WYECBC Advocacy
We’ve all heard the lines before, “early childhood is so important”, “the early years are the critical years to a child’s development”, and so on and so on. Unfortunately, a lot of this falls on deaf ears, as quality funding for early education and care goes largely unnoticed and unsupported for most states in the US. In March of 2024, President Biden proposed in his 2025 budget request, an additional $500 million to the Child Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and an additional $544 million to Head Start. Unfortunately, there was also proposed a $65 million decrease in funds to the Preschool Development Grant (PDG). However, as of March of 2025, Congress has only approved a Continuing Resolution to keep funding at its current levels and not offering any additional funding to federal programs and grants. (First 5 Years Fund, 2025)
Although there is incredible supportive research detailing the positive impact of quality early care and education in the first 5 years of a child’s life, there is not much in the way of financial or legislative support from this research. When the WYECBC does program visits around the state, we often see and hear the same story. Lack of resources, lack of employment, and long, stressful days are the most common experiences for early childhood providers. This all leads to severe cases of burnout, provider turnover, and lack of support for programs who are educating and supporting children and families who are having trouble navigating in their own days. With state and federal advocacy programs facing financial cuts or program cuts, the uncertainty is only increasing for educators and families across the state.
Early childhood providers typically don’t have the time or resources to advocate for themselves. They are focusing on keeping children safe, happy, and healthy and trying to keep their programs open. Although the field of early care and education has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 30 years, it is still a field which is not taken as an important profession by the general public or our community leaders. Even though research has shown that critical brain development is happening from birth to age 5, the efforts to support high quality care programs are still drastically needed. How can we better support these early care providers? How can we convince legislators to find more funding to support programs that should not have to follow a business model of funding? When we treat children as a commodity, it unfortunately causes us to make business decisions which are not necessarily good decisions for children and families that attend our programs.
Call or write to your legislators and ask them to help find creative ways to support and fund early care and education. Encourage them to support Head Start and Developmental programs as well. Send them data on the positives of high-quality early childhood programs and why we should be investing in them early. As providers we can also advocate for ourselves by continuing to increase our knowledge in child development and other aspects of early education and continue increasing our professionalism in the public eye. The stakes are higher than ever right now, and children and families need all the help that we can give.
Short List of Resource and EC Advocate Organizations
https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislators
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ADEHIe9NxDaOGig5HiRxjCWrsPnzmpZ9/view