Today’s state of early care and education is, in a nutshell, unsustainable.
That’s a recent survey discovered by 10,000 early childhood educators, and what providers continue to share anecdotely.
There’s a pandemic in the back Funds accompanied by It now brings a declined memory to the field. Many early education providers have found that they can’t keep up with rising costs, shortages of staff and low morale.
January, NAEYC, a nonprofit advocacy group working to promote high-quality early learning. Survey subject Early educators in all states and settings, including center-based, home-based, headstart and public preschool programs.
“What we see in this study is surprising and not surprising,” says Daniel Haynes, managing director of policy and professional advancement at NAEYC.
About a third of corresponding providers reported paying more rents than they did this year before, but nearly half said they were more likely to be in property and liability insurance.
“We’ve seen a lot of people living in the world,” said Meredith Burton, director of the Furman University Children’s Development Center, a small two-classroom program in Greenville, South Carolina.
Burton has the unique advantage of running the program within a university-owned building, which doesn’t charge her rent, but everything else has been rising since 2020, from utilities to groceries.
The reality is that it is nearly impossible to pay livable wages for staff, and many providers have discovered that they are paying what they deserve without enforcing the program.
After working 28 years as a child, Jennifer Trippett’s program first experienced a budget shortage in 2024. In response, she had to raise her family tuition fees by 20% in January. More than half (55%) of the providers surveyed by NAEYC in January said they had raised tuition fees last year as well.
Even that tuition adjustment is that Trippett, director of Cubby’s Child Care Center in Bridgeport, West Virginia, is the state’s largest licensing program serving around 450 children every day, and is “taken seriously” some of the classrooms when children transition into the next age band in August.
“I struggle with staffing every day,” she admits. “Every day I walk on eggshells. It’s the game we live in every day. It’s not where I want to be.”
In 2019, prior to the pandemic, Tripet paid staff the same wages Walmart, Target and hospitality companies paid employees. It was okay as some people preferred to be around young children and she could have guaranteed normal opening hours, but other jobs required night and weekend shifts.
Not that today. According to Trippett, the same employer doubled his initial wages and “I couldn’t keep up,” she said.
Cubby’s pays staff between $12 and $16 per hour. Meanwhile, local gas stations started employees at $15.50 an hour, and “my 15-year-old nie started at the mall for $12 an hour,” she says.
Trippett finds itself in the same CATCH-22 as many other early education providers do. She really needs to give her staff a raise to compete with other businesses in the community, but she cannot ask families who enroll in the program to pay more than they do. Already, she says she charges more than many people can afford.
This represents what thousands of providers shared in the NAEYC survey. More than half say they have no programme in place compared to what they want to see. Why 41% said it was because parents were unable to pay for care, while 37% said they were too low to recruit and maintain qualified staff.
South Carolina provider Burton feels that early childhood educators have once again felt forgotten by the public after boosting their temporary position on the worst day of the pandemic.
Naeyc’s Hains confirmed that many providers feel this way. He described it as a return to the “unsettled state of affairs.”
“It feels like a slap in the face for many providers,” Burton says. “Here we are finally recognized as an essential workforce, and now we are “working as hard as possible, with as much time as possible, low wages and little profitable. That’s not sustainable for everyone.”
In fact, almost half (47%) of survey providers said last year that burnout had worsened, resulting from low pay at work, physical and mental demands at work, and inadequate resources to address developmental and behavioral challenges for children.
Burton can prove everything, including navigating how it can help children with “very specific needs they’ve never encountered before.”
“It’s definitely getting difficult,” Burton says. “I love what I do, [but] I’m tired for a lot of time – not necessarily physically exhausted, just emotionally and mentally exhausted. ”
She adds: “The expectations I set for myself. I feel a great sense of responsibility for the staff and the families we serve. I want us to succeed. And I hope to meet our mission and provide the best care and education to the children who spend their time with these kids. It’s an emotionally exhausting journey.”
Although not reflected in the investigation, Haynes says he had a conversation with a provider who has experienced “concern, confusion and uncertainty” about the gusts of change coming out of the federal government.
The temporary fundraising in February caused panic. Affected Many Head Start programs, he admits. Many educators are worried too Medicaid’s fateof which approximately 230,000, or 1 in 4 people nationwide, rely on health insurance.
Fundraising disruption and pullbacks come when the field needs more public investment, Haynes points out.
“We’ve become very used to how bad it is and how hard it is,” he admits. “But this remains a crisis, even if we are used to it.”
