In Quotes: Amy O’Leary and Lauren Cook on GBH’s Boston Public Radio

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Amy O’Leary, executive director of Strategies for Children, and Lauren Cook, CEO of Ellis Early Learning, were guests on Boston Public Radio where they talked about Massachusetts’ $1.5 billion investment in child care. (Their segment starts at the 1:28:31 time mark.)

Here’s some of what they said.

O’Leary: “The Common Start Coalition worked to file a piece of legislation which is, as you said… the result of decades-long campaigns, all advocates working together on this common vision for young children, and so the bill was filed and what happened is a lot of that policy from those bills ended up in the budget.” 

“One of the things I want to highlight is the commitment from Governor Healey, Lieutenant Governor Driscoll and the Legislature.” 

“When you think back to March 2020, we had to recreate an early childhood system. So the lessons we learned through Covid… the legislators’ and our leaders’ willingness to understand, to do program visits, to talk to people who are running programs, to really understand what those policy decisions mean to children and families across the Commonwealth, that for me has resulted in much stronger policy, including some of the Covid relief dollars, $475 million that the state of Massachusetts has picked up the tab for. We are the only state in the country to do that. Other states saw the federal federal funding come and go and did not take any state action.”

Cook: “The $475 million is funding the Commonwealth Cares for Children grants, the C3 grants, which started off as pandemic funding, as Amy said, and it’s now in statute as permanent funding going forward subject to appropriation. What this means for me as a provider is that I can count on that money this year and hopefully going forward so that I can raise teacher salaries, so we can stabilize tuitions for families, so that we can improve operations at Ellis.

“When you’re running a nonprofit child care center, everything is difficult… the leaky roof, cleaning the gutters… for [our] three schools.”

“The primary issue is [child care] requires so much money, so this is definitely a budget to celebrate. And there are huge Investments for our sector, but we need to think of it as the exciting launch to a trajectory we need to follow. It is not a grand finale. We have to continue to push, push, push because it is so expensive.”

To hear more, please check out the video.