said.

Thompson had to make cuts to try to make the math work, such as getting rid of her cleaning service. “Anything I was paying to outsource to do, we have now just picked it up,” she said. “Now we have to do everything.” She’s asked parents to bring in snacks to reduce the cost of food. Even so, she’s had to ask each family to pay an extra $25 a week. 

Even with those changes, she may not be able to keep the doors open. The possibility of having to close her program “has definitely been a discussion,” she said. She’s confident she has enough money to operate for the next six months. But, she said that over the next four months, if she doesn’t see any signs that the state is changing course and she hasn’t been able to make up enrollment with parents who don’t use vouchers, she will notify her parents about closure. 

Early educators and advocates are mobilizing to push back on the cuts. “As soon as these providers got word of these cuts happening, they were immediately set on fire,” Wells said. The Indiana AEYC organized “INAEYC Calling Day” on Nov. 5 and the association asked providers and families to call state legislators  to make the case for investing in child care. With a budget surplus of this year, they hope to convince lawmakers to dedicate money to the sector. 

If they don’t, Miller is consumed with fear about what will happen to the school-aged children in her program. “Those are the most vulnerable students,” she said. She worries that if they can’t afford what she now has to charge them parents will decide to leave children home with an older sibling or even by themselves. That, she frets, will put them in danger; they’re not old enough to be cared for by anyone but an adult, she said.

To the state, Miller has a message: “Fix this crisis that you have put families and child care providers in.” She added, “Some way, somehow, it needs to be fixed.”

For some programs, the promise of incoming funding will be enough to restart operations. But many won’t be able to open their doors until they receive their federal dollars, which could take up to two weeks, said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the NHSA. 

Sheridan said the Trump administration understands the urgency and is “moving as fast as they possibly can.”

That said, this interruption had an opportunity cost, and it’s led to instability for families and providers, he said, adding that the shutdown caused staff to focus on issues they “should not be worried about,” such as fundraising and contingency planning.

Some providers fear greater delays since the Trump administration shuttered half of the Head Start regional offices earlier this year. 

“They’re going to be working as hard as they can, but they’re going to be doing it with half the capacity,” said Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.

And even once the funding comes through, closed centers will need to go through a series of logistical hurdles, including reaching out to families who may have found alternative child care arrangements and calling back furloughed staff, some of whom have found employment elsewhere. 

“Head Start is not a light switch,” Hamm said. “You can’t just turn it back on.”

This interruption has also further eroded trust between grantees and the federal government that was already shaky, she added.

The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment on when programs can anticipate communication from the office or their funding.

Since Nov. 1, approximately 65,000 kids and their families — close to 10% of all of those served by Head Start — have been at risk of losing their seats because their programs had not received their awarded funding during the longest government shutdown in history. The early care and education program delivers a range of resources to low-income families including medical screenings, parenting courses and connections to community resources for job, food and housing assistance. 

At the peak of the Head Start closures, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services, according to Sheridan. A number of the remaining programs were able to stay open through private donations, loans, alternative funding streams and staff’s willingness to go without pay.

Valerie Williams, who runs a Head Start program with two facilities in Appalachian Ohio, was excited to tell parents that classrooms would be reopening soon. Her centers have been closed since Nov. 3, impacting 177 kids and 45 staff, many of whom already live paycheck to paycheck, she said.

A number of families were doubly impacted, losing access to Head Start’s resources as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, simultaneously. In the days leading up to the closure, Williams and her staff prepared families as best they could, sharing information about resources for food, assistance for utilities and heating and guidance on child care options. 

On Thursday, Williams wrote to parents via an online portal that she hopes to restart the normal school schedule sometime next week. The post was quickly flooded with comments. 

“This is super exciting!!” wrote one parent. “Best news in a long time. Carter has been asking every day. Hope to see u guys very soon.”

“Yayyy,” wrote another. “The kids miss you guys so much!”

Still, Williams knows reopening won’t be seamless. Along with program leaders across the country, she’ll need to call back furloughed staff, place food orders and handle a number of other operational challenges.

And despite the excitement, the transition back may also prove tricky for some kids.

“I do think that it will feel like starting school again for a lot of our classrooms,” Williams said. “They’ve been out for two weeks … You’re going to work on separation anxiety issues, you’re going to have to get into that routine again and the structure of a classroom environment. So I think that will be a big issue for a lot of our teachers.” 

As of Friday afternoon, Williams was still awaiting communication from the federal Office of Head Start with information about the anticipated timeline for next steps. 

“As soon as we get that notice of award, [I want to] start our staff and kids back immediately,” she said. “The very next day.”

Now that the shutdown has ended, what’s next for Head Start?

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. This year, grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November were left scrambling, as the federal shutdown dragged on.

The government began to resume operations late Wednesday night after President Donald Trump signed a bill, funding through Jan. 30 and allowing programs that didn’t receive their funding on time, including Head Start, to use forthcoming dollars to backpay expenses incurred over the past month and a half.

Here’s what Hamm predicts will happen next: The Office of Head Start will recall all staff to resume, including those who were furloughed during the shutdown. The employees will review grant applications, a process which requires them to flag any language that might be reflective of diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Next, money will be sent along to the remaining regional offices, and eventually dispersed to individual grantees. The NHSA is hopeful that this process will be completed by Thanksgiving for all grantees.

There are two things the federal government can do to help centers open faster, according to Hamm. First, they could waive a typical protocol that leads to a period of seven days between when a member of Congress is notified that their state will be receiving funding and when the funding actually goes out, Hamm explained. 

Officials could also notify grantees, in writing, about how much money they’ll get and when it’s expected to come through, so they can begin planning. 

Unlike SNAP, which received guaranteed funding through the budget year, money for Head Start remains uncertain beyond Jan. 30. While the fear of another shutdown has caused “quite a bit of worry” among the Head Start community, Sheridan said it would likely lead to fewer program disruptions, since it wouldn’t fall at the start of the fiscal year.

To prevent similar chaos moving forward, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin introduced in the final days of the shutdown that would guarantee uninterrupted service for fiscal year 2026. 

“The 750,000 children and their families who use Head Start shouldn’t pay the price for Washington dysfunction,” Baldwin, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, wrote in a statement to The 74.

Multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration over the past year have plunged programs across the country into uncertainty. In the wake of that recent upheaval, a leadership change is also underway. The acting director of the Office of Head Start, Tala Hooban, accepted a new role within the Office of Administration for Children and Families and will be replaced by political appointee Laurie Todd-Smith, according to an email statement from ACF. Todd-Smith currently leads the Office of Early Childhood Development, which oversees the Office of Head Start. 

Sheridan described this move as anticipated and not particularly concerning, though others were less sure. Joel Ryan, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, noted that Hooban was a longtime civil servant and strong supporter of the Head Start program. Without her, he fears “there’s nobody internally with any kind of power that will push back,” on future threats to the program.

Another worry plaguing providers: current funding for Head Start has remained stagnant since the end of 2024, meaning that through at least Jan. 30, programs will be operating under the same budget amid rising costs across the board.

In previous years, the program’s grant recipients typically got a cost-of-living adjustment, such as the bump ($275 million) for fiscal year 2024. In May, a group of almost 200 members of Congress signed to a House Appropriations subcommittee, requesting an adjustment of 3.2% for 2026. A recent statement from NHSA suggested that instead, the proposed Senate bill for next year includes a jump of just , or $77 million.

“If we don’t see a funding increase in line with inflation, that means that Head Start will be facing a cut of that degree,” said Sheridan. “It’s just kind of a quiet cut, or a silent cut.”

“I think what will end up happening,” said Ryan, “is you’ll end up seeing a massive reduction in the number of kids being served.”

A video illustrates a cartoon Brachiosaurus trudging along. The dinosaur has bright colors and a friendly voice carefully designed to draw the attention of a toddler. As the green leaf-eater goes to speak, a banner ad floats across the screen.

Experts caution that this experience can distract the child. “There’s advertising embedded into the video, or at the bottom of the video, or the side,” said Kaitlin Tiches, a medical librarian at Boston Children Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab. That can be especially problematic if the ad isn’t developmentally appropriate for the viewer. 

The tough choice about whether to allow babies and children to consume content online is nothing new. Neither is that comes with it for many parents who opt to allow their little ones to access digital media, from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggests to avoid it for babies under 18-months-old and to limit it for kids under age 5.

At a time when kids are gaining access to digital devices earlier — many of them as infants or toddlers — and cuts to public broadcasting have put an end to many of the high-quality programs American children have been raised on for generations, the decision has become more complicated.

, which comes with its own unique blend of allure for parents and children has become a staple in many homes. The streaming site is seeing a surge in popularity, especially among families with children under 2, even though child development experts have expressed about the use of the platform for young children.

According to a recent published by Pew Research Center, 62% of toddlers ages 2 and under watch YouTube, a significant spike from the 45% reported in 2020. There was also an uptick in toddlers who watched YouTube daily, rising from 24% in 2020 to 35% in 2025. 

“I think it’s a very striking rise,” said Colleen McClain, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. “It’s a great example of a theme from our report, which is that tech starts young.” 

What to Know Before Letting Kids Hit Play on YouTube

The YouTube boost arrives as concerns continue to swirl about the site. Tiches warned of unfettered advertising and the company’s focus on profit over education. She pointed out that traditional children’s media has clear parameters around advertising  — the episode plays, then cuts to commercial break. But on YouTube, prevalent banner ads appear throughout the screen, with other ads interjecting in the middle of an episode. That children’s learning. 

“I think because YouTube creators are monetized, there’s a lot of pressure to successfully create videos, and with the young children on these platforms, it’s a big market,” Tiches said. “Ads might be very long and again, if parents are not watching with their children, then the children might not know how to skip them. Then, it’s minutes of an ad that may not be appropriate for very young children.”

While creators can mark whether their video is child-friendly, the ads — and videos themselves — may not be developmentally appropriate. A found that only 19% of the videos infants and toddlers watched on YouTube were age appropriate. That report was based on data about young kids and YouTube by Common Sense Media, which revealed that roughly one-fifth of advertisements contained age-inappropriate content including violence, drugs and sexual content. About one-quarter of ads were child-appropriate, with most (74%) deemed “neutral,” for companies like Volvo, State Farm Insurance and Casper Sleep Inc. 

But even those can influence children on consumerism, which may not be the intended point of watching content. 

Curation and quality control are important, experts said. Shortly after the Common Sense report came out, its lead author, Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan , “YouTube is kids’ favorite playground right now.” She added: “We have to ask whether it’s being maintained in the right ways, if the equipment is safe and giving kids freedom to explore and have positive experiences? Or are they being steered towards experiences that benefit marketers and brands, but don’t support their developmental growth?”

Many entities, such as PBS, have their for children’s programming, thanks to the , a law that requires broadcast television to air a dedicated amount of educational content and limited advertising during children’s programs. Streaming services like YouTube do not have to adhere to those rules. YouTube’s asks publishing for a primary audience of children to mark their content as “Made for Kids” and to ensure they’re “complying with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other applicable laws.” 

“The content I’m viewing on Netflix or Disney has been selected by that company; if they say it’s child-focused, depending on the company, I can have a little more reasonable awareness or trust,” said Kate Blocker, director of research and programs at Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. 

“I could post a video and say it’s educational, but what does it mean?” Tiches added. “There’s not necessarily a lot of oversight into what is considered truly educational, or [ensuring] the value of it is rooted in early education practices.” 

Blocker said some parents, while well aware of issues on social media sites, may view YouTube as a separate entity akin to watching traditional television or a streaming service. But Blocker points out the platform more closely mimics the former, with the ability to comment on videos, have an auto-play feature and deliver suggested content driven by algorithms. 

“There’s a lot of national dialogue and awareness building around social media and its particular harms, but generally speaking I don’t think people connect that thought to YouTube,” she said. “They’re thinking of Instagram and TikToks and teens  — [but] not making the same connection to the content on YouTube.” 

Some parents are somewhat cognizant of limiting their children’s screen time, at the very least. According to the Pew report, roughly one-quarter of parents said that they believe they can “do more” to limit their toddler’s screen time access. As the child gets older, that share becomes almost half: 47% of parents believe they can do better limiting their 8- to 12-year-old’s screen time. 

“I have a 3-year-old, and we don’t let her use a phone or tablet or anything,” one parent said in a focus group conducted by Pew in March. The parent added that they let their 3 year old use a laptop for a week’s subscription to an educational platform. “It got me thinking there probably are opportunities to use technology as an educational tool … but I’m so scared about the consequences … that I’m probably hesitant to use it at all.”

The Pew report highlighted that children found YouTube content educational and entertaining, but the research did not delve into why parents turn toward the platform. The screen time, Pew’s McClain said, could be driven, in part, by parents simply battling with high stress levels. 

“From qualitative research, we’re hearing more and more that it’s really hard; parents are struggling,” Blocker said. “Sometimes you need something to keep your little one still, to do the dishes or help your older one with homework.” 

Some may turn toward YouTube because of its easy accessibility across various devices. Others may be drawn to its free model at a time when the cost of cable subscriptions and streaming service continue to rise. And with funding for public media — most notably PBS — in recent months, families are left with less reliable options for high-quality children’s programming.  

“Regardless of the platform, it can feel overwhelming,” Tiches said. But families might  have an easier time figuring out whether programs on a more traditional network, like PBS, have had input from educational or developmental experts, versus on YouTube, where parents have to search for information about the creator, Tiches added.

How Parents Can Help Kids Stream Smarter

Experts acknowledge that it is not feasible to expect parents to avoid screen time entirely. from The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages use of screens for babies under 18 months old and recommends that parents who want to introduce digital media to their 18- to 24-months old toddlers do so by co-viewing high-quality programs. According to the Pew report, most of them are: 74% of parents of kids age 12 and under watch YouTube with their children, and more than 90% of parents of kids 5 and under do. 

“I think it speaks to the way parents are navigating all this technology for their kids,” McClain said. “Parents are really navigating these decisions on a daily basis, dealing with a lot of emotions around them and trying to do the best for their kids.” 

If watching together is not possible, Blocker suggests that having the content on a large screen — not a small screen plugged in with headphones — is preferred, so the parent is still able to hear the content. 

Tiches added that parents can look into who is making the content their children are consuming, and at the very least, should look at the type of content that it is. If a video is fast-paced, consider finding something more calming, especially for kids under 2.  

“You can tell sometimes from the title if there are shapes, colors, numbers, letters … that’s going to be a lot of information, but probably not as beneficially educational,” she said. “Versus really focusing on circles, for example, or words that start with the letter ‘A.’”

Beyond what parents can do though, there is a push for more legislation from both the federal government and technology companies. 

“Parents don’t want to do this alone,” McClain said. “One of the things that stand out in our work is [that] parents are people: they work, they struggle with their own screen time. And that, combined with [the fact that] they want technology companies to do more, really paints a picture.”

But this Monday, she won’t have a classroom to go to.

That’s because the ongoing government shutdown has forced her Highland County, Ohio, program to shutter, impacting 177 kids and 45 staffers. Across the state, at least three providers will close their doors, cutting off services to at least 1,000 young children and employment to 286 Head Start workers.

And Ohio is not alone. In all, 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico serving are at risk of closing Monday morning as federal funds expire this weekend. Since the beginning of October, an additional six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama have been operating without federal funding, drawing on emergency local resources to keep their doors open. 

In total, these approximately 65,000 kids account for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning and child care program for lower-income families.

News of their Head Start program’s closure has hit Price’s community in the Appalachia foothills particularly hard.

“I had a parent come up and grab me and hug me and she cried and I cried,” she said. “You know, a lot of parents really rely on our program. It’s pretty much invaluable in our county.”

Sarah Allen’s family is among those feeling the pain. Her 3-year-old daughter Hallie attends Head Start while Allen, a former Head Start teacher herself, works on obtaining her state teaching license and substitute teaches at the local school to make extra money. Her husband is a firefighter.

Starting next week, they’ll both have to work fewer hours to stay home with Hallie, creating financial hardship for the family.

“I can’t work if I don’t have a babysitter and prices keep going up for everything — and food costs are crazy,” said Allen, who is also worried about the interruption to her daughter’s education.

Many Head Start families could face a double blow, losing access to the program and food assistance on the same day, with funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, set to run out Saturday as well. An infusion of contingency funding from the White House earlier this month for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, is expected

About 50 miles south of Highland, right along the Ohio river, sits Scioto County, another Appalachian stretch, parts of it so rural that some communities don’t have stop lights. Come Monday morning, Head Start classrooms across 10 centers in the region — serving 400 early learners and infants — will shut down and all 100 staff members, 60% of whom are former Head Start parents, will be furloughed. 

Communities in , leaving many kids to be raised by grandparents or other family members, who are heavily reliant on Head Start programming, said Sarah Sloan, early childhood director of the county’s Community Action Organization. Other parents are in recovery themselves, she added, and lean on Head Start to provide a safe and stable place for their kids.

Their programming is where families already under stress come to get help, she said. 

Despite this, the reception to the grim news that classrooms would close — from both families and staff — ”has just been so generous,” Sloan said Wednesday, her voice cracking.

“I have not heard one negative word from our parents. They have said things like, ‘We are in this together. We understand. We hate it for your staff. We’re worried.’”

Some states find last-minute funding, others don’t

The 74 spoke with over a dozen Head Start Association presidents, providers, teachers and parents in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio and Washington, the six states with the largest number of seats at risk.

Some states, such as Ohio and Washington, are bracing for imminent closures, but others, such as Missouri and most of Georgia, have been able to access other sources of funding, giving them a runway of a week or two. This means that where a young child lives will determine whether or not they have a staffed classroom in a few days and if their families can access the range of other resources Head Start offers, from health care services to parenting courses.

While each state faces it own challenges, a few universal themes emerged: an assertion that even if local Head Start organizations are able to scrape together enough funding to keep their doors open, it will only be temporary, extending access for a few days or weeks; fear that the borrowed funds to stay operational may not be reimbursed once the federal government reopens; and concern that low-income families will lose access to food assistance at the same time. 

Head Start, which turned 60 this year, provides children at least two meals a day. All of this is setting off alarm bells about the unprecedented nature of the government crisis and the devastating effect it will likely have on the country’s most vulnerable families.

They will begin feeling the blowback from D.C. this weekend, as some parents are forced to choose between caring for their kids and showing up for work.

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. Grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November are now scrambling, as the second-longest federal shutdown in history heads into its fourth week.

While there this week, Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum, with some of the severest programming losses falling on red states.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the National Head Start Association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

‘These are actual people’

No state has more seats at risk than Florida, with 9,711. While the majority of centers across the state will be able to remain open through the first two weeks of November, at least one program in West Palm Beach serving children of migrant families and seasonal workers will be forced to shutter this weekend, according to Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association. The closure will impact 386 children and 283 staff across six centers, she said.

Minick wants Congress and the president to understand, “These are not just data points. These are actual people.”

In neighboring Georgia, policymakers were preparing to potentially close centers serving 6,499 children and infants, until a last-minute, bridge loan from The Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta’s Impact Investing Fund came through The $8 million means that three major providers, serving 5,800 kids, will remain open for at least 45 days, though that leaves hundreds of others throughout the state still in a lurch. 

Juanita Yancey, executive officer of the Georgia Head Start Association, expressed her gratitude for the money while emphasizing that it’s only a stopgap measure.

“Time is running out,” she said. “Programs are doing everything possible to keep their doors open, but they cannot run a program on reserves or goodwill. Every day of inaction is another day of uncertainty for families who count on Head Start services.”

“This shutdown is pushing programs to the breaking point when children and families can least afford it,” she added.

The bulk of Head Start seats in Missouri also appear to be safe — at least for now, according to Kasey Lawson, director of the Mid-America Regional Council, which serves 2,350 kids across 17 providers. Though that still leaves about 1,500 seats unaccounted for. 

For Lawson’s 17 providers, the choice to remain open is both temporary and a risk, she said, since the centers don’t have that money “just sitting in the bank,” and they fear they won’t receive backpay once the federal government does reopen.

Lawson said they’ve asked legislators, members of Congress and the federal Office of Head Start, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services, to guarantee reimbursement as they have in the past, yet “nobody’s willing to do that. And so it is the reality of where we sit right now, that it is a true risk that all of our agencies are taking.”

And even though most Head Start families in Missouri will have a place to send their kids Monday morning, many may still face a significant burden as at least 1,100 rely on expiring SNAP benefits.

In North Carolina, where 4,697 seats are at risk, at least one center will be forced to close this Friday, said Terry David, president of the state’s Head Start Association. Classrooms that are based in the local school district should be able to remain open through the end of the calendar year, he said, but that only accounts for about 140 kids.

Across the country, in Washington state, at least one program in the city of Vancouver, which serves at least 175 kids, will close this weekend. Another in the same region, The Margaret Selway Early Learning Center, will remain open through Nov. 7, but each day beyond that is uncertain, according to Nancy Trevena, chief strategy officer at the Educational Opportunities for Children and Families.

Kimberly Gusey’s foster son, Ranger, is a student at Margaret Selway and is especially dependent on Head Start services. The program was able to secure a one-to-one certified nursing assistant for Ranger, who has cerebral palsy, is nonverbal and is fed through a G-tube. 

“It’s amazing,” Gusey said, her voice breaking. “It brings me to tears how much they’ve done for us.”

If the program closes next week, Gusey’s husband will have to quit his job as a mechanic to care for Ranger.

“We’re talking a large amount of money not coming into our home, but we’re willing to do that because we love these children,” she said. “But in so many ways it affects us. Not [just] the pocketbook. The routines for the kids. The routines for us. Everything is affected by this.”

The 49% of families who reported not being able to access these necessities — including food, housing, utilities and child care — marks a 13 percentage-point jump since June and one of the highest rates recorded since the began collecting data in 2020. 

The economic struggles were paired with significant emotional distress among parents, including anxiety and depression. 

“We’re really seeing for the first time rates that are this high,” said Philip Fisher, director of the early childhood center, which runs the monthly data collection. “Never — even during the midst of the pandemic — have we seen anything like this … And the fact that it’s now going into its third month where we see rates around this high suggests that it’s not a one-time anomaly.”

The numbers are a warning sign for the state of families’ financial well-being writ large, he noted.

“We’re talking about half of families now that are saying, ‘I can’t afford child care,’ or ‘I’m skipping meals in order to feed my kids,’” he added. “And that should be of concern, regardless of your political affiliation or where you live.”

While the latest data is from Sept. 1, more detailed research is available for the month of July. In response to open-ended questions posed that month, parents expressed significant anxiety and upset.

“Every bill feels heavier than the last,” wrote one Tennessee parent. “It’s exhausting to live like this. We’re not asking for luxury, we just want to be able to meet our basic needs without constant fear.”

“A huge portion of our monthly budget goes just to keeping a roof over our heads, leaving very little for savings, groceries, transportation, or emergencies,” said one Florida parent. “The pressure to stay housed is constant, and it forces tough trade-offs, sometimes delaying bills, cutting back on essentials, or skipping activities for the kids.”

An Oklahoma parent cited the cost of baby diapers and formula as their biggest concern, while another in Alabama wrote about the rising cost of utilities.

The three-month period between June and September marked the highest rates of material hardship for parents since the survey’s inception, with a record 56% reporting at least one basic necessity being out of reach or difficult to access in August. Since the pandemic started, at least a quarter of families have reported living with this challenge every month.

The spring and summer of 2021 saw a drop in these rates. Fisher said this coincided with the majority of the pandemic relief efforts, including the expanded Child Tax Credit, which increased the maximum credit amount, widened the scope of coverage to include 17-year- olds and allowed some people to receive monthly advance payments. The expansion was credited with cutting child poverty rates nearly

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Congress and signed by President Trump this summer increased the maximum credit amount though it also cuts other benefits for lower-income families.

The most recent survey numbers were recorded before the ongoing government shutdown began earlier this month, which experts warn will likely exacerbate the pain families were already feeling. Advocates are particularly concerned about programs such as Head Start, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, all of which may be at risk if the shutdown continues. 

Several states have that families may lose access to SNAP and funding for 65,000 Head Start seats is in jeopardy if the three-week-old shutdown drags into November.

And even once the government re-opens, many of these challenges will persist, according to Amy Matsui, vice president of Income Security and Child Care at the National Women’s Law Center.

“Between the ongoing increase in housing costs and the cost of living, the aggravating impact of tariff policies, we really are seeing everyday costs for families continuing to increase, and it’s really putting women and children in an impossible situation,” she said.

Matsui also emphasized the extraordinary cost of child care, noting that this administration’s “sustained attacks” on programs such as Head Start have only added to this stressor.

Fisher warned that high levels of fiscal strain among parents can lead to a “chain reaction of hardship,” which ultimately trickles down to kids.

Indeed in July, about 3 in 4 parents surveyed said their kids were also experiencing emotional distress. Chronic anxiety in kids can have long-term effects on their learning, relationships and health.

“We know uncertainty and instability for families is very destabilizing and very, very stressful, particularly with young children,” said Ruth Friedman, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and former director of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Child Care.

“If parents’ economic conditions are uncertain and more challenging,” she added, “that absolutely has an impact on children’s development and well-being both in the short term, and beyond.”

Before the pandemic helped fuel the growth of vaccine politicization across the country, less than 1% of Austin school district’s kindergarteners in the fall of 2019 failed to comply with the state’s vaccine reporting requirements.

Five years later, Austin ISD had some of the state’s highest number of kindergarteners who neglected those state requirements — about 1 in 5 kindergarteners had not proven they were fully vaccinated against measles and did not file an exemption.

A Texas Tribune analysis has found that this explosion of vaccine non-compliance has played out across many school districts in the state in recent years, helping to push Texas’ measles vaccine coverage to the lowest it’s been since at least 2011.

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“We definitely were on a better trajectory [before the pandemic],” said Alana Bejarano, executive director of health services and nursing for the Austin school district, which reported a 23% delinquency rate for the measles vaccines among their kindergarteners.

“I don’t know that I can pinpoint the concrete answer, except [preschool and kindergarteners] were born at a time where everything kind of went off track and getting them back into that, you know, that’s been difficult.”

The Tribune examined kindergarten measles vaccination compliance because it’s the earliest the state documents school vaccination rates and measles can be especially deadly for young children. The state’s two measles deaths this year were girls ages 6 and 8. Under Texas vaccine requirements, most kindergarteners must show they are fully vaccinated against measles or file an exemption to enroll in school; most who are not fully vaccinated have an exemption.

During the pandemic, the statewide measles vaccine delinquency rate — a term the Texas Department of State Health Services uses to track students not compliant with those requirements — more than doubled.

The Tribune estimated the number of vaccine-delinquent kindergarteners in each district by comparing delinquency rates and enrollment totals.

In school districts with the most delinquent kindergarteners in the 2024-25 school year, the latest data available from the state, as much as 44% of their kindergarteners were delinquent in the measles vaccines, and their delinquencies also outnumbered exemptions, which was not the case at the state level. Those school districts had vaccine delinquency rates as small as a fraction of a percent just five years prior.

The five other vaccinations required for kindergarten followed similar increases in delinquency rates during the same time period.

The pandemic is the driving force behind the increase in vaccine delinquency, school district officials say. Many children are entering school after falling behind on their immunizations during the pandemic, making it an untenable task for resource-strapped school districts to chase after parents to vaccinate their children or submit an exemption.

Meanwhile, access to vaccines, especially free and low-cost doses, have also dwindled over the last several years amid funding cuts and the politicization of vaccines.

State laws and rules don’t dictate who has to enforce vaccine compliance, although the Texas Department of State Health Services administers the law and school districts have traditionally been among the first line of enforcement.

While school districts acknowledge they are enrolling students not compliant with state vaccine requirements, district officials say they are caught in a no-win situation. Pushing vaccines too hard could lead to retaliation from groups and politicians opposed to vaccine mandates, and district officials don’t want to disenroll students — public schools have a responsibility to educate all children and so much of their funding is tied to attendance, too.

“We encourage our school nurses to advocate strongly to promote and protect public health at their campus,” Becca Harkleroad, executive director of the Texas School Nurse Organization. “But ultimately it’s up to the superintendent and the principal to decide how strictly they are going to enforce it or if they are going to enforce it.”

Statewide, the percentage of kindergarteners who were delinquent in getting the measles vaccine more than doubled to 2.68% between 2019-20 and 2024-25, the latest data available. The delinquency rate jumped to 3.1% in 2021-22, surpassing the number of students who had an exemption. Those rates have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, although the exemption rate has returned to exceeding the delinquency rate.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that a year ago 25,000 Texas kindergarteners were not fully vaccinated against measles. Of those, more than 16,000 had an exemption, and about 9,000 did not have an exemption and under the state’s definition, were vaccine delinquent.

The overall vaccine delinquency rates may be small, but anything that causes vaccination levels to fall means more children are vulnerable. Ideally, schools try to keep their vaccination levels at 95% to help protect those children with compromised immune systems or medical conditions that keep them from being vaccinated.

In addition to vaccine delinquency, the state also tracks the percentage of students who are vaccinated, formally exempt from vaccinations, and provisionally enrolled because of vaccination status.

Most unvaccinated students in Texas are permitted to enroll because they have an exemption form or a note from a doctor. They can also provisionally enroll without proving vaccination status if they are homeless, military dependents or in foster care and their records cannot be obtained by the start of the school year.

The Texas measles kindergarten vaccination rate of 93% is the lowest it’s been since at least 2011, ranking the state 18th nationally.

“The decrease in vaccination rates overall is certainly a concern because it leaves our population vulnerable to different infections,” said Dr. Erin Nicholson, a pediatric infection physician at Texas Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. “And we saw that front and center with the measles outbreak that recently happened.”

Schools: A first line of defense against infectious disease

By the time most children enter kindergarten, they have received two MMR vaccination doses, against measles, as well as mumps and rubella for most people. The MMR vaccination for kindergarteners is considered one of the .

State health officials audit school vaccination records each year for accuracy, by sampling school district records, explains Chris Van Deusen, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services. But there is nothing in state rules that requires DSHS to enforce the vaccination requirement.

As a result, the de facto enforcement has traditionally fallen to school districts.

Some of the state’s highest kindergarten measles delinquency rates were in larger school districts and charter networks: KIPP Texas Public Schools (44%), Spring ISD (30%), Austin ISD (23%), Dallas ISD (20%), and Houston ISD (7%).

The five public school systems with the highest counts made up more than half of all delinquent kindergartners in the state, despite enrolling less than 10% of the state’s public school kindergarteners.

Some district officials, including Dallas, say they try to follow state requirements by sending home students who do not have completed vaccination requirements or an exemption. But, they enroll those students, contributing to the district’s vaccine delinquency rate.

The Austin school district will also enroll the students who don’t meet vaccine requirements, but they wait to send those students home until their parents have been notified of their vaccine delinquency three times, Bejarano said. They can return once they have proof of vaccination or the exemption form.

State data doesn’t track how many vaccine-delinquent students school districts send home. It also doesn’t reflect changes to vaccine delinquency later in the year because the data is based on surveys school districts submit in the first half of the school year.

While some school districts say they try to send home students who don’t meet vaccine requirements, Houston ISD officials said they are keeping those students in the classroom. They, too, dedicate time and resources to track all students’ vaccination status and try to communicate information with parents about the need for staying up to date on the schedule.

But, they are “not excluding students from learning based on vaccine status,” according to a statement to the Tribune.

Chanthini Thomas, a school nurse who retired from her job at Houston ISD’s Bellaire High School last summer, said the conflicting messages from the district, resource reductions and the yearlong chase to get vaccine paperwork in was frustrating.

“You have little support,” she said. “Why would you say…that’s a requirement to any school for the state of Texas but then you put out a mandate from the district to say, don’t let immunizations prevent enrollment? And the reason is because they need the numbers, because the numbers were dwindling.”

Like many other urban school districts, HISD is battling — and the funding that comes with it — as more families move toward better job opportunities and lower housing costs in the suburbs or choose charter and private schools.

As school nurses have told the Tribune over the summer, school districts choose to enroll unvaccinated children so they can keep “butts in the seats” and the base amount of money they receive from state and local sources to educate each student — .

“I see the school as being in a tough spot,” said Melissa Gilkey, a University of North Carolina professor who studies vaccine efforts at schools. “We work so hard to minimize absenteeism…that I do have some sympathy for that idea that it’s hard to exclude them for one health service.”

KIPP Texas Public Schools, a charter network with campuses across the state, declined an interview but insisted it was following the state immunization requirements. Its kindergarten measles vaccine delinquency rate was less than 1% in 2019 compared to 44% last year.

Spring ISD, north of Houston, reported last year that more than 30% of its kindergarteners were measles vaccine delinquent. The district informed the Tribune it also follows state rules closely but said its high MMR delinquency rate was evidence of “enrollment and access issues” and that Spring ISD was “actively working to strengthen this process.”

The Spring district cited family’s frequent moves in the area, limited access to health care and language barriers as reasons there’s a delay in getting student shot records updated in time for school.

“We are committed to improving compliance rates and ensuring our students are protected against preventable diseases,” said Shane Strubhart, the Spring ISD spokesperson.

Access to vaccines has dwindled

The pandemic disrupted preventive health care, becoming most apparent in some of the most recent kindergarten classes, filled with students born around the first COVID-19 outbreak. The COVID-19 pandemic not only interrupted home and school life, experts say, it upended regular health checkups younger children typically receive before they start school and that impact continues to be felt today.

Families “going to see the doctors got off track for everyone during the pandemic,” Austin ISD’s Bejarano said.

For low-income and immigrant families who already found health care access a challenge, more are struggling to find what Bejarano calls their “medical” home, a regular primary care doctor who can either vaccinate their children or answer concerns and perhaps direct them to the state’s exemption process if they feel strong enough to opt out.

“COVID didn’t do vaccination or education and many other things as a whole, any favors,” said Jennifer Finley, executive director of health services for Dallas ISD. The district’s kindergarten measles delinquency rate jumped to 20% last school year compared to 1% during the 2019-20 school year.

Diminished vaccine access is also a factor. Up until the early aughts, public health departments, churches and even lawmakers would hold free or low-cost immunization clinics over the summer for families.

In 2004, the Dallas school district turned away hundreds of students, who walked and drove to nearby clinics for free or low-cost vaccines, according to a Dallas Morning News article.

After the pandemic, those resources are even fewer.

“It really stopped during the pandemic,” Finley said. “Some of the folks lost their funding.”

Schools rely heavily on local public health departments to help them with vaccination clinics. Once the threat of COVID lessened, public health departments used those funds to add more staff and hold more vaccination clinics.

But two things began by local health departments. First, those leftover funds were clawed back early by the Trump administration this year, prompting some staff to look for other jobs, thereby causing staff shortages in public health vaccination departments. And second, public health officials suspect more immigrant families are shying away from vaccination because of stepped-up immigration efforts and deportations.

In Texas, there are an , all of whom do not qualify for state Medicaid health insurance coverage, attending school.

“We typically have big lines and the waiting room is packed. Our whole lobby is packed,” Dr. Phil Huang, the director of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, told the Tribune in August. “This year it has not been that way.”

Vaccine hesitancy changing school messaging

After the pandemic, many parents watched as debates raged over the safety of the quickly-developed COVID-19 vaccine. As a result, they are asking more questions about all childhood vaccinations.

In many cases, parents are spreading MMR doses out and that, too, could be the reason for more kindergartners showing up with an incomplete vaccination status, Bejarano said.

“The main concern [among parents] is basically, ‘Am I doing the right thing for my child, that is in their best interest and help me understand what the risks are of these infectious diseases that vaccines are trying to prevent,’” Nicholson, the Texas Children’s physician, said.

Before COVID, many doctors adopted an imperial tone — “you should do this because I’m the expert,” she said. That changed after the pandemic. “We are looking at how we talk to these parents, because the last thing that we want to do is come across as condescending.”

School nurses have also worked tirelessly to try to find a winning formula to reach families of vaccine-delinquent kids. At a national school nurse conference in Austin this summer, an entire session was devoted to teaching nurses how to have tension-free conversations with parents who are skeptical of vaccine requirements.

Ultimately, school nurses just want to inform parents of their two options to stay compliant with state rules: either provide proof of vaccination or an exemption, Bejarano said.

“We’ve made these large campaigns and we are really kind when they register, letting them know what is the law, what the exemptions [are],” Bejarano said. “I just think the district in general is understanding we need to do better when it comes to public health and getting these rates up.”

The good news, she says, is that the greater efforts made by school nurses in the fall to try to help parents become vaccine compliant tends to push down the high delinquency rates by the end of the school year. Data provided to the Tribune by Austin ISD proved that out. That 23% delinquency rate for kindergartners recorded in the fall of 2024 fell drastically to 6% by May 2025 possibly due to the fear produced by the measles outbreak in the months prior.

“I do think that everybody came together in the Austin community and really did try to push for that” compliance, Bejarano said. “And I think that’s why it helped the rate last year.”

Finley points to other lesser-known reasons complicating the back-to-school vaccination picture. Among them, an influx of students came to Texas from other states, many already armed with vaccination exemptions or with incomplete vaccination histories who are having to be re-educated about Texas requirements.

Starting Sept. 1, Texas parents can more easily obtain a vaccine exemption form by downloading it off the state’s website, but how that will impact the delinquency gap won’t be seen until data is released next year.

Nicholson, Finley, Bejarano and others say they would like to see more data that clearly explains the rising delinquency rate and how many students who were once marked delinquent end up becoming fully vaccinated or obtaining an exemption by the end of the year.

“Does it mean, you know, people are just struggling with paperwork?” Nicholson said. “Or does it mean that really those vaccinations are falling?”

This first appeared on .

This accounts for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning programs for lower-income families. 

Due to the timing of federal grants, six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama are already operating without federal funding, the association said. So far, they’ve been able to keep their doors open by drawing on emergency local resources, but that money could soon dry up.  

By Nov. 1, an additional 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico, serving 58,627 children, will face the same fate. In Florida alone, 9,711 Head Start and Early Head Start seats are threatened.

“Programs are scrambling,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “We don’t want to see our children become the victims or [get] caught in the crosshairs of these types of political fights.”

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, called it a significant threat and “the latest attack in a series of attacks on Head Start” since President Donald Trump took office for a second time in January.

“What we don’t know is who’s going to have to close immediately, but some will,” Hamm told The 74 Friday, noting the damaging impact closures would have on some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and their families.

Sheridan expressed similar fears: “losing that type of routine, which is so critical for young children — especially young children who have so much going on in their lives — is really problematic for their development.“

“Beyond that,” he said, “it’s going to force parents into making some really tough decisions.”

Head Start parents often work multiple jobs, yet still live under the federal poverty line and so are unable to afford other sources of child care and early learning. If the shutdown continues, Sheridan said, some may have to leave the workforce to care for their kids themselves.

The government shutdown has now dragged into its third week, after Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum. For example, in alone, just over 3,700 children are in jeopardy of losing services as of Nov. 1.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the national association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

The administration froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. They also grant recipients that funding would be denied for any programming that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, without defining what that might include — leading to confusion and a lawsuit. 

Then, in July, the administration announced a drastic federal policy shift that would bar many immigrant families from the early education centers. In September, a Seattle judge ruled that these kids can remain in Head Start programs throughout the country, while a case challenging Trump’s order makes its way through the courts.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Office of Head Start, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamm emphasized that cuts to Head Start services would have a ripple effect across communities, especially rural ones for whom the program may be the only early learning program available as well as a relied-upon contributor to the local economy.

And once a program closes, it can’t always quickly re-open, as laid off staff may be forced to find employment elsewhere.

“Head Start is not a light switch,” she said. “You can’t just turn it off and then two weeks later open it back up.”

Since its inception in the 1960s, Head Start programs have reached and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. the $12.1 billion program served about 754,800 children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

They also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early child care and education. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

Historically during shutdowns, Head Start agencies were able to take out loans or dip into reserve funding with confidence that they’d be reimbursed once the government re-opened. While Hamm said she doesn’t have any reason to believe this administration will change that policy, “the way that they have been targeting certain programs and federal staff is leading people to worry,” including banks that have in the past acted as lenders. 

Compounding this anxiety is a concern around other programs that Head Start families often rely on, such as Medicaid; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

Despite these hurdles, Sheridan said the Head Start community has really rallied to try and protect and support kids. That being said, the coming challenges are “really disheartening, because children and families should never be put at risk because of political gridlock.”

Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department announced that New Mexico will become the to offer universal child care to families as of Nov. 1. 

Over the past six years, New Mexico has become a trailblazer in child care infrastructure. In 2019, the state created its first Early Childhood Education and Care Department with a Cabinet-level secretary, showing a commitment to improving care and support for young children. In 2022, New Mexico became the first state to enshrine a right to early education for children 0 to 5 years old, by passing a constitutional amendment and directing dedicated funding to child care and early childhood education. The state pulled dollars from its Land, which collects and invests profits from oil and gas revenues, and created a steady stream of money for early childhood programs. This has led to increased pay for teachers, higher reimbursements for providers that accept subsidies, more families qualifying for free or reduced price child care, and more child care slots.

Since 2019, the state has made progress on improving access and affordability of child care, expanding free child care to families with an income at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, which for a family of four is an annual household income of $128,600. But without a sliding scale model, families with an income over that threshold were left responsible for covering the cost of care. Starting in November, all residents of New Mexico will be able access child care for free, regardless of income. 

In a touting the change, the state estimates that families will save an average of $12,000 per year. The state is also implementing an incentive rate for child care providers that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, with the goal of creating an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals to staff a universal system.

Here’s a look back at some of the key actions and policy changes that have led New Mexico to arrive at universal free child care.

2019

New Mexico creates the Early Childhood Education and Care Department

In 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law Senate Bill 22, creating the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department — an agency that would coordinate the work of three previous departments under a single entity to administer all state programs for children from prenatal to 5 years old. Though several states had Cabinets devoted to the interests of children, this move led New Mexico to become one of four with a department entirely dedicated to early childhood.

2021

Grassroots advocates in New Mexico target money from the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to pay for early childhood education

After a decade of organizing, early childhood education advocates in New Mexico home in on creating a change to their state constitution to guarantee a right to early education, eyeing the Land Grant Permanent Fund as a path toward developing a funding stream to support the vision.

2022

A Win for Early Childhood Education with a Ballot Initiative

On Nov. 8, 2022, New Mexico voters a constitutional amendment making their state the first to guarantee a right to early childhood education with funding to support it. 

Grassroots activists mobilized to bring a change in early childhood education to New Mexico, and after a ten year battle they found success through a constitutional amendment which received more than 70% of the vote. 

Hailey Heiz, deputy director of the University of New Mexico Cradle to Career Policy Institute, explores how New Mexico’s child care landscape has changed and what advocates across the country should keep their eyes on in this Q&A.

2024

After COVID disruptions, report shows New Mexico among states making top gains in pre-K enrollment

Two years after voters in New Mexico demanded more access to early childhood education by , the state’s investment has begun to show success. According to the From the National Institute for Early Education Research, it’s one of the top states to make gains in preschool enrollment, with 70% of 4-year-olds now attending public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

2025

A glimpse into New Mexico’s progress over the years

New Mexico’s early care and education system has undergone dramatic changes over the past five years as a result of a significant investment the state made in 2019. Increased wages for early educators, higher reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies, increased capacity and an increase in the number of families eligible for free or reduced price child care are among the advancements

There are tribes living on in New Mexico, a state where Native American citizens represent about of the population. Half of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New Mexico are on tribal lands. 

In addition to investing in early care and education by expanding funding, creating a dedicated department for early childhood and becoming the first state to guarantee a right to early childhood education, New Mexico has also explored ways to support its tribal communities. This includes supporting programs that preserve tribal languages and culture. 

With federal funds from the American Rescue Plan gone, some states have established trust funds dedicated to early care and education — and some say they’ve drawn inspiration from New Mexico, which was ahead of the curve. From voters approving the ballot measure to devote funding to early care and education in 2022, to efforts to decrease costs for families and increase pay for providers, and more recently, doubling the minimum amount the fund will spend on early education each year — the state has been a leader.

New Mexico becomes the first state to offer universal child care

On Monday, Sept. 8, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department that New Mexico will become the first state in the nation to guarantee no-cost universal child care to families starting on Nov. 1, making child care free for families, regardless of income. 

The decision came just a day after another U.S. district court judge in Rhode Island granted a that offered similar protections to preschoolers That ruling also means undocumented residents can still access adult and career and technical education and won’t be cut off from a range of federally funded emergency services, including for domestic violence and homelessness.

Linda Morris, an ACLU attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Washington state case, said she was elated by the decision, noting its sweeping scope. 

“This is an incredible victory, especially for Head Start providers and Head Start children and families,” she said. “Today’s ruling makes clear that every child, no matter their immigration status, deserves access to early educational support. We are extremely pleased with the court’s decision.” 

In issuing the national injunction, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez strongly rebuked the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees Head Start and funds 80% of its costs, for changing a longstanding legal interpretation and classifying it for the first time as a federal public benefit. 

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for these supports, including food assistance and non-emergency Medicaid. The move to restrict Head Start access is part of a wider Trump administration effort to exclude the undocumented from all taxpayer-funded services and programs, including several that involve education and job training.

The ruling restores Head Start eligibility to children and families who have student visas and other temporary statuses and were also excluded by HHS’s . The move affected the eligibility of more than 500,000 kids, according to the agency’s own analysis, and impacted approximately 115,000 children currently enrolled in the program.

Andrew Nixon, the HHS communications director, said Friday his office disagrees with the injunctions and is evaluating next steps. 

Head Start associations from four states and two parent and caregiver groups sued the agency and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Washington case. 

Joel Ryan is executive director of one of , the.

“I feel relief. I feel like people can breathe a little bit more,” said Ryan, whose organization’s other legal claims against the administration are focused on confusion over its anti-diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and the mass firings of Head Start staff.

Martinez rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that Head Start is a welfare program because it provides other means of support, including meals. Public schools do the same and no one would argue they are not educational in nature, he wrote. 

“Providing services such as health care, nutrition and other social services does not make Head Start non-educational but, as the Head Start Act states, ‘promotes the school readiness of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development,’” he wrote, noting, too, that Head Start funds do not provide payments of benefits to individual households or families. 

In court Tuesday, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Micheal Velchik tried to parse the degree of learning and instruction that takes place in Head Start from what’s taught at the K-12 level. 

“It’s technically not school or education because it’s preschool. It’s what you do before school and so it’s not really education in that sense,” said Velchik, who mistakenly referred to the program as Head First several times.

Jannesa Calvo-Friedman, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said undocumented parents, families of mixed immigration status and others with full legal standing but who lack documentation told Head Start operators they were keeping their kids away out of fear or confusion.

“The children who are losing education at this time [in their lives] can never get it back,” Calvo-Friedman said, citing studies on the critical nature of early learning. “Unless the directive is stayed or enjoined, defendants will continue to communicate the message that immigrant families need not apply.”

Martinez agreed that allowing the directive to go into effect while the underlying case was being argued would impose imminent and irreparable harm.

“While actual loss of funding from under enrollment might be down the road, families losing access to Head Start due to the Directive’s unclear guidance and chilling effects appears anything but speculative and exists even prior to enforcement,” he notes.  

The judge expressed disbelief at the government’s contention that implementing the restriction immediately would discourage illegal immigration.

“The Court is floored by this argument,” he wrote. “Nothing on the record provides any means for this Court to infer that access to Head Start ‘incentivizes’ illegal immigration.”

Head Start was established in 1965 to help improve kindergarten readiness for low-income children and to support their families. It has served young learners  and their families in the 60 years since. 

Our community’s commitment ensures that third graders get a lot of attention. 

But our work starts well before third grade. 

Early literacy begins with early childhood education. In our community, families of newborns get a custom lullaby to sing to their baby. We give families free books and learning kits so they have tools and resources in their homes. We create opportunities for community learning through our connection centers, events, playgroups and more. 

This type of foundational work is imperative. Educators and nonprofit leaders cannot suddenly lean into the science of reading at first, second, or third grade and overlook the fact that what children experience from birth to age 5 can make or break these efforts.

After all, research indicates that disparities in cognitive and social-emotional development are and tend to widen by the time the child reaches age 2. By the time kids start kindergarten, children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds often in reading and math compared to their lower-income peers. 

To close these gaps and put students in an infinitely easier position to read on grade level by the time they finish third grade, and to do so without making Herculean efforts to catch students up, the solution is simple: provide more access, sooner, to high-quality early childhood education. 

In my home state of Florida, for instance, there are more than a million children ages 5 and younger. Two-thirds of these children’s parents work. For the sake of our economy, this is good news. The bad news is that federal and state early learning opportunities in Florida under age 6. Everyone else is left to pay out of pocket for home- or center-based care or cobble together a makeshift solution. Parents are scrambling to make sure their children are looked after. In these scarcity environments, the priority is finding coverage, not necessarily attaining high-quality care that builds cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills. 

This gap between the early childhood education opportunities available to parents and what parents need is kneecapping our state’s future, and Florida is not alone. As a country, getting third-grade students reading on grade level would be infinitely more feasible if more students were building foundational skills in the pivotal early developmental period. And, in a country where just of fourth-grade students are reading proficiently, we need all the help we can get. 

Here in Indian River County, we do what we can with what we have.  The nonprofit provides  high-quality early childhood education for children and training for educators. The integrates language development and health education into support services for young families. These programs and others are supported by a community of individual donors who make it possible to provide direct services to students and give parents the tools they need to be their child’s first teacher. 

Through programs like — which  prepare parents with modeling fun, loving, language-rich interactions that can be done anywhere and anytime — and Carnegie Hall’s , parents learn tips and tricks for creating a learning environment in their own homes, reading together, and connecting the senses to reading through movement, music, and more. Children who participate in these programs and pre-K are more likely to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

When children reach elementary school, I lead works with the school district to provide instructional coaches and reading specialists in every elementary school, as well as to closely monitor students’ performance on interim assessments to determine where to provide extra support. 

Effective early childhood programming is a tested strategy not only educationally but financially. Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and his team analyzed long-term data from high-quality early childhood programs, and they found a on investment per child when accounting for outcomes such as higher earnings, better health, reduced crime, increased productivity and reduced need for special education and social services.

This return is possible only with investment of not just time and money but also attention. Both the science of reading and the science of learning are based on brain development. How we interact with our youngest children, how we speak with our youngest children, and how we provide for our youngest children – starting before they are even born– will determine the extent to which young people grow up with a fair shot at a world of opportunity. 

Gonzalez is a longtime community organizer and advocate who works with community health workers and in the local school system in Santa Ana, California, a city . Most kids and families she knows spent their summers cooped up inside for fear of walking outside and being taken. She has seen for herself kids running in search of safe places to go when they see a truck that could have ICE agents, and knows firsthand of parents being detained after walking kids to school, and of raids at a popular grocery store. “The aisles are now empty since no one ventures outside anymore,” she said.

But the changes to the tax code that target immigrant families are the least of her concerns right now. “We used to offer classes about how to pay taxes,” she said, speaking of The Promotoras, a community support group that she is involved in that provided resources for families adjusting to life in the United States. “But we aren’t even giving out information about the taxes now because we are so impacted by worrying about who is going to come home each night.

Growing up, as the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, her grandfather would stop by the panaderia every Sunday and invite people who had recently arrived from Mexico into their house for menudo, a type of Mexican spicy stew. Gonzalez, fluent in both English and Spanish, would translate and help fill out immigration paperwork and tax forms.

For decades, immigrants in her community were actively encouraged to file taxes, she said. Having taxes in good standing was one of the criteria for gaining citizenship under the Reagan administration’s 1986 reform, which happened when Gonzalez was in 6th grade. But 40 years later, Gonzalez is now hearing from more people that they are scared to file taxes and have decided to hold off. “Who wants to tell the IRS where you are? Right now, silence is our safety.” 

Changing the filing requirements for the Child Tax Credit is a recent action by the Trump administration to revoke benefits for noncitizens — one that creates a particular pain point for families with young children. In the passed this summer, Congress increased the CTC amount to $2,200 and indexed it to inflation, and also , including requiring children and at least one parent to have a Social Security number. 

More than who are American citizens are living with an undocumented immigrant according to estimates from a study published by Brookings Institution in April. More than 2.7 million are children in elementary and middle school grades and 1.96 million are under 6 years old. 

Policy experts believe that many of these families would have qualified for the Child Tax Credit under the previous policy, but will no longer be able to receive it due to this change. Many of these kids are American citizens living with parents who pay taxes through an (ITIN), not a Social Security number. The IRS issues ITINs and relies on them to collect tax revenue from people who may not have work authorization but still earn income in the United States. By contrast, a Social Security number is issued by the Social Security Administration and is only available to citizens and those legally authorized to work in the United States, including or have a pending asylum claim with work authorization. 

A family’s income also plays a role. According to from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, an estimated 19 million children under age 17 will be ineligible for the full Child Tax Credit because their family’s income isn’t high enough to qualify, up from 17 million under the previous policy. For children under 6, estimates show that 30% could be ineligible for the full credit because of their family’s income. The analysis in the brief estimates that a family with two children will now need to make $41,500 in income to receive the full tax benefit, a leap from $36,000 under the previous policy. 

Since its inception in 1997, the CTC has been a partially refundable tax credit, meaning that people who file with a little or no tax burden can still receive the credit in the form of a refund. And in 2021, it was the one time “advanced refundability” of the CTC that sent checks to so many households in America, cutting child poverty in half and being lauded as the most (and no, the checks aren’t likely to return). The credit also enjoys widespread popularity with a , which crosses party lines.

The shift to requiring that children and at least one parent have a Social Security number to access social benefits is part of a larger effort that dates back to the Gingrich era in 1996, explains Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center. This was when Republicans took control of Congress and unveiled the “Contract for America,” which was designed to rework a number of the country’s social programs. This included changing the earned income tax credit — a refundable tax credit for low income families, which has been long considered one of the — to require tax filers to have Social Security numbers. But even with the changes to the EITC, parents filing taxes with an ITIN could still claim the Child Tax Credit, McCabe explained. 

Excluding immigrant families from receiving the CTC isn’t likely to have a meaningful impact on immigration, said McCabe. “Most people don’t migrate for tax credits,” he said. “But people who are here, legal or not, with families and with kids, will have fewer resources to get by on.” 

Chris Wimer, director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy and Megan Curran, policy director of the organization, said that while the changes brought about by this shift to the CTC will affect families, the impacts are dwarfed by the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which will hit families hard. Even the $200 increase in the CTC does little to offset it. “It’s basically lower than it was previously given that inflation has overtaken the $200 increase,” said Wimer. 

“Those are the same kids that are going to see the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid and the ACA Tax Credits, and could see changes to eligibility for free school meals,” Curran said. 

Economist Kathryn Edwards said that adding the additional Social Security number requirement is creating a “chilling effect.” She adds: “It is a — when you target mixed status families they drop out of programs they are eligible for. These are kids eligible for Medicaid, but maybe the mom is afraid of what could happen to her brother. That is the point of all of these changes, intimidation and fear.” 

For Gonzalez, there is little surprise that the CTC has been targeted. “They pick on the kids,” she said. “They know how much we love our families.” She works with many families that have at least one parent with an ITIN, and said many of them have been in this country for 20 years paying taxes. “They use their ITIN numbers to buy a house, get a phone or a car,” she said. 

Any possible savings from limiting the CTC could be offset by those afraid of filing at all, she said. “The U.S. is going to be losing all that money.”

Formed in 1969 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit authorized by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, PBS has been a staple for American families for decades. 

From its earliest days airing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street to iconic shows from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s like Electric Company, Reading Rainbow and Bill Nye the Science Guy, PBS programming has taught children to understand and express their emotions, and helped them build foundational literacy, math and science skills. And since 1999, PBS Kids has brought beloved characters like Daniel Tiger and Arthur into American through shows and digital games. 

Today, PBS, along with NPR and funded by CPB faces an uncertain future after President Donald Trump signed a bill cutting earmarked for the Corporation.

public broadcasting has been under threat. In the 1990s, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, led efforts to . In 1969, Fred Rogers before Congress to protect $20 million in federal funding for the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the Nixon administration proposed cutting in half.

“I’m constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for 15 years I have tried, in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care,” Rogers told then-Senator John O. Pastore. Rogers contrasted his approach with the animated “bombardment” and gun violence he saw on other networks.

Underscoring the importance of programs appealing to social emotional learning and mental health, Rogers won Pastore over. “Looks like you just earned the $20 million dollars,” Pastore concluded.

Over the years, PBS has remained a media source among Americans, especially for its children’s programming. As of 2024, more than 130 million people watch PBS via traditional television; nearly 60% of all U.S. television households watch PBS over the course of a year; and PBS Kids 15.5 million monthly users and 345 million monthly streams across PBS KIDS’ digital platforms.

Here’s a visual history of the milestones and iconic moments from the organization that has served generations of learners — as well as a glimpse into efforts to protect it over the years:

1969

Fred Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications to oppose proposed cuts to federal funding for public broadcasting. 

Sesame Street airs its episode in November 1969.

1970

The photos below capture behind-the-scenes moments from the first season of Sesame Street.

1971

1973

1986

’90s and Early 2000s

2005

2008

2009

Sesame Street turns 40. 

2011

2012

2013

2017

2025

The fight to fund continues. 

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics in June, involved a meta-analysis of 84 studies and found that paternal mental distress around the time of birth was associated with poorer global, social-emotional, cognitive, language and physical development in their children. 

While research on the intersection of mental health and parenthood has long focused on mothers, this analysis sought to examine whether the mental health of fathers influences child development, said Delyse Hutchinson, an associate professor in the school of psychology at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia and the study’s senior author.

The results didn’t surprise Hutchinson, she said. “It’s still a stigma for a lot of dads, mental health, and they tend not to talk about it openly and that kind of leads maybe to a lot of men not even necessarily recognizing that they’re experiencing mental health symptoms.” 

“It matters for families. It matters for supporting mums and babies. So it’s not a surprise. It’s just the affirmation and having the evidence to take to policy makers, healthcare, and say, look, this does matter. We’re gonna do more about this,” she added.

The studies included in the analysis followed the development of children ages 0 to 18, though the majority of research examined development before adolescence. Hutchinson emphasized that the postpartum period, when fathers typically have more direct contact with their baby, has the greatest impact on a child’s development. 

Part of the study’s goal was to build awareness around what depression looks like for dads, since they often than women. Men might withdraw socially or feel unable to emotionally regulate themselves. They could also erupt in outbursts or anger, Hutchinson said.

While conducting the analysis, researchers found that a father’s mental state affects children in a number of ways, most notably a child’s social-emotional development, including emotional regulation and social skills. Children who grow up in a household with a father navigating mental health issues such as depression, may themselves have difficulty regulating their emotions, Hutchinson said. 

“Say you’re feeling a little bit sad and down, you tend to be less sensitive towards others, or if you’re getting agitated and frustrated … that’s a less sensitive response to an infant or a young child,” Hutchinson added.

Children pick up on emotional cues. When a child experiences their father expressing anger or distress, it can lead them to develop an insecure bond with him, according to Hutchinson. This can bring a child to feel unsure that their dad can provide for their emotional needs.

Most of the existing research on how a parent’s mental health influences child development focuses either on both parents or just the mother, Hutchinson explained. That means moms and dads are grouped together when researchers look at development outcomes for children. While conducting the meta-analysis, lead researcher Genevieve Le Bas reached out to many authors of the published studies to ask if they could retrieve unpublished data on the mental health of fathers.

“Whilst a very significant proportion of the data in this review is from published studies, we often had to contact authors to obtain data on fathers that wasn’t specifically recorded in those studies,” said Hutchinson.

The fact that fathers were either initially left out or mixed into data about mothers is reflective of larger issues in the research field, as well as the culture of parenting, Hutchinson explained. That culture tends to push fathers to the side and neglect health services which could support them throughout parenthood.

But the role of fathers in parenting and the awareness around their mental health is changing. Dr. Craig Garfield, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University and a practicing pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, has experienced that change firsthand as both a father and a researcher. When Garfield took a year off to take care of his 18-month-old son, he felt very lonely. He recalled being the sole father on the playground and in the local “mom and tot” classes. Soon after, he shifted his research focus from injury prevention in childhood to the role of fathers in families.

Medical journal reviewers have long been skeptical that fathers can experience post-natal depression, Garfield said. When he worked on a with his colleagues in 2002 about how pediatricians can support fathers and recommended screening fathers for depression after their partner gave birth, he got pushback during the peer review process.

“It came back from the reviewer saying, ‘There’s no such thing as this. You can’t kind of make it up and start suggesting screening dads,’” he said. “And to a certain extent, that is true. There was not much in the literature, but we all knew from clinical experience that there were dads that were depressed.”It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that Garfield was able to include peer-reviewed studies on paternal mental health in his published research papers, he said. 

There are cultural norms and stereotypes working against dads, Garfield said, but it’s necessary to recognize that paternal mental health affects families every day — and to address the issue. 

Addressing Mental Health for Fathers

There are a number of efforts underway to address some of the findings surfaced by the emerging body of research on fathers’ mental health. Kevin Seldon, who runs Dads Supporting Dads, a network of organizations supporting fathers under the nonprofit All Parents Welcome, said the dads he works with are often met with skepticism when they express their struggles with postpartum depression. Seldon and his wife spent years trying to have a baby. During the birth of their son, his wife needed an oxygen mask and their baby emerged blue. (Seldon’s wife and now 6-year-old son are healthy.) 

“It’s very stressful and anytime I tried to address it, people would be like, ‘You didn’t give birth.’ But trauma is not mutually exclusive,” Seldon said.“[After] five years of struggling and the very traumatic birth — by the time we got home, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”

Dads Supporting Dads grew out of a podcast Seldon launched when he found himself feeling isolated after the birth of his son. Through his show Dad I’d Like to Friend, Seldon and other fathers were able to talk about their feelings after the birth of their children. 

“My wife had all these moms groups, right? But I couldn’t find any support,” Seldon said. “I realized that I was so far from alone, so many people were struggling.” He also sought help through talk therapy, which helped him understand that his depression wasn’t uncommon, that what he experienced wasn’t a depressive episode, and that his emotions wouldn’’t necessarily disappear a few years after birth. 

As the podcast took off and Seldon saw demand for that connection, he started facilitating in-person gatherings for local dads and a WhatsApp community where dads could connect across the country. 

As nonprofit organizations and community groups look to connect fathers, researchers are urging policymakers to enact more and physical and mental health for fathers. Though society has traditionally pushed dads to return to work as quickly as possible to get a paycheck, Garfield believes paternity leave could help fathers better support their children.

“I took care of a family in the NICU this weekend where the baby was two days old in the NICU and dad’s back at work,” Garfield said. “One of the most important things that we can do is really work toward paid leave for moms and for dads.”