COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio has 800,313 children ages newborn to five, many of them in child care and all who would benefit from a quality preschool program, according to research from a newly formed alliance of researchers from 14 Big Ten schools.
The Big Ten Early Learning Alliance is coordinated by Ohio State University professor Laura Justice and Rutgers University professor W. Steven Barnett. Roughly 40 researchers from the schools are looking for best practices in hopes that the new focus that business groups and state and local governments put on early childhood learning results in improvements.
“Over the last four years there’s an increase in federal and state level policies directed toward early learning, early childhood,” Justice said. “And we want to make sure that science is threaded through those initiatives.”
The other researchers come from Indiana University, Purdue University, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Illinois s Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Investing in good child care and preschool programs can pay dividends for the rest of the child’s life, Justice said. Children in quality programs are less likely to be delinquent in school, less likely to need special education services, have higher high school graduation rates and even earn more as adults, she said.
“At least half of families with young kids in Ohio are headed by a single caregiver,” she said. “So obviously, they have to work. We want that for every able-bodied person in our state. You can’t work if you don’t have safe and warm care for your child. It’s an absolute starter into that conversation about the economy. Then the evidence is abundantly clear when you have a child in a quality early childhood program, where the educators are skilled at supporting kids to develop fundamental skills, there’s payoffs well into adulthood. And that evidence is very, very strong. But the caveat is it does have to be high quality early childhood care. It can’t be a place where they’re babysitting kids.”
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The group‘s first published paper surveyed the landscape of child care and preschool within the researchers’ footprint.
The U.S. has 22 million children age five and under. Among the other states in the Big Ten alliance, Michigan has 650,317 children in the age range; Indiana has 489,421; Pennsylvania has 807,774, the research brief found.
About 18,000 kids in Ohio are in a state-funded pre-K education program, in which the state pays some or all of the tuition based on family income. In some cases, parents must come up with a copayment. Ohio spends on average $4,000 per child enrolled a year, the research brief found.
Justice said that $4,000 isn’t enough to provide full-time daycare in a quality program in most Ohio communities, which usually runs closer to $12,000 a year.
“What you’re going to get for a cost like that ($4,000) is a half day. You might be able to access a program that goes from 9 to 11:30 every day, or a couple hours in the afternoon. My concern about that is it doesn’t meet the need of working parents,” she said.
Many Ohio child care centers, including one on the OSU campus, layer state, federal, local and parent funds together to try to decrease the cost of full-day, year-around early childhood education, she said. Many communities provide funds for early-learning programs, including Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Ohio’s average daycare subsidies have increased in recent months, due to efforts made by the new Ohio Department of Children and Youth, which has worked to leverage state and federal dollars to pay higher subsidies to child-care providers, Justice said.
But even with more money, access to good programs can be scarce.
There are not always openings at childcare centers that take subsidies. Or there may be availability at some centers but they’re located in a suburb far from a parent’s home, and they lack the transportation to take advantage of it, Justice said.
“We do know that we have a massive shortage,” Justice said. “We’ve had a lot of providers shut doors due to COVID. We also more broadly have a massive worker shortage. So providers are having a really hard time finding qualified educators to staff their programs.”
In our Rethinking Childcare series, cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer are examining the expense and difficulty of finding quality child care and proposing solutions to share families’ burdens — and help our economy.
Laura Hancock covers state government and politics for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.