With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone.
At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old. And at younger ages, it’s not the kids asking for the devices, but parents looking to keep tabs on their children out of concern for their safety.
That’s what EdSurge senior reporter Emily Tate Sullivan found when she spent months researching the recent boom in smartwatches for kids, for a feature story that EdSurge co-published with WIRED magazine last week.
“The worst case scenario in the minds of the parents I talked to is just always looming,” she says. “These parents think, ‘If there's a school shooting, if there's a lockdown, I want to be able to communicate with my child in that locked down classroom. If they are abducted, I want to be able to know exactly where they are. Maybe there's still a watch on their wrist and I can track them.’ I mean, these are things that are so improbable, but it doesn't really matter. The fear is pervasive. It's a really powerful force.”
But while parents focus on physical safety as they hand kids smartwatches, they may not be considering the downsides of starting a digital life so early, according to digital media experts. And schools are increasingly seeing the devices as a distraction — sometimes from parents texting their kids during the school day. Yet watches are often not included in school bans on smartphones, and they’re not always mentioned in the conversation about the effects of digital devices on children.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we go behind the story with an interview with Tate Sullivan, including details that she wasn’t able to fit into the final piece. And in the second half of the episode, the author reads the full article, so you can catch this story in podcast form.
Many parents are unable or unwilling to send their children to school with a phone. Smartwatch use among kids is booming, but experts warn the devices could be yet another “electronic umbilical cord.”
As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.
“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”
When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.
“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”
She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.
She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.
Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.
Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.
Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”
And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.
[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.
— Kris Perry
“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”
Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.
Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.
“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”
Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.
In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.
The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.
Today’s tools make such tracking possible.
“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”
This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.
It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.
— Mitch Prinstein
Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.
“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.
“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”
Technology ‘Training Wheels’
When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.
It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.
“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”
Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.
Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.
Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.
A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.
Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.
— Girard Kelly
“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”
To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.
“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”
Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.
“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”
As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.
“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”
That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.
“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.
Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”
“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.
What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.
Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.
“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.
To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.
‘Better Be Safe Than Sorry’
When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.
“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”
She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.
“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.
The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.
The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.
Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.
Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.
Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”
Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.
Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.
“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”
It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.
Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.
“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”
But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.
Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.
“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.
Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, byanumberofmeasures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)
“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”
It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.
Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.
“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”
Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.
I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.
— Katie Joseph
“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”
Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.
If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.
“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”
Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.
“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.
Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.
One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.
“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”
The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.
‘Opening Pandora’s Box’
Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.
Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.
“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”
Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.
Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.
“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)
The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.
“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.
True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.
Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.
“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.
Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.
They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.
— Katie Joseph
“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”
She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.
Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.
For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.
Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.
He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.
“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”
Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?
Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.
That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.
“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”
Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?
The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”
Despite the historic funding that was funneled into the field in the wake of the pandemic, early care and education continues to be one of the most beleaguered occupations in the United States.
Early childhood educators earn, on average, $13.07 per hour, a wage that puts them in the bottom 3 percent of workers nationally. (Elementary and middle school teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $31.80 per hour, and U.S. workers, across occupations, earn about $23 an hour.)
That’s according to findings from the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a report that typically comes out every two years and is produced and authored by a team of researchers at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.
The U.S. early care and education system was broken long before the pandemic, thanks to a dynamic where families can’t afford to pay more while providers can’t afford to charge less. Those costs are, in effect, subsidized by the paltry wages earned by early childhood educators — the teachers and staff in these programs, about 98 percent of whom are women and half of whom are women of color — even though they are entrusted with one of the most important jobs that exists, said Caitlin McLean, lead author of the report and director of multi-state programs at CSCCE.
“Our child care workforce — the majority of whom have some higher education — are building our children’s brains in the most critical period of their development,” McLean said during a press call last week. “[Yet] early educators are paid so little that many worry where their next meal will come from.”
In early care and education programs, employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans are rare. Close to half (43 percent) of early educators rely on public assistance, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to make ends meet, which the report estimates is costing taxpayers $4.7 billion a year.
The billions of federal dollars pumped into the field in recent years — including $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act — are widely seen as having been successful in helping stabilize programs and prevent massive waves of closures. However, most of those dollars expired in September 2023, while the remainder expired about two weeks ago.
Absent ongoing funding and a more permanent solution for the field, ARPA dollars seem not to have meaningfully moved the needle. New data in the Workforce Index underscores that reality.
“The funding was not about making the ideal child care system,” McLean said. “It was about preventing the utter collapse of the system we had.”
Corrine Hendrickson’s situation illustrates why the funding stopped short of transforming the field and the lives of those who work in it.
Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career, and it really isn’t.
— Corrine Hendrickson
Direct-to-provider payments from ARPA allowed Hendrickson to make changes to her licensed home-based child care program in rural Wisconsin and spend money that she’d never had. She hired an employee for the first time, allowing her to step away for personal appointments. She made repairs and improvements to the building. She increased her own wages from $8 an hour to $12, which she said gave her enough extra money to buy her own kids clothes and pay monthly bills on time.
“Without the ARPA funding, I would’ve closed and never reopened,” she said, adding that as a home-based provider, “if I closed, I would’ve lost my home.”
But then ARPA funding expired last year, and she was forced to make hard decisions just to maintain her new hourly rate of $12. She has raised tuition rates on families three times in the past year, she shared, for a total increase of $70 per week. Some families, she added, have reached out to inquire about her program but then backed off when they learn she charges $259 to $281 per week, depending on the child’s age. It’s just too expensive, they tell her.
“Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career,” Hendrickson said, “and it really isn’t.”
Nationally, wages for early childhood educators have increased by 4.6 percent in the last few years, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Index. That’s still less than the overall workforce, whose wages have increased by an average of 4.9 percent, as well as those of fast food workers (5.2 percent) and retail workers (6.8 percent). The latter two occupations are relevant because many educators have left their positions in recent years for jobs in food and retail, where wages are similar or higher and stress is much lower.
The national average, though, is just an average. About a dozen states have stepped in with their own investments in early care and education since ARPA dollars expired, helping programs and staff to avoid the so-called “child care cliff” that others have endured.
Some states have seen much bigger wage increases for early educators; in nine states, plus Washington, D.C., early educators experienced wage increases of more than 10 percent. The highest gains were in D.C., with an average 27.1 percent wage increase for educators.
‘This Is a Serious Job’
Lida Barthol is an infant and toddler teacher in Washington, D.C., where her salary has soared in the last few years.
Barthol entered the field in 2016, when she was earning about $11 an hour. Now a lead teacher with a bachelor’s degree, and with help from the District of Columbia’s targeted compensation program for early childhood educators, she is making the equivalent of about $36 an hour.
In 2021, after the DC Council approved a tax increase on the city’s highest-income residents, the District launched the Pay Equity Fund, an effort to increase the compensation of early childhood educators so that it better aligned with that of K-12 teachers with similar qualifications and experience.
“Which is insane,” Barthol said. “It’s unheard of.”
In the program’s first year, educators received one-time payments of up to $14,000. Barthol remembers calling her friend, another early childhood educator, in disbelief over the state of her bank account. “We just sat there and cried,” she said. “It was a really big moment.”
Now, the District funnels Barthol’s wage supplement through her employer, so it is reflected in her regular paychecks. The program — which has led to higher recruitment and retention in the field — shows what is possible if early childhood educators are paid a livable wage.
“It really changed everything about my life,” Barthol said. It gave her and her partner of seven years the financial security to get engaged and plan a small wedding, which is set to take place next month. It’s a “cultural milestone,” she said, that she didn’t feel stable enough to have before.
It has also made her feel that her work — her career path — is valued.
“I used to say, ‘There’s no reason to get a master’s degree in early education because you’ll never earn that money back.’ But really, I love this field. I love learning. I love thinking deeply about the work I’m doing,” said Barthol, who graduated in the spring with her master’s degree in human development.
“It gave me the confidence to be like, ‘This is a serious job,’” she said. “You don’t need a degree to do an amazing job, but it is just that affirmation that this is serious work, and [with] young children, there’s complexity there.”
With federal pandemic relief now gone and a new presidential administration set to begin in a few months, the field is at a “crossroads,” the authors of the report wrote.
Barthol has been attuned to the candidates this election cycle, she said. The nominees of both major parties have mentioned child care at a number of campaign events and even during the recent vice presidential debate.
They’re not always getting it right, Barthol noted. She cited a recent interview with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who argued that the solution to sky-high child care costs for families was, first, to lean more on “grandma and grandpa” for care, and then, if that option isn’t available, to reduce regulations and lower qualifications for entering the workforce.
Vance suggested that the problem with the field is that the barrier to entry is too high, Barthol said, and that plenty of people want to work in early childhood education but can’t get a degree.
“What barrier to entry? You don’t need a degree,” Barthol said. “The issue is the pay being so low and the unpredictability of benefits.”
She’s seen many young people enter the field, enthusiastic about working with kids, only to realize how “physically, mentally and emotionally demanding it is,” then receive that first paycheck and decide, nope, this isn’t going to work for them.
“It’s not that the barrier to entry is so high,” Barthol reiterated. “It’s that the system is not built to support young families and the people who care for their children.”
Miguel Quinteros spent over a decade as something of a tech-savvy teacher — one not afraid to try new things in the classroom, in hopes that they would make learning more interesting, more intuitive and more engaging for his students.
He took that proclivity to the next level a few years ago, when he accepted a position as a K-12 technology coach in a small school district in western Michigan.
Quinteros loves the work he gets to do, trying to solve problems for teachers, students and administrators in his rural farming community, removing obstacles that come their way and generally continuing in his pursuit of looking for ways to make learning more fun and approachable to students.
And he hasn’t had to abandon teaching. In 2022, Quinteros’ district, Mason County Central School District, opened a first-of-its-kind immersive room that, with augmented and virtual reality advanced technology, allows students to deepen their learning with interactive, sensory-oriented lessons — from the World War I trenches to erupting volcanoes to ancient Greece. Quinteros manages the immersive room for the district and helps bring lessons to life for children of all ages.
“I just get to do the fun part now: teach,” he shares. “I don't do the grading and the discipline anymore.”
In any given school, a robust school staff is quietly working behind the scenes to help shape the day for kids. In our Role Call series, we spotlight staff members who sometimes go unnoticed, but whose work is integral in transforming a school into a lively community. For this installment, we’re featuring Miguel Quinteros.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Name: Miguel Quinteros
Age: 51
Location: Scottville, Michigan
Role: K-12 technology coach
Years in the field: Three in current role, after 11 as a teacher
EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to your role as a technology coach?
Miguel Quinteros: Well, I'm originally from El Salvador. I came when I was 25 for medical treatment, and then I had to stay in the country and find something to do. So I became a youth minister with the Catholic Church. Then I thought, ‘Oh, I like to work with young people,’ so I decided to become a teacher. When I was studying to become a teacher, I had to choose a major and a minor, and I picked social studies as my major and computer science as my minor. With my minor being computer science, I focused a lot on how to use technology in the classroom, how to do things that we would not be able to do otherwise.
Once I became a teacher, even though I was teaching Spanish, computer science and social studies to middle and high school students, I was always using technology in the classroom. It was a small town, and word got out. After the pandemic, I think a lot of school districts realized that teachers needed more support with technology, and a lot of tech coach positions came up. So then the district where I work now actually recruited me to come take this position.
When people outside of school ask you what you do, like at a social event, how do you describe your work to them?
Most of the time, I don't like to tell people what I do. I feel like, especially being Hispanic, when people see me in social [settings], they assume that I work in the fields doing migrant work, agriculture. And the moment they know what I do, it’s almost like they give me more importance. I like people to see me for who I am as a person, not for what I do.
But if I meet somebody, and I can see that they genuinely accept me for who I am, then I open up more with them. Otherwise, I guess I'm kind of guarded with this topic. It's sad, but that's the reality, and I have to live in my skin every day.
Let’s say you met someone who was genuinely interested in you. How would you describe to them what your work entails, if you were feeling really talkative and generous that day?
I’d tell them I am a technology coach, and most people are like, ‘What is that?’ Because these are kind of new positions that have emerged. And then I explain that I go into classrooms and help teachers use technology, to make classrooms more engaging. I also order technology for the teachers and for the students — physical technology as well as learning apps. I provide teachers with training on how to use that technology.
And then they ask more questions. If they said, ‘So you don't teach kids anymore?’ then I tell them about what I do with teaching young kids, too. My position is really unique because we have, in our district, an AR/VR immersive room, which I run and I create content for when I have downtime. It’s the first of its kind in a K-12 building in the whole country, and it's open for our K-12 students. It’s this room with three big walls with projectors that become interactive to the touch and with surround sound. The floor is also interactive. It's like virtual reality without the goggles.
If I didn’t have that immersive room, I would probably miss being in the classroom, because I went to school to be a teacher. And I like that part, the teaching aspect.
When did the immersive room open in your district? And what are you teaching kids in that setting? What does that look like?
The immersive room was an initiative for the district right after the pandemic. They were brainstorming ideas on how to get kids to come back to school after such a long period of time away.
So far it has accomplished that goal. We’re a rural community. We don't have that much funding, and our kids come from very poor homes and backgrounds. A lot of children have never been to a museum, never been to cool places in the big city. With the immersive room, basically we can recreate any of that.
We can take a field trip to the deepest part of the ocean, for example. I have this one immersive experience that starts on the surface of the ocean and then lowers depending on what part of the ocean you want to visit. If you want to go to the part where the coral reefs are, or if you want to go to the deep part of the ocean where it's dark and no light gets through, you can do that. And then once we are there, in the ocean, the buttons are interactive in the walls and the children take turns touching those buttons, which gives them information about the specific aspect of the ocean. So the kids come and they get to touch the walls and interact and learn that way. And the room also has this four-dimensional aspect. If I want to bring a seashore scent into this experience, I can upload that so they can smell like they're right there in the ocean. And there's also fans that can activate and recreate different wind variance.
So that's what makes the lesson more interactive. We have other lessons to go to the moon, where we play with the gravity of the moon. There's bricks that they pull with their hands, and they fall and it simulates gravity. And then we talk about gravity. ‘What happens if we throw this brick right here on earth? How fast would that go? And look what happens if we throw this brick on the moon and how much slower it goes down.’ Then we’ll learn about the phases of the moon, how the moon interacts with the oceans and how that influences us and our daily lives on earth. This is what makes it really cool for the students.
That sounds incredible. I've never heard of anything like that. And you’re saying you teach all grade levels in the immersive room?
Yes, right now, but the way it works is the teachers schedule time with me and they bring the kids. The teachers are there in the classroom with me also. When they sign up, they give me an idea of what they expect to see in the immersive room. And then when they come, I have the lesson ready and the moment they walk in, boom, they are immersed in the lesson. That's what I like about the system.
What does a hard day look like in your role?
Sometimes, I have to make sure that rostering is OK. That means I have to spend the whole day fixing data and correcting names of students and making sure that everything is properly entered in the system and that students have access to their devices. And I have literally spent days repetitively deleting duplicate students. I guess that would be a hard day, just the monotonous work. I like variety.
What does a really good day look like?
A great day for me is when I get to do a little bit of everything: when I get to see the students, when I get to teach at least one class, when I get to interact with the teachers, helping them brainstorm ideas on how can we include students in this learning process with an app, and when I get to do some purchases too on that day, for some things that the teachers really need.
It just fills my heart when I am able to advocate for them because I tell them, ‘I like to do for you what nobody did for me when I was a teacher.’ Nobody will come and say, ‘What do you need? How are things going?’ I like to do that on a daily basis. If I find myself with the downtime, I don't stay here at my desk. I walk and I go to the other buildings, and it’s like, ‘Oh, Miguel, by the way,’ and then they need me for something. I get to interact with the principal. I get lots of hugs when I go to the lower elementary with the younger kids, like kindergarten to second grade.
So I guess a fulfilling day for me would be when I get to serve all of my clients — and in my job, my clients are students, teachers, admin, and anyone who is walking through this building — and when I get to make their lives better, a little bit lighter.
What is an unexpected way that your role shapes the day for kids?
One way is all the educational apps that they use on a daily basis. If something goes wrong with it, they call me. But if everything is running smoothly, it’s because of the job I do. I guess that's where my job gets taken for granted, when everything is running smoothly, everything is in place. We use tons of different learning apps — from Google Classroom to Clever — and I'm the person responsible for rostering them and then training the teachers.
What do you wish you could change about your school or the education system today?
I wish that the teaching profession would be more respected, that teachers would be able to get all the resources they need and the support that they need. I wish the politicians would put more money where their mouth is. Teachers are underappreciated. I wish that our society would realize that without teachers, there are no other careers. There's no doctors, there's no lawyers, there's no politicians — without teachers.
Also one of the things that I wish we could change is that we expect all students to have the same credits. In Michigan, if you want to graduate high school, you have to have three science credits, four social studies credits, four ELA. Everyone has to have the same. And I think that's seriously wrong because not all kids are the same. Everybody has different needs, everybody has different dreams, everybody has different backgrounds. We should provide students with a variety of choices.
Like OK, imagine this kid who is terrible at reading and he hates social studies, but he's a hands-on kind of kid and he likes to take things apart. Why not provide a path for this kid where he will get to graduate with a high school diploma and with skills on how to do the particular job that the kid wants?
Your role gives you unique access and insight to today's young people. What's one thing you've learned about them through your work?
I’ve learned about how life is a lot simpler in a kid’s mind, and they know the joy of living day to day. When a kid comes and gives you a hug, they really mean it. When they give you a high five, it's because they want to do that. I am touched by the sincerity of the kids and how many times they teach us that life can be fun, life is fun.
Before I became a teacher, I was doing youth ministry and I was recruiting this kid, this young man, and I was like, ‘Hey, I have some fun programs at the church. Come and join us.’ He looked at me and said, ‘What kind of fun? Your kind of fun, or my kind of fun?’ I said, ‘That is an absolutely great question.’
That kid kind of changed my life because when I became a teacher, I always kept that in mind. Still to this day, that echoes in my head: ‘What kind of fun? Is it your kind of fun, or my kind of fun?’ Learning does not have to be boring. It should be fun. And that was my passion, to make learning fun for the students, to the point that they don't realize that they are learning because they're having too much fun.
That's what I like about students. Sometimes they can challenge you, they can ask you questions, and if you listen to them, we can learn a lot from young kids. I have learned a lot from them.
Four years ago this month, one of the most devastating wildfires in Oregon’s history erupted across the southern portion of the state.
As the COVID pandemic raged, leaving children out of schools and away from regular routines and social interactions, the fire only magnified the disruption. It destroyed thousands of homes in the agricultural towns that make up the Phoenix-Talent School District, displacing hundreds of families and closing as many businesses.
The wildfire, as with any natural disaster, had many ripple effects throughout the region. One that the district is still grappling with is the impact on young children. For the last few years, children have been entering kindergarten without some of the basic skills and abilities that had once been commonplace.
“It’s hard to separate the fire and pandemic,” says Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning at Phoenix-Talent School District. “The fire really exaggerated the learning losses and learning gaps of the pandemic. It made them even more visible, and it made them last longer.”
During the pandemic, many early learning programs and preschools — already a scarce resource in the area, Lambert says — shuttered temporarily. Then the fire, which damaged some early learning facilities, forced further closures. The two events prevented many children from accessing high-quality, in-person early care and education opportunities before kindergarten.
Plus, Lambert says, some of their families lost work, hurting them economically. Many of their parents were experiencing mental health challenges. Their households were filled with stress.
The combination of all of these factors helps explain the state of the district’s recent cohorts of incoming kindergarteners, she says. Many have lacked the social skills to interact with their peers, the ability to follow instructions and stick to a routine, the attention spans to sit through an entire story read aloud in class, Lambert says. Few had early learning experiences prior to starting school, she adds, and even concepts like which direction to turn the pages in a book are foreign to many of them.
Phoenix-Talent may be a more dramatic example, given the added impacts of the wildfire in 2020, but it is far from an anomaly. Across the country, elementary school teachers and leaders report that children are entering kindergarten worse off than their peers of the past. They have underdeveloped social-emotional and fine motor skills. Some are not yet able to use the restroom independently.
“The news is sobering,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, an assessment company that recently published research showing that the nation’s youngest learners, especially, are still struggling to rebound from the pandemic’s disruption to learning and development. “The impact of the pandemic is lasting way longer than we anticipated.”
The differences are hard to miss. More children are having trouble separating from their parents or caregivers when they go to school, for example, because maybe they haven’t had much or any time apart from them until now.
“We see a lot of concern from parents and from teachers,” says Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons, which operates more than 600 early care and education centers in the U.S.
Many educators and researchers, in interviews, point out that these developmental differences may not all be a result of the pandemic and the lower rates of preschool enrollment that followed it. Children’s reliance on screens, including very young children — even infants and toddlers — is likely a factor.
Robertson believes screens are responsible for much of the disruption to fine motor development. Rather than reading physical books, some children are having stories read aloud to them from a phone. Rather than doing arts and craft activities, which give them a chance to practice holding a crayon or using scissors, they’re swiping on tablets.
“We’re having consequences of screens that we didn’t predict,” Robertson notes.
The good news is that even if children are “behind,” that can easily — and sometimes quickly — change. They pick up skills fast at such a young age, especially when learning is steeped in curiosity and wonder, Robertson says.
Children need certain skills and competencies to be ready to show up, participate and thrive in kindergarten, educators and child development experts say. But many kids — and an increasing number over the last four years — lack access to the resources and experiences that introduce those skills to them before they start elementary school. Noting this worrying downward trend, many school districts have stepped in with their own solutions to support early learners as they prepare to start school. We take a close look at two of them.
Oregon’s Jump Start Kindergarten
During the pandemic, leaders at the Oregon Department of Education understood that early learning programs were critical for preparing children to transition to kindergarten and that those programs were much less accessible and available to families at the time, creating a “critical need,” says Marc Siegel, communications director for the state’s department of education, in a written response to EdSurge.
Leaders “understood that additional support was necessary to ensure our youngest learners were prepared for the social, emotional and academic demands of public school environments after a prolonged period without in-person learning opportunities,” he adds.
Those sentiments led to the creation of Jump Start Kindergarten, a state-funded program that utilizes Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act to provide incoming kindergartners and their families with an “on-ramp” to kindergarten.
A teacher guides an incoming kindergartener through a matching activity during a Jump Start Kindergarten lesson. (Photo courtesy of Phoenix-Talent School District.)
The Jump Start program varies based on the needs of each school and community where it’s implemented, Siegel says, but all include a few key components. Every Jump Start program has a half-day classroom experience for at least two weeks, for a minimum of 30 hours total, characterized by hands-on activities, establishing classroom routines, and building relationships with other children and educators. Additionally, each program offers partnerships with community-based organizations and provides experiences to promote family engagement, such as playground meet-and-greets, a school-based scavenger hunt or an opportunity to meet school staff.
Phoenix-Talent School District has offered the Jump Start Kindergarten program during the last three summers, with noticeable results, Lambert says. It has also expanded the program in a few ways.
The first year — summer 2022 — the district’s program prioritized children with special needs who had limited access to early special education services. During those few weeks, they learned to follow a routine, to line up as a class, to use a paper towel dispenser, Lambert recalls.
In the second and third year, the district expanded the program by opening it up to any child who didn’t attend preschool or another early learning program and increased the duration to five or six weeks. This summer, the program enrolled 34 kids. (Phoenix-Talent was estimating 140 kindergarteners this fall, and Lambert says 50 or 60 slots would’ve been ideal.)
Children sit and listen during story time in two classes of the Jump Start Kindergarten program. (Photo courtesy of Phoenix-Talent School District.)
The children who attended Jump Start Kindergarten seem to be “much more prepared” and more committed to showing up to school each day, Lambert shares. “We saw a big difference in attendance. That impacts academics, too. Students don’t learn if they’re not at school.”
Overall, kindergarteners in the district had an attendance rate of 59 percent in the 2023-24 school year, whereas the students that had attended Jump Start the prior summer came 78 percent of the time. (It’s too early to collect data for the 2024-25 school year.)
The Jump Start program has been a boon at Phoenix-Talent, especially now that staff have figured out how best to run it. Its future, however, hangs in the balance, with ESSER funding expiring at the end of this month and replacement funding from the state uncertain.
“We’re pretty sad about it,” Lambert says. “It helps kids — and their parents — be more comfortable starting school. … I think we’re going to need that for many, many years.”
Baby Bags, Badging and Beyond
Without a designated program from the state, other districts have had to be a bit more scrappy.
Leaders in Manheim Central School District, in Manheim, Pennsylvania, realized that the pandemic would impact even the children not yet in school, and that they would need extra support.
“We knew we had to do things differently,” says Tracy Fasick, the recently retired director of curriculum and instruction for the small, rural district.
They came up with a multi-pronged strategy that would engage families early — as early as possible, in fact — and would create better communication and consistency with local early learning programs.
One of those strategies was “baby bags.” When a baby was born in the district — somewhere on the order of 210 to 240 times per year, Fasick says — she would drop off a bag that included resources on local programs and early intervention services, some toys and learning materials, and a sippy cup and bib with the district’s mascot.
“Right away, it establishes that this is a future child who will come to our school,” Fasick says of the bags. “It’s welcoming.”
In the district’s kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms, teachers use “badging,” where kids don’t get letter grades but badges for different skills and competencies they’ve mastered. For example, in those early elementary grades, a child can earn a badge if they achieve certain literacy and numeracy goals.
Fasick wanted to get the district’s future students more accustomed to that system, so she met with all of the preschool leaders in the area and helped them develop age- and developmentally-appropriate badges for the preschoolers, working backwards from the badges available for kindergarteners. Now, those programs offer badging, too. Kids can earn them for gross motor skills — if they can hop and skip — and for zipping or buttoning their own coats, for sitting still and following directions.
The preschool programs now, Fasick says, “are very aware of what we’re teaching in kindergarten, so they can prepare [the children] for what is going to be happening in kindergarten.”
She adds: “Kids like the badging. It’s something tangible. … Learning is celebrated, which helps a lot.”
As a final push in the lead-up to kindergarten, Manheim Central provides families with “Countdown to Kindergarten” boxes at their kindergarten registration.
Aimee Ketchum, a pediatric occupational therapist and professor of early childhood development at the nearby Cedar Crest College, created the boxes to give families a crash course in everything their child would be expected to know by the time they start kindergarten.
Ideally, the kids have six months to work through all the activities in their box, which includes a planner (detailing two activities to do each month), a pencil box with fine motor manipulatives, seed packets for planting, a ruler to measure the growth of those seeds and eventual flowers, activities and scissors for developing cutting skills, note cards to practice writing their names and an index card and string with which to practice tying a shoe.
Ketchum, who assembles the boxes in her garage with her family, clarifies that they are not intended to replace more formal early learning experiences, but rather to supplement it for those who don’t have access.
“Children need access to high-quality early childhood education, and too many of them aren’t getting it,” she says. “This is an attempt to provide some tools [and] some hands-on activities, and give parents an awareness of what is expected and an opportunity to practice” those skills with their children.
Pretty much every parent and caregiver wants the best for their child, Fasick notes, but many don’t know where to begin. The boxes offer guidance.
“Families are grateful for anything they can get that will help their kid,” Fasick says. “This is an easy way to help them.”
When Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate earlier this month, his ascendancy helped to elevate the idea of educators serving in public office.
Walz, who served several terms in Congress before becoming the governor of Minnesota in 2018, is a former high school social studies teacher and football coach who, to this day, holds those identities close. Come January 2025, depending on the outcome of the election, he could be moving to Washington, D.C., to serve as vice president of the United States.
Though Walz is squarely in the spotlight during this election, a number of other educators are seeking public office this year, many for the first time.
In many ways, politics is an obvious and natural progression for educators, teacher-candidates and political scientists say.
This summer, EdSurge spoke with five individuals running for election — three classroom teachers, one superintendent and an early childhood advocate — about their motivations and the skills and experiences that would set them up for success in office, if elected in November.
Once a Public Servant, Always a Public Servant
Plenty of former educators hold public office today, including at the federal level, such as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, a former preschool teacher, and Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, a former high school history and government teacher.
“They’re already public servants,” Siegel-Stechler points out. “They have a lot of insight and experience in how to navigate some of the challenges that go along with large public institutions and the processes that make government happen.”
Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, adds that individuals who prioritize public service and volunteerism are more likely to engage with civic and political organizations.
Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.
— Jonathan Collins
“It’s the involvement in those networks that tends to catapult people into the process of running for office,” Collins says. “Think about teachers and teachers’ unions, about what a teacher does on an everyday basis. Arguably the highest form of service is to teach every day.”
Chad King Wilson Sr. is a high school alternative education and social studies teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. He’s running for a seat on the Frederick County Board of Education this November.
Teachers, Wilson says, understand that their role — with students, with families, in a community — has a certain power and, with it, demands a certain responsibility.
“In politics today, the decisions our elected officials make affect our lives — sometimes in small ways, sometimes big,” he says. “Educators have a service mindset and a duty of care in everything they do. That serves you well in any elected position, because you’re already serving. You’re a public servant, [asking], ‘How can I uplift you? How can I get you where you need to be?’”
Education Is Inherently Political — Even More So Today
Between the pandemic, which led to divisive and prolonged school closures, and the increasing politicization of education — from book bans to discussions of gender identity and legislation about what can be taught or said in a classroom — many teachers feel vilified.
“Teachers have found themselves under intense scrutiny in recent years, and that has really made them staunch advocates,” says Siegel-Stechler of Tufts. “When you feel like you are asked to justify and asked to uphold your values, that can lead you to want to make big changes.”
A few conditions must be in place for someone to run for office, adds Collins of Columbia. Once you account for access to resources and connections, the most important factor is being energized.
“You could argue no professional has had reasons to be as fired up over the last few years as teachers,” he says. “Teachers have been showing that they are fed up for quite a while. It’s the people who get fed up who tend to see politics as that next step as well.”
Especially when teachers feel that the conversations being had and decisions being made about them and their students don’t reflect reality, that can inspire some to run.
Numerous candidates noted that their school boards and state legislatures lack representation from people who have knowledge and understanding about schools today.
“You don’t have a lot of people [in office] who are still in front of students, working inside of schools, who know this because they live it every day,” says Wilson. “That gave me the nudge to go over the line: ‘I’ve gotta step up.’”
Sarah Marzilli is an elementary school art teacher who was running for a seat on the school board in Volusia County, Florida, but recently lost her primary. She feels that, with the pace of change in schools today — from social media and cellphone use to the growing challenges around mental health — school boards need representation from current educators.
“We need to make sure we have someone who’s in the trenches, so to speak,” Marzilli says, “not an outsider looking in on it.”
Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, a longtime Spanish teacher and current substitute teacher who is running for a seat in the Kentucky state legislature, notes that because a lot of legislators are lawyers, they can have unrealistic expectations about how quickly change happens in education.
“When they talk about education, they talk as if you can snap your fingers and have something done,” Cottrell says. “As teachers, we know the amount of time it takes. We know more about the initiatives that look good on paper but won’t actually move the needle. … We’re results-driven.”
While tuning in to a recent public committee hearing about the growing population of English language learners in Kentucky schools, Cottrell was appalled by committee members’ ignorance about basic education codes. “I wanted to jump through the screen,” she recalls. “No one knows what they’re talking about. … They’re not even asking the right questions.”
Susie Hedalen is currently the superintendent of Montana’s Townsend Public School District and running to be Montana’s next superintendent of public instruction. Hedalen has worked as a teacher, a principal and a superintendent at districts of varying sizes in Montana.
“I’m living it every day,” Hedalen says. “I know what our challenges are. I know what school leaders feel like they need and how the state could support leaders as well as teachers. I get to work with students and families every day and really have a pulse on what’s happening in education in Montana right now.”
A Bevy of Transferable Skills
Educators tend to possess a set of skills that lend themselves well to public office, many people pointed out.
For one, teachers are often effective communicators to different audiences, be it students, families or administrators. They can communicate well one-on-one but also to large groups.
Teachers are practiced decision-makers, too.
“They make a lot of hard decisions every single day,” Siegel-Stechler says. “Alone in a class with 20 to 30 kids, they have to be able to make good decisions on the fly.”
Educators are often good listeners. They are trusted members in their communities. They get along well with people who have a range of personalities and opinions. They have a certain comfort level with public speaking. And they tend to be disciplined. Those are all qualities that came up during interviews.
Educators are usually empathetic too, Collins says, noting that empathy is a quality missing from our politics today.
“In order to be an effective teacher, you have to be able to empathize with students — not judge them based on preconceived ideas, understand the humanity and dignity of each child and how to maximize their potential,” he says.
Educators Take a Seat at the Table
The two candidates who are running for seats in their state legislatures — Cottrell from Kentucky and Safiyah Jackson from North Carolina — both noted that the electoral system is stacked against people like them.
“If you’re an educator with educator friends, or a Black woman with Black friends, it makes fundraising very difficult,” says Jackson, an early childhood advocate and chief strategy officer at the North Carolina Partnership for Children. “If you’re a lawyer with lawyer friends, bam. It’s a system designed to deliver exactly as it’s delivering.”
It takes a lot of time and money and social connections to run and win a campaign, Cottrell says. That’s not very practical if you’re a full-time employee earning regular wages.
“I would love to see more teachers run for office and be empowered to do that,” Cottrell says, “but that’s really, really difficult under the work burden they have.” (Cottrell is not teaching full-time right now.)
The result, she says, is a body of legislators that does not include many people with “boots on the ground, who are getting their hands dirty in the work.”
Cottrell understands that not every educator can or wants to run for office. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be involved in the process of politics in some way. They might consider alternatives like asking to testify before a committee or offering to work with their representatives on legislation pertaining to education.
“The more teachers are involved in the process, the better relationship there will be between the statehouse and schools,” Cottrell says. “That can only benefit the kids.”
As someone who views cooking and baking as hobbies, not chores, I follow a lot of food bloggers and recipe developers on social media. I subscribe to many of their newsletters. I, well, make and eat a lot of their food.
Yet I’ve only come across one who devotes back-to-school season to easing the financial burden on educators.
Deb Perelman, the best-selling author and food blogger behind Smitten Kitchen, has been running the Classroom Wishlist Project for three years now. Each summer, she creates a post on her Instagram account (1.8 million followers) welcoming teachers to share their school supply lists, along with a bit of humanizing information like where they live and what they teach, in a Google form.
Then Perelman puts their responses in a spreadsheet, which as of mid-August has over 730 entries for the 2024-25 school year, and invites her expansive reader community to visit a teacher’s wish list and purchase what they can so that these educators don’t have to pay out of their pockets.
The average teacher, according to the nonprofit DonorsChoose, spends close to $700 of their own money on classroom supplies in a given year — a reality that “feels all wrong and makes me sad,” Perelman says in the Classroom Wishlist Project description.
The famous food writer lives in Manhattan and has children entering fourth and 10th grade this year. There are all sorts of causes and issues she could support. Why, I wondered, did she choose this one?
I recently got to ask Perelman that myself, along with other questions — like what has most surprised her about the endeavor and what recipe on her site most says “back to school.”
She is quick to note that the wish list project, which she finds gratifying and heartening, does not require major sacrifice on her part.
“I almost feel guilty, sometimes, about what a low lift this project is for me,” she admits. “I would do it if it was harder, [but] I feel like I have to be honest — I'm not sweating over this.”
She adds: “It's more a reflection of the generosity of the community, and the kindness. This is not about me doing anything special. I'm really just using a space I've already created to bounce the light back to people who need it.”
The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: When and how did the Classroom Wishlist Project first begin?
Deb Perelman: This is the third summer, so I guess that means that it began in — what year is this? — 2022.
A reader messaged me, and she said her daughter was a school teacher, and [the school] had given her no budget for classroom supplies. She asked: Would I mind sharing her classroom wish list with my readers and getting the word out?
It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.
— Deb Perelman
And when I did, they wiped out her wish list in, I feel like, under a day. The generosity was just staggering. And I heard from a lot of other teachers who asked if I could help them, too. I thought, ‘Yes, why not? Let's just do this.’
The first summer, it was not the most organized. Like, people would [direct message] me their list, and I would share it in a spreadsheet. By the second summer, which was last summer, I knew I was going to do this as a project, hopefully every year.
I created a Google Form where teachers could submit their list, and asked them to tell us a little bit about their classroom and to tell us what city they’re in. I think that helps a lot because sometimes you might read, like, ‘Oh, it's a music classroom. I love music,’ or, ‘Oh, that's my town.’ So it's more meaningful for people to have a little more information when there are so many [lists].
Doing it that way, we got a lot, a lot, a lot more submissions — like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And I worried — and I still worry — that we get too many submissions to make any meaningful difference. If it's 20 lists, we're going to wipe them out. But I can't promise that for 900 lists at all — or even close.
But the thing I forget is that, if you need stuff and a stranger sends you even a quarter of it or one [item], it still just completely makes your day. Whether you just got the crayons or just got 10 books, it doesn't matter. There's no way it's not well received, even if it's not everything people need.
Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman
I imagine people receiving and giving appreciate the humanity of it.
Yeah, I think it feels good on both sides. And I think it feels really fun to buy books and crayons for classrooms. I love buying school supplies.
I have two kids, and they're both in public school. When they first started in their elementary school, we would get [a list] from the teachers at the beginning of the year, ‘Here's some stuff we could use for the classroom, bring it in if you can.’ And then, as the fundraising improved at the public school, the PTA was able to bring in more money. We no longer have to buy any school supplies at all, and it really is such a privilege. I mean, we don't even buy a single box of crayons. It's just — it's crazy.
We got very lucky. … And like I said, I think it's so fun to buy crayons and books and whatever for a classroom. It feels really good.
That's a very organic start. Do you often get reader emails of people asking for you to support a cause?
Not as often as I would expect, but maybe I'm not that on top of my email.
Photo courtesy of Deb Perelman
One of the dark Smitten Kitchen secrets is that I have no staff, just sort of a very, very, very part-time assistant. I'm just like a do-it-myself person, which is good and bad. So I wouldn't say this happens a ton, but I liked this one. It feels good. I think everybody wins. I love the idea of supporting teachers.
The things that these teachers need are often so basic. These are small, inexpensive purchases that can really make somebody’s day. And then I get these lovely notes back from them. It’s just the joy, the incandescent joy, from people who walk into their classroom and find that a complete stranger bought all the glue they needed for the year. Or somebody sent me this picture of — it must be 50 books for her classroom. Somebody bought basically every book on her list, and she walked into her classroom and it was there.
How do the teachers find you? Are they often readers in your online community?
Usually. I mostly do the shoutout through Instagram, where I have my largest social community. I have a website too, but I almost try to funnel it down a little bit. It's either somebody who reads the site, or it might be their kid or their friend. I was trying to keep it from being too wide and too open on the internet, because otherwise we'll just get 10,000 wish lists and nothing will get filled.
But I also like the idea, if I can get a part-time staff person next summer, of trying to expand it a little bit more. Like maybe I can get some people to sponsor or match wish list clearing. I just don't have, personally, the bandwidth to dig into that right now.
Is there any teacher this year or in past years whose story stands out to you?
Oh, my goodness, there have been so many.
I remember last summer, after the wildfires in Hawaii, there were people who were looking specifically for the lists from those teachers [on Maui].
Especially when there's been some sort of tragedy or weather disaster, and it's been in the news and teachers don't even know how they're going to start their school year, I think there's definitely a lot of focus on that. There's definitely an interest in helping in such a specific way — where what you're doing is going to directly affect a kid's education and how their year goes. It feels like the most satisfying giving in that way.
Is there a request that has been especially frequent or something that surprises you when you look through these wish lists?
I think the thing that [is most surprising] is just that so much of how a school thrives depends on the way we do funding. And I am not a national expert on education in any way … but so much of it comes from crowdsourced fundraising and not out of the money schools get from the state for students.
In a lot of places, parents don't have extra money to give. And then there's other places where parents are writing $500 checks or more to the PTA every year, and it's just crazy how much that changes a kid's education.
If you're in an area where parents don't have deep pockets and a lot of spare change, why should the kids' classrooms not have what they need? Why should that affect whether they have enough crayons? It's wild when you think of it that way.
That's what's been eye-opening for me. I've also heard from so many retired teachers and older teachers who are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I must have spent $2,000 a year from my own paycheck. This is so nice that people want to help out.’ People don't see this money that the teachers are spending. It's invisible.
Do you measure success by dollars raised or wish lists cleared, or are you measuring it at all?
I'm actually not measuring it at all. … I do use the thank you notes as a good measure of how it's being received and the joy. You can always just see the joy.
Final question: What recipe on your website is the most quintessential ‘back to school’ recipe?
I think homemade Oreos have got to be it, right? I mean, of course. It's either going to be grilled cheese and tomato soup — a kid-friendly meal — or it's going to be homemade Oreos. They’re really easy: It’s like two chocolate sugar cookies with vanilla in them. They’re really fun.
2023 was the hottest year ever recorded on the planet — by far. More than halfway in, 2024 is on track to exceed it, with July the hottest month on record and July 22 the hottest day.
Everyone is feeling it — energy bills are up, social plans are disrupted, sleep and exercise are more elusive. In early care and education, children and caregivers are finding that it’s disrupting their everyday routines and experiences.
“The heat is different this year for us,” says Tessie Ragan, owner of Perfect Start Learning, a licensed home-based child care program in Rosamond, California, which she describes as the “desert part” of the state.
By the end of June, temperatures regularly approached or exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit in her Southern California community.
Although Ragan runs a nature-based summer camp for 3- to 6-year-olds, the weather made it impossible for them to be outside some days.
“It’s just too hot for them,” she concedes. “Some of the kids started breathing heavy. It just made it miserable for them to be outside.”
Without a shade structure or heat-resistant playground equipment, much of Tessie Ragan's backyard is unsafe for children in her program during the hottest weeks of the summer. Photo courtesy of Ragan.
Extreme heat can be dangerous for anyone, but it’s especially troubling for young children.
Children under age 5 are physically more susceptible to the negative effects of extreme heat, explains Allie Schneider, an early childhood education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank that recently published a report on the topic.
Our sector is not prepared for this.
— Angie Garling
Little kids’ bodies heat up faster and cool down slower. They have fewer sweat glands. And any hit to their sleep or concentration can have a deleterious effect on their learning and development, Schneider says. Plus, when temperatures are up, air quality tends to go down, which is also worse for kids, who inhale and exhale about twice as often as adults.
As temperatures trend upward, already-hot places like Rosamond are getting hotter, while more temperate regions that have long escaped a need for indoor air conditioning and outdoor heat-mitigation systems are now having to adjust to a new normal.
That’s putting a strain on early care and education programs, which are responsible — first and foremost — for keeping kids safe and healthy, but seldom have access to the funds needed to add or upgrade heat-mitigation systems.
“They absolutely do not have the infrastructure that they need,” says Angie Garling, senior vice president of early care and education at Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a national community development financial institution with an early care and education team focused on investing in the child care ecosystem. “Our sector is not prepared for this.”
Garling often hears from child care providers, whose messages boil down to this: “I know about kids. I know what I need for kids. Somebody needs to help me figure out the rest.”
Providers want support figuring out how to navigate, prioritize and afford solutions like solar panels and HVAC systems.
“They’re also very cost conscious, because they’re severely underpaid and under-reimbursed,” Garling adds.
Ragan has been running her summer camp for years. She used to start it after her program’s school year ended in May, with camp running for six weeks, from the first of June to mid-July.
A few years ago, grappling with extreme heat that had become “insane,” she had to reconsider her approach.
“We could not be comfortable or safe outside,” Ragan recalls. She says she was scared for the kids. “They all started turning bright red. No matter how much water I gave them. … They slowed down and weren’t enjoying themselves.”
She adds: “It made it impossible for us to have actual, meaningful summer camp activities.”
The plastic play equipment would get so hot it could burn a child’s skin. The overhang on her house only extended so far, leaving much of the backyard exposed to the sun. She couldn’t afford to buy a misting system or a larger shade structure or wooden playground equipment — all thousands of dollars apiece — to ease the situation.
The roof on Tessie Ragan's home covers a portion of the backyard, offering kids in her program a shaded patio. But the sun-exposed area is often too hot for children. Photo courtesy of Ragan.
“It didn’t seem like it was in the children’s best interest for me to run the summer camp [if] we didn’t have the ability to be outside as much as they need to be outside,” says Ragan, who talks about the importance of outdoor play for kids’ gross motor development.
She decided to abbreviate camp going forward, wrapping up at the end of June. That meant losing two weeks of income, but it would allow her to cut out two of the hottest weeks of the summer.
Ragan made a personal sacrifice to prioritize children’s health. As a provider, she knows what signs to look out for and when kids might be reaching their limit.
Because young children are less able to recognize and communicate when they are experiencing symptoms of heat exhaustion, it falls to the caregivers in their lives to notice and respond.
That is an important but tricky responsibility, says Schneider, since there is no standardized guidance for caregivers. Some pediatricians say that anything above 85 degrees could harm a child’s health, she notes, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a single temperature, since humidity, sun exposure and exertion are factors to consider.
Still, Schneider believes clear guidance is both achievable and necessary for early childhood programs and providers in the near term, but she stops short of saying there should be any requirements around it.
“One hesitation we have about including a specific, enforceable requirement in child care licensing programs, is that it does present a financial barrier for providers who are already operating on very thin margins,” she explains.
Garling, at LIIF Fund, agrees — and believes that’s why early childhood should be prioritized for climate adaptations. These include outdoor improvements such as heat-resistant play equipment, misting systems, trees, solar panels and shade structures, as well as indoor upgrades like insulated windows, air purifiers and electric HVAC systems.
“Businesses can benefit, and therefore children can benefit,” Garling says. “Children can be inside in a healthy way, and they can be outside.”
We’re worried about paying our bills, paying our staff. It leaves very little — almost nothing — to save for something like this.
— Nancy Harvey
Nancy Harvey, a home-based provider in Oakland, California, has welcomed some climate adaptations in her home over the last year.
With the help of a grant from LIIF, Harvey was able to replace an outdated heating system and get air conditioning in her home for the first time. (That grant is part of the work LIIF is managing on behalf of the state of California to help about 4,000 providers expand and improve their physical spaces.)
Oakland doesn’t experience some of the extreme temperatures that many other parts of the country do, Harvey acknowledges, but it can still get up into the 90s in the summer and down to the 40s in the winter.
Last October, Harvey got a ductless mini-split heat pump installed in the ceiling on the first floor of her home. The placement alone is a huge relief, she says, since her old system was a wall heater that she always feared a child would burn themselves on (she had a plastic lattice cover on it for safety, but says: “Has that ever stopped a child?”)
With the help of a grant, Nancy Harvey received a new energy-efficient ductless mini-split heat pump, making her house more comfortable during winter and summer. Photo courtesy of LIIF.
The new system has made the inside of Harvey’s house more comfortable during both winter and summer, she says.
“This is a learning environment,” she emphasizes. “[Now], we don’t have to worry. It enables the children to focus and have a better educational environment.”
Without the grant, she never would have been able to afford these upgrades, Harvey says.
“We don’t have enough funding. We’re worried about paying our bills, paying our staff,” she says. “It leaves very little — almost nothing — to save for something like this.”
Extreme heat can cause real, serious health effects, especially for children with asthma and other respiratory issues. But many people are quick to point out that, when it’s too hot for children to be outside, they are also denied key gross motor development opportunities and quintessential experiences of being a kid.
“Children this age — they love outdoor play,” says Harvey. “They thrive on it. It is certainly a very big disappointment when they can’t go outside and breathe in clean air, fresh air.”
Harvey has woven numerous outdoor activities into her program, from painting outside to riding bicycles to setting up a “castle” they can play in.
When they're stuck inside — due to extreme temperatures or bad air quality from wildfire smoke — “they miss all of that,” she says. “Those are important developmental activities that they’re not able to enjoy when we’re forced to be inside.”
Tiaja Gundy was just 19 years old when she started working at Federal Hill House, an early learning center in Providence, Rhode Island. It was 2016, and back then, she lacked experience and expertise working with young children. She had no intention of staying in the field long-term.
But the work grew on her. Gundy started out as a “floater,” helping with infants, toddlers and preschoolers as needed. She found she loved being around children.
As years passed, Gundy gained experience, and she moved into an assistant teaching position in a toddler classroom. Yet she was still missing some of the critical knowledge about child development that would allow her to continue growing in her career.
In 2021, Gundy recalls, one of her supervisors pulled her aside, and said, “You’re very promising. I know you can go farther in this field,” then told her about an interesting opportunity.
Rhode Island was launching a registered apprenticeship program for early childhood educators. With her employer’s support, Gundy would get to continue her paid teaching job as she took college courses, pursuing a Child Development Associate (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for those who work in early care and education settings. It would set her up to one day become a lead teacher. The apprenticeship would come with guaranteed wage increases, too.
Tiaja Gundy, a toddler teacher in Providence, Rhode Island.
The thought of balancing both work and school again was daunting, Gundy admits, but she was encouraged by her colleagues and excited to deepen her understanding of early childhood education. She decided to apply.
For decades, apprenticeship has been a popular career pathway for occupations such as electricians, plumbers and carpenters. In early care and education, however, there was limited uptake of the model.
Recently, that has changed — and fast. A decade ago, only a handful of states had registered apprenticeship programs in early childhood education. Five years ago, that had risen to about a dozen. As of last year, 35 states had an apprenticeship program for child care and early childhood education, and another seven states were developing them, according to a report published by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC).
In 2021, the last year for which there is available data, early childhood education was one of the five fastest-growing occupations for apprenticeship, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“There’s just been an explosion,” says Linda Smith, who authored the BPC’s apprenticeship report last summer and has since joined the Buffett Early Childhood Institute as director of policy. “It is happening all over this country.”
Explaining the ‘Explosion’
Smith sees at least two reasons for the emergence and rapid growth of this model in early childhood education.
The first is that more federal funding has become available in recent years. At least 10 states are using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars to build or expand their child care apprenticeship programs, and 13 are using Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five funds. As many as 15 states are using money from the Child Care and Development Fund, which received a $15 billion boost under ARPA.
The second reason is that there is increased awareness of how essential and how endangered the early care and education sector is.
“We’re in a tough spot right now with child care in this country,” Smith says soberly. “We have a workforce problem on our hands. Everyone is crying for child care workers. They can’t fill jobs. Wages are low. Child care programs can’t compete with big box stores, fast food, you name it.”
Broad recognition of that reality, Smith says, made policymakers and other leaders more willing to invest in the early education workforce.
It also helps, she adds, that people understand what apprenticeships are. It’s a well-established model that they can visualize and — importantly — measure.
From day one, an apprentice is a W-2 employee. There is no such thing as an unpaid apprentice.
— Randi Wolfe
Randi Wolfe, founder and executive director of Early Care and Education Pathways to Success (ECEPTS), an organization that provides training and technical assistance to get programs registered as apprenticeships, believes this model is proliferating in early care and education because it’s a natural fit for the field’s workforce development needs.
The early care and education workforce, Wolfe points out, is mostly made up of low-income women, and they are disproportionately women of color, immigrants, non-native English speakers and first-generation college students.
“Asking those people to do an internship that is unpaid creates unintended inequity,” Wolfe says. “From day one, an apprentice is a W-2 employee. There is no such thing as an unpaid apprentice.”
It works well for both educators and early learning programs, she adds. Early childhood educators who can’t afford to miss out on wages while they earn a degree get to do both at the same time — and at little or no cost. They get raises throughout the apprenticeship and, in many cases, are eligible for a promotion once they complete it.
Their employers, meanwhile, end up with highly skilled teachers who, after investing significant time and energy into their careers, are more likely to remain in the field.
“They’re the best qualified candidate,” Wolfe says of apprentices. “You’ve trained them. You’ve grown them.”
For early learning programs, better-qualified teachers can also help them move up the scale on their state’s quality rating system. Higher quality ratings are tied to higher subsidy reimbursement rates in many states. In short, apprentices help a program’s bottom line.
All of these outcomes support children and families, who benefit greatly from having teachers who provide high-quality, research-backed care and education.
The Nuts and Bolts of Apprenticeships
To be considered a “registered” apprenticeship, programs must meet a number of criteria and get approval from the U.S. Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency. All registered apprenticeships have a sponsor, such as a community-based organization, a workforce intermediary or a business, that manages program operations. Registered apprenticeship programs have a few other key ingredients:
Employers must partner with apprentices, allowing them to learn while they earn. In early care and education, the employers are early learning programs.
Apprentices must receive on-the-job training with opportunities to practice their new skills in context. Many programs pair apprentices with a mentor to fulfill this goal.
Apprentices must receive instruction related to their industry. In early care and education, that happens in a classroom setting, often at a community college but at four-year institutions too. Employers are expected to provide support and flexibility so apprentices can attend classes and complete coursework.
Apprentices are guaranteed incremental wage increases as their knowledge and skills grow. This is a huge win for early educators, who have some of the lowest wages in the country, but also a point of tension for programs, which are seldom in a financial position to pay staff more.
Apprentices must receive a credential. In early education, that is usually a CDA or an associate degree, and sometimes a bachelor’s degree.
Despite the many criteria, there is still some flexibility for individual apprenticeship programs to put their own spin on the model.
In Rhode Island, where Gundy apprenticed, the program is exclusively for infant and toddler teachers, often the “least educated and least compensated” faction of the early childhood workforce, says Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island Association for the Education of Young Children, which helped develop and implement the program, in partnership with a state agency, and now manages it.
There is a notion in the field, Hildebrand says, that if you start out as an infant or toddler teacher, you can get more training and education and then “move up” to teaching preschool.
“It’s almost like a promotion,” she says, because preschool teachers typically earn more money and command more respect.
But that dynamic leads to the high turnover of infant and toddler teachers, which, given the challenges many programs already face with hiring and retention, and the legal requirements around staff-to-child ratios, can result in classroom closures and reduced slots for the youngest children. It certainly has in Rhode Island.
“The waiting list for infants and toddlers is absolutely astronomical,” Hildebrand says, acknowledging that’s true outside of Rhode Island too. “It is reaching critical levels at this point.”
With additional funding on the way, the apprenticeship may soon expand to preschool teachers, among whom there is ample interest, Hildebrand notes. But right now, Rhode Island is focused on retaining the teachers who are in the highest demand.
Minnesota’s registered apprenticeship program, which launched in summer 2023, includes a strong mentorship component. Each apprentice is paired with a mentor, often a colleague at the program where they work, says Erin Young, who manages the program for Child Care Aware of Minnesota.
“That’s the secret sauce,” says Young. “That’s the magic.”
Mentors, who receive 24 hours of free training, guide apprentices through questions and topics ranging from children’s behavioral challenges, to curriculum implementation, to family engagement. That can be especially helpful for apprentices who are still quite new to the field of early childhood education, Young explains.
“It’s nice to have someone say, ‘It’s OK.’ ‘Try this.’ ‘Start here,’” Young says. “Having a mentor at the beginning of my early childhood career would’ve been a huge help.”
The mentorship made an impression on Katelyn Sarkar, an apprentice who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education leadership in June.
Katelyn Sarkar, a lead teacher and early childhood apprentice in Rochester, Minnesota, reads a book in her Head Start classroom. Photo courtesy of Sarkar.
Sarkar’s mentor would observe her in her classroom at a Head Start program in Rochester, Minnesota, then offer feedback and suggest strategies for her to try. “As an early childhood educator, I grew so much more in my skills because of that,” Sarkar shares.
Next up, Young is developing an apprenticeship model for licensed family child care providers, a group that is currently left out of most registered apprenticeship programs, despite being the “dominant form of care in rural Minnesota,” Young says, and an option preferred by many families.
“If it gets approved, that’s a really big win,” Young notes. “It opens the door for other states to do it.”
No Such Thing as a Silver Bullet
Although many early childhood advocates view the apprenticeship model as a promising strategy for workforce retention and improvement, they’re also quick to caution against overweighting its potential.
In early childhood, we tend to [want] a single solution to a complex problem. That does not work. ... Apprenticeships are never going to be the only answer.
— Linda Smith
“In early childhood, we tend to [want] a single solution to a complex problem. That does not work. The problems of child care in this country are very complicated,” says Smith of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. “Apprenticeships are never going to be the only answer.”
The model, while exciting, has its limitations, Smith adds.
Right now, apprenticeship cohorts tend to be quite small, with around five to 25 early childhood educators enrolled. Rhode Island graduated 16 apprentices in its pilot cohort and has another 17 enrolled now. Minnesota had 19 apprentices enrolled as of June.
That’s because apprenticeship programs are demanding, resource-intensive and very costly.
In Minnesota, for example, where early childhood apprenticeship costs fall on the high end, Young budgets $20,000 to $24,000 per apprentice per year. Apprenticeships there run for at least two years, she says.
That estimate includes covering 85 percent of the cost of college tuition and books, as well as giving apprentices an annual $2,000 stipend to help with transportation, internet access and their remaining 10 percent of tuition costs, and awarding them a small bonus at the end of their apprenticeship year.
It also includes an annual $5,000 stipend to employers to offset the costs of hosting an apprentice. In Minnesota, employers chip in the final 5 percent of tuition costs, and they are expected to give apprentices a $1 an hour raise at the end of each year, which typically works out to be about $2,000 a year, Young says. It can be hard for employers to budget for that right away, she notes. Mentors also receive a $3,500 annual stipend.
It’s expensive, to be sure, but Minnesota recently received $5 million from the state earmarked specifically for apprenticeships, Young says.
“There’s not going to be one silver bullet,” Young acknowledges, “but professionalizing the field, reducing turnover and increasing compensation is going to have to happen, and I am hoping the data will show this is one positive strategy that moves the needle on that.”
Now 27 and finished with her apprenticeship, Gundy has received her CDA and been promoted to lead teacher in her toddler classroom. She’s also pursuing her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.
“It was nice to get the science behind what I did,” Gundy shares about her apprenticeship experience. “It answered ‘why’ — why are we doing it this way, why is play important. … It helped me be an overall better teacher.”
As a school counselor, Leighanne Mainguy can never be sure what’s in store for her each day.
Some days, she arrives at her elementary school to learn that a student is in crisis and needs her full attention; she’ll clear her schedule. Occasionally, a tragedy in the community will leave students and staff shaken, and Mainguy will move swiftly to lend support.
The job can be heavy and hard. With so many young people today facing mental health challenges, such as anxiety, depression and stress, school counselors are in high demand. Yet their capacity is limited: School counselors in the U.S. have an average caseload of 385 students, based on the latest data available. (Mainguy’s caseload is slightly better than that, and the American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of one counselor to 250 students.)
But the job also comes with regular doses of levity, joy and laughter — moments that Mainguy describes as “soul building.”
Every week, a student may interact with dozens of adults in their school, from counselors to custodians, bus drivers to paraprofessionals, food service workers to school nurses. These individuals are integral to a school community but rarely as visible as, say, teachers and principals.
In a new series, “Role Call,” EdSurge is elevating the experiences of the myriad school staff members who help shape the day for kids. This month, we’re featuring school counselor Leighanne Mainguy, who shares how she came into this work, what people get wrong about it, and what she wishes she could change.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Name: Leighanne Mainguy
Age: 49
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Role: School counselor
Current age group: PreK-5
Years in the field: 12
EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to this role?
Leighanne Mainguy: So I didn't start counseling until I was 38. I've always been a helper by nature. When I was a kid, I found a lot of joy in that. When I went to college, right out of high school, I got my degree in psychology and knew I wanted to do something in that realm, but circumstances didn't allow for that for quite some time.
For years, I was helping my husband through college, and we were having kids. We were living in Michigan, and I had a good job working in corporate America. Then we moved to Nevada, and with my husband’s support, I started a master’s program. In most states, you have to have your master’s degree to work as a school counselor.
I could have been a mental health professional as well — I could have gone into something like that. But I'll be honest with you, I love the school environment. I love working with kids. Plus, it's given me an opportunity to spend a lot of time with my husband and four children because they were in the school district (my husband is a teacher).
It's something that I think I was meant to do, but how I got here was just a long, long process.
When people outside of school ask you what you do — say, at a social event — how do you describe your work?
So in my profession, especially for people my age and older, the term used to be “guidance counselor.” We prefer to be called school counselors now, because previously a “counselor” would be considered somebody who supported you in finalizing your credits, who you might've only seen in high school and helped you maybe decide on which direction you were going to go after high school.
Now, many school counselors do tier one counseling, which is working with all students; tier two counseling, which might look like small group support; and then we might do tier three, which is individual counseling for short periods of time. I don't recall that ever being the case when I was a kid. I think I saw my guidance counselor once or twice, maybe, my senior year. Now we're in elementary schools, we're in middle schools, we're in high schools. So it's just a more well-rounded job.
Most of the time, I get a pretty good reaction to telling someone I’m a school counselor. They're like, ‘Cool, that's awesome. You're an educator.’ But if somebody allowed me to get that deep into it, that’s what I’d say.
What does a hard day look like in your role?
Hard days can be super emotional. I think most counselors are pretty good at compartmentalizing the bigger issues so we don't take it home at night, but we get to deal with some of the hardest things that a kid, or even a staff member, will see.
I've had kids come in the day after one of their parents died. I’ve had to talk to kids about some pretty horrific things that have happened in their homes. On top of that, days when we have to implement suicide protocols (after students have expressed thoughts of self-harm) are probably the most emotionally draining. We take that very seriously.
I mean, some days are kind of crazy just because you have a lot of busyness. I never know what my day is going to look like. I could come in one morning and have a plan to do three lessons and talk to five kids, and then find that a student is having some suicidal ideation first thing in the morning and have to support them through managing that, getting in touch with their family and managing the aftermath of that with their teachers.
Bigger events can be really difficult as well. We had a huge, traumatic event in our district with the Route 91 shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017. That affected a lot of families in our community. Over 500 people were shot and 59 died.
Those are big days where you're like, ‘OK, scrap it.’ You shift gears, you’ve got to manage everything. You’ve got to take a step back [and ask yourself], ‘How are we going to support our students as a school? How are we going to support our staff?’
What does a really good day look like?
Field Day is always a really great day. We've had some professional athletes come — from the Golden Knights and the Raiders. They have these events where, like, 50 kids get to practice with the Raiders out in our field. We have picnics where parents come into our school, and we all go out in the field and eat with the students.
Anytime that it can feel like we’re a community, anytime we can do something big with the kids, and you just see them smiling and enjoying themselves, I would say those are my best days. There's nothing like seeing a kid light up, to see a kid giggle. It's soul building to see them have fun.
What is an unexpected way that your role shapes the day for kids?
School counselors are out and about all the time at our school. The day starts, and we're in the hallways with the kids. I think knowing that there are other people in the school besides their teacher that care enough to know their name, know about their families, ask about how their soccer game went last night, know that they have a big test coming up — I think, for some kids, that’s unexpected. For some parents, that’s unexpected. And I think that makes them feel important and seen and heard.
What do you wish you could change about your school or the education system today?
I wish that more people were willing to ask questions about what we do — like you are doing — and listen to our answers.
There are a lot of assumptions about the education field currently — not just about teachers, but about my role too.
I guess if I could change something, it would be that people would listen better, because I think so many of the people [making decisions about] public schools haven’t spent any time in them, and aren’t asking good questions about what we need to support our students.
Your role gives you unique access and insight into today's youth. What is one thing you've learned about young people through your work?
They just give me hope, as an adult. I think that we get super clouded in the day-to-day stuff — paying your bills and being an adult, it can be a lot. I'm not even going to get into politics and all the really scary things that can happen. But kids give me joy and hope.
I know that's not insight, necessarily, but they remind me of all the good things in life. Even though I get to hear some of the worst things that have happened to them, they remind me of all the good things in this world. So I guess maybe my insight is that us adults need to be a little more present in our day and learn to be a little bit more like kids.
While her daughter naps, Bridget Collins spends an hour reviewing and role-playing activities with her home visitor, Amanda Pedlar, in the front room of her house in San Antonio, Texas.
This week, the pair starts by discussing 3-year-old Brook’s burgeoning curiosity. Pedlar notes that it’s normal, at this stage of development, for Brook to ask “Why?” often, to want to try new things and to explore her environment. Then she gives Collins some suggestions for encouraging her daughter’s inquisitiveness.
Together, they work through an activity packet, covering topics such as language and motor skills. Collins will introduce these same activities to Brook in the coming days.
Bridget Collins, left, and home visitor Amanda Pedlar role-play washing their hands ahead of a "tasting party" where they will distinguish between sweet and crunchy foods. Photo by Emily Tate Sullivan.
When Pedlar and Collins role-play a “tasting party” — surrounded by stuffed toys and dolls, in the spirit of a tea party — and try to distinguish between foods that are sweet and those that are crunchy, Collins leans into the persona of her daughter, simulating the 3-year-old’s tendency to become distracted, to be silly and to interject with a defiant “no!”
It allows Pedlar the opportunity to model different reactions.
“It really helps to see her respond the way I should respond,” says Collins, who notes that she used to tell her kids “no” a lot but now sees a host of other ways to reply, such as with redirection.
Week after week, the activities help strengthen the bond between parent and child. Collins also says it’s boosted her confidence.
Kids are learning from their parents and caregivers from birth. But what they’re learning, and how they’re learning, varies widely. By connecting families with trained educators, home visiting programs give parents a chance to learn high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities to do with their kids and ask questions about their child’s needs and progress.
This year, EdSurge has been reporting on voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services and the difference they can make for children and families in the United States.
In one story, we examined how a home visiting program, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), is supporting immigrant families and connecting them to their communities. In another, we looked at how two long-running home visiting programs have adapted their models to serve home-based child care providers.
Over the past five months, we’ve observed home visits in two different states, attended a home visitor training and have spoken with more than 30 people to understand the home visiting landscape in this country and to see how these services support child development, improve school readiness, empower families and promote safe and healthy home learning environments.
Here are five key takeaways from our reporting:
1. Home visits do more than empower parents to be their child’s first and best teacher.
Home visits provide parents and caregivers with invaluable lessons and insights about their child’s learning and development. This can lead parents to become more confident teachers and more vocal advocates for their children. But the role of a home visitor extends beyond that.
“It's almost equally … about helping our families find the proper resources to improve their lives and improve maternal mental health,” notes Pedlar, the home visitor in San Antonio. “Things as simple as helping a family find a food resource and taking that burden off their shoulders can be really helpful.”
Home visitors provide goods such as diapers and wipes. They can connect families to resources such as food pantries, domestic violence prevention and early childhood intervention. And they’re often alerting parents to family-friendly events in the community, such as free days at the zoo.
Many home visiting programs also offer regular group meetings to convene participating families. For families new to this country, those meetings can provide a rare opportunity to meet others who come from their home country or speak their native language.
“At the end of the day, when you really deconstruct home visiting, it is about relationships,” notes Mimi Aledo-Sandoval, senior policy director at Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit that works with early childhood advocates across all 50 states.
2. Home visiting programs can be beneficial for every family, but for now, their reach is limited.
More than 17 million families nationwide, including 23 million children, stand to benefit from voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center. That is to say, every pregnant woman and family with a child under age 6 has something to gain from these regular, in-home services.
“Being a parent is hard. Being a new parent is hard. I think that’s true regardless of socioeconomic strata, regardless of where you live. It is a life-changing event,” says Dr. Michael Warren, associate administrator of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “So it is helpful to be able to get resources and get assistance when you need help. Home visiting can help fill in those gaps.”
While home visits are proven to lead to positive outcomes for children and families, only some have access to these programs, due to lack of funding. In 2022, only about 270,000 families (about 1.6 percent of those eligible) received home visiting services.
With limited funding, many communities deploy home visiting programs for specific populations, such as low-income families, single-parent households, recent immigrants and refugee families, families experiencing homelessness and those with a history of substance abuse.
3. The U.S. government invests in home visiting programs, and funding is set to expand.
Many home visiting programs have been around for decades. Historically, they’d received state and local funds, as well as money from private foundations, says Sarah Crowne, senior research scientist at Child Trends, a nonprofit research center focused on children and families.
Then, in 2010, the federal government invested in home visiting programs for the first time with the creation of the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. “It was a game changer for states,” Crowne says.
To access those federal funds, states must work with one of the 24 home visiting programs that have met HHS criteria for evidence of effectiveness.
There has not been an opportunity like this in the recent past to be able to do this kind of expansion for home visiting services.
— Michael Warren
“It’s very rigorous,” Crowne adds. “It’s not just that any program can get these funds.”
Before Congress reauthorized MIECHV in 2022, the program was funded at $400 million annually. Now, under a new funding formula, that allotment will double to $800 million annually by 2027. Starting this year, the federal government will match $3 for every $1 in non-federal funds spent on home visiting programs, up to a certain amount.
“It really opens that door wide for [states], and it allows them to expand into communities where they know there is need but they have not been able to serve those communities to date,” says Warren, whose department oversees MIECHV.
“It really is exciting,” he adds. “There has not been an opportunity like this in the recent past to be able to do this kind of expansion for home visiting services.”
4. Home visits are not a replacement for early childhood education, but they can help establish a solid foundation.
In a world where every family has access to high-quality early childhood education for their children, home visits would be a complementary support.
“In some countries, that is what happens,” says Miriam Westheimer, chief program officer for HIPPY International. “In this country, given very limited resources, that’s rare.” More often, in the U.S., children are either attending an early childhood program, or families are receiving home visits, she says. “It should not be one or the other,” Westheimer adds. “It often is.”
No one is arguing that home visits should be a child’s only outside learning experience before school, but with early care and education inaccessible and unaffordable for many families, that may be their only option.
In such cases, researchhasshown that home visits can give children a solid foundation from which to build as they begin school. Home visits help them acquire social-emotional skills, early literacy skills, and fine motor development, such as holding a pencil and using scissors.
5. The impact of home visits is expanding by serving home-based child care providers.
Home visits have traditionally been delivered to parents and primary caregivers. But in recent years, a number of home visiting programs, including HIPPY, ParentChild+ and Parents as Teachers, have seen an opportunity to expand their reach by serving home-based child care providers.
The model has proven successful, and many programs are trying to grow their presence among child care providers, including unlicensed “family, friend and neighbor” (FFN) providers, who are typically excluded from training and education programs.
A number of counties and states are finding ways to use public funds to implement this model.
Because many home-based child care providers serve multiple children and have strong relationships with the families they serve, many policymakers see them as well-positioned to translate the expertise they gain from home visits into positive outcomes for children.
Soon after Miriam Bravo began watching her 2-year-old grandson full-time, she realized that many years had passed since she was last responsible for a young child. Feeling a bit rusty, she turned to the internet to seek out activities suitable for little Tadeo and advice for how best to support him.
She found some resources online, such as songs to sing with him, but Bravo wanted more.
Bravo is part of a group of caregivers often referred to as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) providers. Although this is the most common non-parental child care arrangement in the United States, used by millions of families, few options for training and education are available to FFN providers. Most early care and education supports are reserved for licensed child care providers or parents. And the limited professional development opportunities available to FFNs are often inaccessible, due to factors such as costs, scheduling and language barriers.
So it was lucky that when Bravo knocked on the door of a community center near her home in San Jose, California, wondering whether they had any programs to help her improve as a caregiver, she found exactly what she was looking for.
In Bravo’s northern California community, a home visiting service called ParentChild+ has adapted its well-established model for parents to fit the needs and priorities of home-based child care providers, including FFNs.
For decades, evidence-based home visits from trained professionals have supported families across the U.S. These programs empower parents to engage their children with high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities; promote social-emotional skills and school readiness among kids; and foster a safe, healthy, nurturing home environment. More recently, a number of national home visiting programs have recognized an opportunity to reach more children by serving home-based child care providers, too, and there’s evidenceto show it’s making a difference.
“This is promising,” says Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative to increase access to and quality of home-based child care, “especially in a landscape where there are so few other interventions.”
People want to do right by kids and many times don’t have the tools or knowledge of what the right thing is. Sometimes it’s just bringing in new opportunities.
— Kerry Caverly
In the last few years, Home Grown has provided grants to three home visiting programs that serve home-based providers — ParentChild+, Parents as Teachers and Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters — to help them better understand the needs of the caregivers they’re engaging, learn what factors contribute to the success of the programs and, ultimately, expand their footprint.
It’s an investment in an often-overlooked but invaluable caregiver population that, in most cases, was already looking for ways to provide higher quality care and education to children, explains Kerry Caverly, chief program office at Parents as Teachers.
“People want to do right by kids and many times don’t have the tools or knowledge of what the right thing is,” Caverly says. “Sometimes it’s just bringing in new opportunities.”
An Organic Expansion
Bravo signed on to the free, voluntary, home-based child care model with ParentChild+ right away. Since February, Stephanie, the home visitor assigned to Bravo, has been visiting her and Tadeo twice a week.
Stephanie brings books, toys and materials that Bravo keeps and can use during future learning activities with Tadeo. But her home visitor’s biggest contributions, Bravo shares in Spanish through an interpreter, are less tangible.
Tadeo lights up when Stephanie arrives, Bravo says. He’s eager to find out which activity she planned for him that day. His motor skills have improved, and now, at 2-and-a-half years old, he’s cutting with scissors — a task that many children have not yet mastered by kindergarten. He is able to focus and complete activities that his attention span did not allow even a few months ago.
Bravo, for her part, has gained confidence. She has become a more patient, loving caregiver, she says. “It’s brought us closer.” She sees herself now as more than Tadeo’s grandmother; she is his teacher as well.
Miriam Bravo with her 2-year-old grandson Tadeo. Through home visits from ParentChild+, Bravo says she has become a better caregiver to Tadeo. Photo courtesy of Bravo.
The ParentChild+ home-based child care model emerged organically, says Sarah Walzer, CEO of the organization, which started in 1965 as a home visiting program for parents and today serves a majority immigrant population that speaks over 40 languages.
A little over a decade ago, home visitors reported that a number of parents in their caseload were caring for other children in the community. Over the next few years, in response to that need, ParentChild+ built out a parallel model tailored to home-based child care providers, including FFNs. Today, the program has a presence in 10 states.
The program for home-based providers runs for 24 weeks, compared to 46 weeks for families. The visits are designed around hands-on learning activities and play, Walzer says, adding that the goal is to improve the quality of the child care and to build school readiness for children, with attention to the learning environment and adult-child interactions.
We don’t go in there to find what is missing, lacking or illegal. We go in to look at what is going really well and strengthen [it].
— Sarah Walzer
Their work is strengths-based, Walzer explains. Home visitors seek to identify what’s already working and build on it — that’s true of other home visiting models and of home visits targeted to parents.
“We don’t go in there to find what is missing, lacking or illegal,” Walzer says. “We go in to look at what is going really well and strengthen areas of child care” based on evidence-based practices.
Parents as Teachers has a similar origin story for its home-based child care model, which they call “Supporting Care Providers Through Person Visits” (SCPV).
It was the late 1990s, and more women were entering the workforce, recalls Caverly, the chief program officer. More families, as a result, were seeking out child care arrangements. Home visitors serving families across the country were sharing that they’d show up for home visits and find a relative or neighbor with the child instead of the parent.
“It really got us thinking,” Caverly remembers.
Parents as Teachers adapted its curricula and built out the SCPV program, which is currently being used in 12 states. (With funding from Home Grown, they are updating their curricula for home-based providers and will spend much of 2025 using those new resources to expand their reach.)
Both Parents as Teachers and ParentChild+ serve a mix of licensed home-based child care providers and unlicensed FFNs through their home visiting programs, but “at the heart of it is FFNs,” says Caverly, adding that their work with FFNs does look, in a lot of ways, like their work with families.
One of the key distinctions between their work with providers and families, she says, is that providers learn how to do screenings and evaluations of the children in their care.
That element was especially valuable for Gretchen Dunn, a licensed provider in Olathe, Kansas.
Dunn has owned her home-based child care program for 25 years, she says, but when she heard Parents as Teachers was offering home visits for providers, she called up her local site and asked to participate.
She’s a seasoned provider who attends annual training, she acknowledges, but she liked the idea of getting a “refresher” and the chance to observe another early childhood professional interact with the kids in her care.
Gretchen Dunn with four children in her program on Valentine's Day 2024. Dunn learned how to screen for developmental delays during home visits from Parents as Teachers. Photo courtesy of Dunn.
Over the course of two years, Dunn received monthly home visits, during which her home visitor would usually lead an activity with the kids and leave Dunn with a handout so she could repeat it in the future. The home visitor also brought books. And she helped Dunn screen children for possible developmental delays using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, something Dunn hadn’t used before in her program. Those evaluations can tell a provider if a child may need to see a specialist — a speech therapist, for example — but they can also help inform providers about appropriate activities and interactions to use with each child.
The entire experience was validating for Dunn, she says. As the sole employee of her program, she has minimal adult interaction during the day. Plus, there is rarely anyone to observe her work or note if she is doing a good job.
“To have someone who actually knows my field and training come in and give me new ideas and support and back me up — all those things, that’s what I enjoyed” the most, she says.
‘Money Well Spent’
Perhaps the biggest hangup of this model is money, according to Renew of Home Grown.
The sites that already exist to provide home visiting services — to both families and providers — say that with more funding, they could reach many more caregivers.
“We know we have a lot of children who will fall through the cracks,” says Maria Rios, a home visitor for Parents as Teachers in Kansas City, Kansas, who has a caseload of 30 home-based child care providers. “I wish there was more funding.”
Rios, a former preschool teacher and school vice principal, is less concerned about children’s academic skills. “They’ll learn their ABCs in school,” she says. It’s the social-emotional skills — how to interact with other children, how to share — that she feels many children need to pick up sooner.
Home visiting programs are expensive to implement, as most high intensity, high integrity services tend to be, says Renew. It’s a big shift, she adds, for states and localities to go from spending zero dollars on FFN providers to investing thousands of dollars in each person. But she thinks it’s feasible, especially given the number of children who stand to benefit.
A few different funding models are in play already. The state of Colorado has used its Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five dollars on home visiting. And ParentChild+ is getting public funding, including dollars from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, to support its home-based child care programming at several sites, including New York state and counties in North Carolina.
“From our perspective,” says Renew, “it’s money well spent.”
It certainly has been for Bravo, the FFN provider in California. Both the mentorship from her home visitor and the new community she has found among other FFNs in her area have made for a “beautiful experience.”
“It’s not just a program,” Bravo adds, “it’s a family.”
Equipped with new caregiving expertise, she’s thought about taking in more children. She is open to the idea, she says. At a minimum, she’ll get to use her knowledge with future grandchildren.
Young people are struggling with mental health, and for many, the challenges have worsened over the last decade. About one in three high schoolers report persistent feelings of hopelessness and an alarming number say they’ve had thoughts of suicide.
Blame it on the pandemic, or climate change. Blame it on hyperpartisan politics, or the ubiquity of social media and smartphones. Regardless of the cause, today’s teenagers have made clear, in numerous surveys and anecdotes, that they need support.
But across the country, there are too few mental health specialists to serve the growing number of adolescents who could benefit from their services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than a third of the country lives in an area where there is a shortage of mental health professionals, with at least 6,000 additional practitioners needed.
What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success.
— AJ Pearlman
A cross section of leaders across government, philanthropy and the private sector believe that youth can be the solution to both challenges: They can simultaneously offer help and resources to their fellow Zoomers (as members of Gen Z are often called) while building skills that will draw them into — and will make them successful in — careers in behavioral health.
This fall, at least 500 recent high school and college graduates between the ages of 18 and 24 will make up the inaugural cohort of the Youth Mental Health Corps, a national initiative led by AmeriCorps, America Forward, Pinterest and the Schultz Family Foundation.
To start, it will launch in four states: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas. A year later, in fall 2025, seven more states are expected to join the program: California, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Utah and Virginia.
“It is really an innovative effort to try to address both parts of this crisis, by enabling initially hundreds and then thousands of young people to serve … in communities,” says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation.
Members of the Youth Mental Health Corps will serve for at least one year, with placements in middle and high schools as well as community-based organizations and health clinics. The program, which supports members in enrolling in or continuing college courses to work toward earning a degree, offers members career guidance on selecting a credential pathway to pursue and preparation and training for their placement.
Because members are just starting out in behavioral health, they will not be working as therapists or counselors, Chandrasekaran notes. Instead, they’ll primarily serve as “navigators,” helping connect peers and near-peers to services that already exist in their communities that they may not know about or know how to access.
“Folks often don’t know where to start,” explains AJ Pearlman, director of Public Health AmeriCorps. “That navigation and resource support is incredibly helpful, being in school or at a community clinic, meeting people where they are.”
Last year, AmeriCorps invested upward of $260 million in programming to support mental health nationwide, a spokesperson shared. In recent years, AmeriCorps applicants have increasingly shown interest in the mental health and behavioral health fields, at the same time that demand for mental health services has risen. The Youth Mental Health Corps is launching in response to those twin trends.
As a current AmeriCorps member serving with Colorado Youth for a Change, an organization that will become part of the Youth Mental Health Corps this fall, Nelly Grosso, 24, is getting a preview of what this work will look like. She connects high school students to mental health resources, food banks, pro bono immigration lawyers and public assistance programs such as SNAP and Medicaid.
Grosso, who identifies as a “first-generation American student,” says she primarily works with students who, like her, are the first in their family to navigate the American education system. Grosso has found that many students face language, income and resource barriers that are making it difficult for them to show up to school and engage in class. Those barriers are also taking a toll on students’ mental health. She introduces different coping mechanisms and calming strategies to students who are experiencing anxiety, depression, stress and anger, she says, but most of all, she’s trying to help remove the obstacles causing those feelings in the first place.
“It’s really hard to ask for help … because you don’t [always] know what you need,” she says. “It’s easy to feel isolated and alone.”
Grosso has created packets for her students that direct them to a host of free resources available to them. “I’m planting little seeds in everybody’s brain,” she says, so that when they are struggling, they’ll remember there’s a whole list of people and organizations that can help them.
Although Youth Mental Health Corps members will be acting more as liaisons to behavioral health services than delivering those supports themselves, their exposure to such services — and the people who provide them — is intended to help members learn about the field and further incentivize them to launch careers in it, Pearlman adds.
During their service year, they’ll receive a living stipend and an education award, along with training and credentials that will get them started on the path toward behavioral health.
“It will give them a leg up, a head start, in their journey to hopefully become a trained mental health professional,” Chandrasekaran says of the experience.
Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school.
— Nelly Grosso
Both Pearlman and Chandrasekaran refer to the youth mental health challenges today as a “national crisis,” echoing a sentiment that the U.S. Surgeon General has made clear in recent years.
They believe other young adults, of the same generation as the teens and tweens whose mental health is imperiled, are well positioned to help.
Corps members will know firsthand what it’s like to navigate high school in the era of social media, for example. They’ll know what it’s like to experience regular lockdown drills throughout the school year and to feel that the future of the planet rests on their shoulders.
“What we’re really trying to do is to get our youth more people in their corner who understand what they’re experiencing and want to invest in their success,” Pearlman says.
Grosso has found that to be true of her experience in AmeriCorps.
“Nobody understands teenagers more than somebody who has recently been through high school,” she says, noting that she uses TikTok and Instagram to relate to the students she works with at a public high school in the Denver metro area. “That’s a huge privilege that comes with being my age.”
But it goes deeper than that for Grosso. Raised by her monolingual Spanish-speaking grandparents, she felt that she was left to navigate the U.S. education system on her own. Surrounded by peers who spoke of things like SATs, PSATs and FAFSA forms, she felt lost.
She says that’s why this work resonates so much with her.
“My students are going through the same, or very similar, things that I did in high school,” Grosso explains. “I’m able to be the person to my students that I didn't have, which is really healing.”
PUEBLO, Colorado — Standing in her living room, Isabel Valencia sets up her makeshift tennis serve with the materials on hand: a green balloon for a ball and a ruler affixed to a paper plate for a racket.
She bats the balloon to her home visitor, Mayra Ocampo, and they pass it back and forth, counting each return, offering encouragement and laughing at their mistakes.
The moment is light and playful, as it likely will be later in the week, when Valencia tries the same activity with her 4-year-old daughter Celeste. But Ocampo takes care to explain what’s happening beneath the surface: They’re not just playing tennis. They’re building social skills. They’re working on hand-eye coordination. And they’re practicing numeracy.
Home visitor Mayra Ocampo, left, and parent Isabel Valencia practice social and motor skills during a makeshift game of tennis. Photo by Eric Lars Bakke for AP.
Valencia, who came to the U.S. from Colombia a few years ago, found Ocampo through a free home visiting program that supports families with their children's early learning and development.
The model — and others like it — has provided a lifeline for families, especially those for whom access to quality early education is scarce or out of reach financially. These programs, which are set to expand with new federal support, are proven to help prepare children for school but have reached relatively few families.
It was during a trip to the grocery store in 2022 with her two young kids that somebody told Valencia about the home visiting program. She had moved to Pueblo, Colorado, only a few months earlier and was feeling isolated. She hadn’t met anyone else who spoke Spanish.
“I didn’t leave my house,” she says through an interpreter, “so I thought I was the only one.”
The Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program, known as HIPPY, provides families with a trained support person — in Valencia’s case, Ocampo — who visits their home every week, showing them how to engage their children with fun, high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities.
The HIPPY program is unique for its two-generation approach. Through regular home visits and monthly group meetings, parents learn how to promote early literacy and social-emotional skills from staff who went through the program themselves and often share the same language and background as the families they serve.
The program is primarily implemented in low-income neighborhoods, as well as through school districts and organizations reaching immigrant and refugee families, says Miriam Westheimer, chief program officer for HIPPY International, which operates in 15 countries and 20 U.S. states.
Many other home visiting models exist, each with distinct features. Some employ registered nurses as home visitors, focusing on maternal and child health; others send social workers or early childhood specialists. They can begin as early as pregnancy or, as in the case of HIPPY, serve families with toddlers and preschool-aged children.
In the U.S., two dozen home visiting models have received a stamp of approval — and with it, access to funding — from the federal government’s Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program.
Dr. Michael Warren, associate administrator of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the MIECHV program, has seen first-hand the way home visiting can strengthen families but says that, right now, its scope is too limited.
An estimated 17 million families nationwide stand to benefit from the type of voluntary, evidence-based home visiting services that Valencia receives. Yet in 2022, only about 270,000 did.
“That is purely because of resources,” notes Warren. “If more resources exist, more families can be served.”
Fortunately, he says, reinforcements are on the way.
The federal investment in the MIECHV program is set to double from $400 million to $800 million annually, by 2027. Beginning this year, the federal government will match $3 for every $1 in non-federal funds spent on home visiting programs, up to a certain amount. Since many states already have funding mechanisms in place — through a combination of public, nonprofit and private contributions — it is expected to be an easy win.
In interviews with more than 20 individuals who conduct, receive or research home visits, and in observation of two home visits in Colorado and Texas, the extent of this service’s impact on families and communities became clear.
Now in her second year of the HIPPY program, Valencia is a more confident parent. She says the structured curriculum she follows, paired with Ocampo’s support, have helped her prepare her daughter to thrive in preschool.
Login
