a mission of policies to ensure that louisiana's youngest children are ready not only for success in school but in life and we envision a louisiana in which all young children birth to age four are safe healthy and can reach their full potential our work at the policy institute we really seek to be a source of nonpartisan independent information on issues concerning children birth to four in our state and what we know in our state is this is that 67 percent of our children birth to age 4 have both of their parents or their single parent in the workforce also 61 of infants have their mothers going back to work within their first year of life and that child care costs as much as public college tuition which is about 8 700 a year for infants but that actually doesn't even cover the cost of care we know the true cost of care to provide high quality early care and education to young children in louisiana can be upwards of sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand dollars a year and there's not a family that can afford that additionally what we know is that just like the foundation of the house house children's brains are built from the ground up and what we know is that 85 of brain development happens in the first year and the first three years of life and so if we don't build the foundation strong when they're young we have to go back and remediate that and just think about your own house if you had to go and remediate the foundation how expensive that would be and it's the same thing for children if we don't really invest in them in those first three to five years of life additionally what we know about child care is it's a workforce productivity issue child care instability costs our businesses because parents aren't able to go to work and it causes economic losses statewide for louisiana economic losses have equated to this 762 million dollars of annual loss to our employers in the state of louisiana a 1.3 8 billion that's a with a b not an m 1.3 billion dollar annual loss to our economy as well due to child care breakdowns and that the loss of full-time child care is associated with employment disruptions including higher rates of unemployment in particular amongst our mothers at the end of the day this is the facts is that for parents to be able to take care of their children they have to be able to go to work and for them to be able to go to work they have to have the access to quality early care and education what we also know is that low wages for child care teachers contribute to turnover and wages for our child care teachers range about 9.77 per hour that's lower than the national average of 1227 and the southern state average of 10.97 and so what happens is we have our most vulnerable people taking care of our most vulnerable population because they don't have a living wage and can barely afford to live that also then really makes our childcare businesses because at the end of the day their small businesses really struggle to not only retain but also recruit talented teachers to work with our youngest learners and that child care teachers tend to turn over quickly and leave the profession very early which negatively impacts the quality of the care that our an education our children are getting additionally what we know is this is that the state's budget is a value proposition and the value proposition of our budget lately has been that louisiana spends half less than half of one percent of our state budget on early care and education despite the tremendous need and the significant potential return on investment what we know by from an economist jim heckman is that for every dollar that we spend we can get a 13 return on investment we actually think now it's almost 18 return on investment for every dollar that we spend i don't know about you but i know about me there's not anywhere that i can put my money and get that type of return on investment and so it makes sense that we would want to do that in our state and in our children and so what we know before going into this legislative session in 2022 is that if our state did not make a substantial investment in early care and education that we could potentially lose 12.1 billion dollars over the next decade but if our state committed to make really make a substantial investment in early care and education we could have a 1.8 million dollar gain over the next decade it's simple math if we invest now we get a gain if we don't invest we're going to continue to have losses and so that leads me to the 2022 legislative recap where we had a historic down payment of an investment in louisiana's children the first time ever please note that i said down payment because we need this type of down payment for annually for up to a decade at least to be able to cover our children that are at risk in our state and so this is what the legislative session looked like we're proud to say that 44 million dollars went to early care and education in the state budget of that 44 million dollars 25 million went to child care assistance and then the remaining about 18 million dollars really went to improve the rates offered to existing four-year-old programs in our state we've never had this type of single investment ever in the state budget to this amount and so we're very very excited about that in addition to this 44 million dollars there was an additional 40 million in one-time funding to the louisiana early childhood education fund this fund is really an incentive fund and if you all remember back from 2021 when i came to visit you that we had we were able to garner 25 of sports betting revenue to go into this fund up to 20 million dollars well what the legislature did this year in 2022 is put 40 million dollars in that fund this is critically important because this is good government it's saying locals if you come up with a dollar we're going to match you a dollar and with 40 million dollars in that fund of one-time funding it really allows us to work with locals in a different way it's important to note that on april 30th of this year that the city of new orleans said yes to children and they said yes to children in a mighty big way they passed a millage of 21 million dollars a year a year for 20 years in high quality early care and education for birth through three-year-olds not only is it big for new orleans and big for louisiana it's the first type of this kind of investment in the country and infants and toddlers what we see oftentimes is that when state when cities make investments in early childhood they do it for three and four-year-olds but not necessarily for infants toddlers and twos and so we are critically i mean it's just critical that this money went into the fund because then that can help match what the local investment is happening in new orleans but we have places like jefferson parish that is using parish money as well to really be able to tap into this fund we have places like caddo parish and shreveport that are able to access some of these funding in this fund as well because they've raised local philanthropic dollars we have leaders like in monroe friday ellis the mayor in monroe city who's really making critical investments in early care and education and parent education and then right here in baton rouge we have uh the east baton rouge parish school board that are making critical investments to making sure that they increase access to high quality early care and education for three and four-year-olds so again the investment of 40 40 million of one-time investment in the early childhood education fund was massive and then additionally another 27 million over three years for the early childhood services and support program and we were proud to help support partners like the louisiana partnership for children and families to get this bill passed which will include funding for three years to revive a previously cut program that offered families with young children mental health and wraparound services early care and education is critically important but also the wraparound services for when families are in crisis so we are more than thrilled to be able to see this program come back and that's just the money side of what happened this legislative session there were some other really exciting things that happened so one of them is related to juvenile justice prevention dollars we worked closely with representative ken brass to pass hb 460 which was really to allow certain parishes that have a certain type of juvenile justice millage that they could use their local dollars in prevention towards early childhood programming and allow locals to choose what they wanted to do with that money whether it be parent education whether they wanted to build more infrastructure for early care and education whether it be home visiting or invest in city seats in a parish seat model to increase access to early care and education so a real big kudos to representative ken brass on that additionally our senator here senator clio fields passed senate bill 47 which allows school districts to work towards expanding access to high quality early care and education this is particularly important because it's a it's an infrastructure for four-year-olds to have access to full-day year-round quality early care and education four-year-old programming and it tasks the districts to work with child care providers we know that these small businesses of child care are the the most appropriate places for our young children to be and so senator fields worked with stakeholders across the state to really understand that we want to make sure that our children have access to quality early care and education in developmentally appropriate settings that include child care the other piece of this legislation that's really important is again full day year round but not at the detriment to infant and toddler care because it would be really easy maybe for providing child care providers to say we're going to cover just three and four-year-olds but we know infant and toddler care is wildly expensive and hard to get so to have the infrastructure in this bill say not at the detriment to infant toddler care helps working families make sure that they have access to infants and toddler care as well as three and four-year-old care and then we were able to really to re-establish the early childhood care and education commission and this commission has been critically important to our state because it's helped lay out how many children are at risk that we have in our state how many we need to cover and what's the dollar amount we need to go to and so this is on the the second reauthorization of this commission but part of this commission is also tasked to establish a new revenue and compensation task force the new revenue piece is is important because we know that it's expensive to make sure that we have a system that really creates access to high quality early care and education in our state and then the compensation task force is important because it also helps us think about how do we increase access to quality early care and education in our state by having a workforce that will stay in early care and education and also promote high quality at the end of the day and so to say that we had a bang-up legislative session is an understatement i say often we have 84 million reasons to celebrate for our young children in the state of louisiana and that's thanks to the leadership of not only our governor but our elected officials who time and time again said that young children are a priority and we have money and we're going to put our money where our mouth is and say that young children are important and they're important to us as our future but they're also important in our economy now so that we can get families either looking for work working or going back to school and so again very very excited but what i have to highlight is with 84 million reasons to celebrate we have many more millions that we need and many more miles to go and so we need increased we still need increased investment in early care and education the type of investment that we receive this year in the legislative session is the type of investment we need annually for up to a decade prior to the legislative session louisiana was covering about 15 percent of the in-need population of birth to three-year-olds new funding in the 2022 legislative session allowed us to cover approximately four to four to five percent more of birth to three-year-olds in need which brings us to approximately less than 20 of the nearly 150 children 150 000 children that we have in need of our in our state so while we're more than excited and this does help we need continued investment so again i'm very clear this was an incredible down payment but we have miles yet to go um and everybody's very clear we will be back to say this is what we need for our young children and with the need so great in louisiana for our youngest learners and their families we know there is a need for an equitable unified early childhood system ensuring families have access to a seamless high quality early childhood development health and education system and this is why we believe at the louisiana policy institute for children for louisiana to go far for our children we must go together to build a successful louisiana and a successful louisiana starts with successful children if we want to go fast we go alone if we want to go far we go together and we have to go far for our young children and their families in the state of louisiana and i do believe we're on the way but we do have far to go um and so i'm happy to answer any questions and also thank you so much for having me to talk about my favorite subject which are louisiana little people [Applause] could you just briefly explain what programs what's like what ccap means is this money paid to parents or is it paid to providers or is it like a medicaid distribution system sure the question was you know like what's the breakdown what does ccap stand for and where does the money go so child care assistance program is what ccap is it is basically right now in our state pretty much a voucher it doesn't go directly to the families but it goes to the child care providers that are part of our accountability system most people don't know that our early childhood and education accountability system in the state of louisiana is in the top 10 in the country so what that means is that for every public dollar that goes into the system we're accountable for it because we have a system in place and so for a family that qualifies for child care assistance they they qualify and then they can bring their voucher to an uh a child care center that's in the accountability system and we call those child care centers type three centers they're different types and the type three child care center are part of the accountability system so again people go well how do we know our money's doing what it's supposed to do well for every public dollar that goes behind the children they're in an accountability system that we can measure the teacher child interactions we can look at teacher qualifications and we can also look to see the growth and development of the children in that system yes sir they'll provide books to the newborns leaving the hospital i believe so the question was is there a program that still provides books to newborns when they're born coming out of the hospital i think that depends on the hospital in which you're born we're strictly a policy research and data institute that really goes after the facts uh and and make sure that making sure that there is an accountability system making sure that the public dollars are going where they need to making sure that we have a count on who's being served and who's not being served by parish and also looking at the different programs across the state the additional thing that we do is really work hard at telling the business case of early care and education that while it is a workforce of tomorrow issue it's a workforce of today issue because if parents can't go to work they can't take care of their children and i've never met a family that didn't want the best for their children they might not just not know how to do it and making sure that young children have access to quality early care and education is critically important yes ma'am how is this affecting the day care centers across town so the question was how is this this funding right this funding affecting the child care centers in louisiana what allows our early care and education child care centers to do is you know really be able to accept more publicly funded children so it gives them an avenue for um to provide services to children and their families that are desperately in need yes sir with the funding that um early childhood received this year how much of that was federal funds coming down because of some of the funding from congress compared to as a result what is the likelihood of next year that federal funding is not coming that this funding will be there so the question was really related to like where did this money come from and is it federal money and the question to the answer to your question is the money appropriated in our budget was state dollars we've had an influx of federal dollars come into the state and that's been really allocated through the child development block grant but these dollars in our state budget are state dollars and so what happened more than likely we could probably all guess is that the influx of federal dollar dollars for elsewhere in the state um freed up the ability to invest in early care and education the hope is is that 44 million dollars in the state budget will be reoccurring but we know that the 40 million dollars going into the early childhood education fund is one-time money and so stay tuned we'll be advocating for increased investment there too yes sir so the question was is head start in effect and how does this dovetail into into the head start program so early head start and head start are alive and well um those programs really serve our most impoverished children the good thing because we have you know one of the top 10 accountability programs in the state is that what makes us in that category is that our standards are unified whether it's early head start head start or child care assistance or an la-4 program so we're unified in our early learning development standards we're unified in licensing we're unified in the accountability system and so when we talk about our early childhood and early care and education system we're talking about a unified system that moves together so that every you know if you think about what's happening in the early start or head start or in our child care centers we're talking about the same things of what we look for we're looking at teacher child interactions we're you know we're really looking for the magic to turn on and and we see that in our centers and we see that in early childhood um our head start and early head start centers again having a unified system were one of the states that set the pace for that back in 2012 with act three and now many states are are really replicating what we're doing in louisiana because that unified system means that we don't have early care and education spread across all the state agencies it's in one place within our department of education and when we move we're able to move in unison and that became really important if we think about those coveted relief dollars because our state department of education had a mechanism in which to get those dollars out to our our critically important economic lifeline which is our child care center so you know families could go back to work and do those types of things yes uh yes our institute does work with dr zena in new orleans um how is that going because i know that's huge and what how are they are they focused on increasing the minimum wage so the question was related to the early care and education commission and the focus of there's a task force now going to be focused on compensation it's we just started like the new fiscal year july 1. so the commission probably won't meet until august september and that of that group there will be a task force related to wages i will tell you we have integrated group with other stakeholders in the state really looking at compensation to help support the commission work and it's really to think about you know how do we structure rates with child care providers and if we're thinking about the different dollars that go into a child care center how do we really incentivize them to increase their rates increase their wages for their teachers what we've seen with coven 19 because of the the different kova dollars that have come into the state there's been wage supplements to be able to pay teachers more and so how do we continue that but also if we're thinking about an hourly wage most of our child care providers don't have benefits and so if we're going to offer them benefits how do we offer them benefits while also increasing the wage so that the wage doesn't go down so the answer to your question is it's wildly complicated and we have you know the smartest people that we can think of in louisiana but we also have national experts lending in their hand and their minds into this work because it's it's never if you do this this happens you know like it's multiple things um and then to also the political nature of our state to to think about minimum wage going up we just don't know if that could happen so what are alternative ways um to increase rates for our early childhood teachers thinking outside of you know increasing the minimum wage in our state we have to be very very creative yes ma'am so if i'm a parent of a two and a half or three year old how do i know that this is open to you so the question was if i'm a parent of a two or two and a half or three year old how do i know that child care assistance or early childhood programs are open to me there's a few ways if i think about baton rouge they have a ready start community network that really is the one stop shop related to early care and education and so our parents can go to the east baton rouge school board website and look at their ready start network to learn they can also go to the department of education and become eligible for child care assistance and they can go to their their local child care providers and ask if they're a type 3 center that accepts child care assistance for their families and that i would say that's from six weeks up not just two and a half and three-year-olds oh yes ma'am i hate one more question yes ma'am we have [Music] um do a lot of work in that area and it just seems like they move from one perished and there's not enough new ones what are you all doing to try to enhance and at least at the preschool level so the question was related really to teacher retention and how do we retain the teachers that we have in the early care and education system because we know that teachers are moving around and so that's really again like why we're doing a workforce study and really understanding compensation because we know that we we underpay our teachers particularly in early care and education settings and when we hear that k-12 teachers get a raise that's for k-12 teachers if we think about our publicly funded preschool programs in schools that doesn't actually mean they're in the in the mfp to get a raise and so what our districts do because they want to do parity for those four-year-old programs is they find money elsewhere in their budget to give those four-year-old teachers a raise but that's very different than in our early childhood centers in our small businesses our early care and education child care centers they're they're trying to make ends meet and they're doing the best that they can to keep up to be able to retain teachers but it's hard to pay to pay our early care and education teachers in child care yes sir well while the business community is pretty much killed uh of minimum wage increases uh where are where is the business community on some of these issues like lobby uh nfib sure so the question is you know where is business on early care and education and i would say that our state chamber lobby has been wildly supportive of early care and education so much so this legislative session they put their support behind all the bills on this page that you see that were won because they know it's a workforce issue they have to get people to work and if if people aren't working our economy can't thrive additionally if we think about the u.s chamber of commerce this is one of the critical issues that they follow and they do research on all the time and so our businesses know that this is critically important if i think about committee of 100 in our state if you ask them what their platform is they will say education and it includes early care and education and so our business community is there i will say at the policy institute for children we have worked very hard to make sure that we've helped educate and support our business communities across the state to understand you know how this impacts them so much so that we released an april a business workforce calculator for businesses to see what child care breakdowns are costing them and you can go on our website at policyinstitutela.org to look at that we're really fortunate that entergy let us demo back in february what it what child care breakdowns were costing entergy and it's about 14 million dollars annually that's not small potatoes y'all that's big um and then gulf coast bank as well um they when we did the press release in april they allowed us to demo their numbers and they're losing about 600 000 annually and it's because you can't get you can't get people into work you might have people come in but they have to leave early because they don't have reliable child care and then you have people that won't take they won't take a promotion they might go stay part-time rather than go full-time they might quit work altogether and then the replacement cost of retraining and making sure you have a workforce to do what you need to do and so you know i welcome anybody that wants you can go to our website you can put your own your own business information in there and see what it just cost your business whether it's big medium or small and you can really see how child care breakdowns affect all of us yes sir by what yard sticks and in what year do you think i will be able to measure the success of this this the question was you know when do we think we could measure the success of this endeavor and do you mean this year's investment or do you i need a little bit more specificity okay so i think you know there's a couple of things we know from the la-4 program which were one of the first states that had a four-year-old program uh for children that were at risk and what we know from that program from longitudinal work there is that the children that you know took part in that stunt in in that program finished high school and are doing and they've done it well all along and so one of the things that we have to really work on in our state is i would say a unified data system so that we can accurately study longitudinally how children are doing over time based on the types of supports and services that they can get and so this investment this year covers about four to five more percent than what we had before but we're still looking at 20 percent of 150 000 children that we know that are at risk and we need better data systems to be able to to measure that but what we know from longitudinal research is this and i've had the great fortune of working on one of the longest longitudinal studies quite frankly in the world and now these children are in the fifth decade they're around 45 is that if you have access to quality early care and education in your first five years you're more likely to finish high school if you go to college you finish college you have better health outcomes better economic outcomes and when we looked at their brains because we were able to do functional mri you could see differences in the func the structure and the function of their brain this is long-term outcomes that have meaningful differences and this is about saving lives anybody that works with me pretty frequently hears me say if you don't think we're saving lives you're not on my train because the train we're on is about saving lives and making sure that children and their families have access to what they need and that's why we need to go far together and not go far in disparate groups we've got to stay together to do this and so the answer to your question is we'll continue to study what we know is that the class observation tool that we use to measure quality in our state has predicted validity which means if there are good scores on this instrument that children are more likely to do better but at the end of the day one of the functions that we need to see is that we get better than we are now and how is that we have 60 percent of our kindergartners entering into kindergarten in the state of louisiana that are not ready to learn in some parishes it could be up to 90 percent thank you you