The Connecticut House of Representatives passed a priority bill on Saturday that promises to transform early childhood care and education for generations of families.
Senate Bill 1, which also includes supports for special education, would create a new endowment for early childhood education that would draw up to $300 million from surplus funds each year. Depending on surplus funds available and how quickly the fund grows, it would eventually allow families making less than $100,000 to pay nothing for infant and toddler care and pre-K, while families making more than that would pay no more than 7% of their annual household income toward those expenses.
The bill would also improve salaries for workers in the child care sector, and allows for funds to be spent on expanding or improving facilities. Those funds — $80 million — are expected to pass in a bonding bill.
Gov. Ned Lamont, who is expected to sign the bill, reacted to its passage on X on Monday: “Working parents need childcare. It’s an essential part of keeping a job and growing an economy. I thank the legislature for approving my plan to enact the largest expansion of childcare access in state history. Let’s keep CT known as the most family friendly state in the nation!”
Though Lamont’s original plan was limited to an endowment for universal pre-K, S.B. 1 is the result of negotiations between his office, House and Senate Democrats, and advocates over the past few months. Those groups had started off the session with a variety of proposals to accomplish the collective goal of supporting families with the high cost of infant and toddler care and pre-K in a state where spots are often limited and providers struggle to retain workers. S.B. 1 intends to address those roadblocks by improving salaries for child care workers and investing heavily in the sector.
The House also passed House Bill 5003 on Saturday, which would address another headache parents face: finding available spots. H.B. 5003 would create a portal to allow families to efficiently find the child care and pre-K spots they qualify for. That bill would also make it possible to care for up to 12 children, compared to the current limitation of nine children with a primary child care worker and assistant, in a child care home — provided certain requirements are met depending on the size of the facility and it has adequate staffing — and it would create a pilot program for hospitals to notify new parents of the child care centers and other services available to them.
Deputy Majority Leader Rep. Kate Farrar, D-West Hartford, said she hears from constituents daily about the high cost of living in Connecticut, and that child care is a key piece of that struggle.
“So many of our businesses know how critical it is to have affordable and accessible child care,” she said. “Families deserve access to this care, because the greatest investment we can make is in our young children.”
But the bill has been criticized by Republican lawmakers, many of whom say that while they support the cause of funding early childhood education, they are troubled by using surplus funds to do so.
Joe Polletta, R-Waterbury, talked about the fiscal crisis that the state found itself in back in 2017, and how the implementation of fiscal guardrails have helped the state dig itself out of that hole. “Little by little over the last eight years we have chipped away at those fiscal guardrails that got us to the land of steady habits that we are in today,” he said.
“We are going to fix something that’s not broke and I think future generations are going to pay for it. And I hope I’m wrong,” Polletta said.
Lezlye Zupkus, R-Prospect, ranking member of the Education Committee, spent more than two hours questioning the bill’s proponents. She concluded that while she believes it is “our responsibility to make sure we are providing the best for our kids, because they are the leaders of tomorrow,” she would not be supporting the bill.
“I hope that everything in here is going to make the difference that everyone says it’s going to, and I hope that our children are going to be better for it,” Zupkus said. “I hope I’m proven wrong for heaven sake.”
Many House Democrats rose to speak in support of the bill.
Rep. Brandon Chafee, D-Middletown, who worked on the legislation, said that “all too often in politics we think in the short term, offering a temporary program or funding that solves the immediate need but does not solve the underlying issue.”
Chafee said he likes to think of the analogy of offering a hungry person an apple, a short-term fix, whereas planting a tree to address the deeper issue of hunger. “We’re planting a tree here to help future generations. It’s not gonna solve the immediate need, but over time as it grows, if we nurture it, if we nourish it, it will provide into the future year after year,” he said.
Farrar said that on Saturday, since school was out, the building was also full of children of legislators and advocates who had come to cheer the bill’s passage.
“There was an incredible moment, being able to walk out and meet up with the many advocates and parents in the hallways as they cheered, because this is the result of decades and decades of work,” Farrar said.
“For too long child care was seen as something that just sort of happened and didn’t have a real importance or weight on what was going on in the rest of our communities or in our society or our state,” Rep. Mary Welander, D-Orange, said on Saturday.
But she said those providers are truly the bedrock of the state’s economy and, “we need to compensate them, we need to have spaces for them to work in that are safe and clean, we need to make sure that they are able to care for themselves and their family.”
The bill also includes supports for special education, based on feedback collected by the Select Committee on Special Education.
That includes a $10 million grant to create better special education programming in some districts so that students don’t have to travel out of district. And it requires programs to send out notifications when staffing changes, like substitute teachers, last more than 10 school days — disruptions that can have a big impact on special education students. It also creates an educational ombudsman who would help mediate issues that arise when families are having trouble accessing services. The special education provisions in the bill complement those in House Bill 5001.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
