Melissa Duclos, Author at Children's Institute

Oregon Among Tax Strategy Leaders in Funding Early Care and Education

by Melissa Duclos | Oct 15, 2019 | Oregon Policy, Policy in Other States, What We're Reading

“Funding Our Future: Generating State and Local Tax Revenue for Quality Early Care and Education” is a new report that provides early childhood leaders with strategies to direct state and local resources to funding high-quality early care and education. The report, issued by the BUILD Initiative, the Center for American Progress, the Children’s Funding Project, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, and the University of Maryland College Park Schools of Public Health and Public Policy, highlights Oregon’s new approach to corporate and business taxation.

The Fund for Student Success, passed by Oregon’s legislature in 2019, is a gross receipts tax that applies to a variety of corporations, partnerships, and other entities. Businesses that gross more than $1 million in Oregon sales will pay a 0.57 percent tax, all of which will go toward funding the Student Success Act (SSA). Twenty percent of SSA funds are dedicated to early childhood programs and services through the Early Learning Account. Additional funding in a separate Student Investment Account can also be used by individual school districts to expand access to early learning. According to the report, Washington state and San Francisco have also used taxes on business to help fund early learning.

The report also discusses the use of other types of state and local taxes to fund early care and education, providing examples of states and municipalities already using taxes to fund early care and education, and “next generation ideas” for policy makers interested in taking advantage of these funding opportunities.

There are no states that dedicate any of their estate and inheritance taxes to early care and education.
Personal income taxes are being used in Dayton, Ohio to fund early care and education for low-income families.
Cincinatti, OH; King County, WA; San Miguel, CO; and Seattle, WA have approved the use of personal income taxes for early care and education.
A portion of sales taxes in Pitkin County, CO; San Antonio, TX; Denver, CO; and South Carolina are used to fund early care and education.
Cities in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Washington have allocated funds from “sin taxes” such as those on tobacco, alcohol, lotteries, and gambling to early care and education.
Florida and Colorado are leading the way on the use of special district government taxes to fund early care and education.

Download the full report to find out how your state is using these taxes to support young children and families, and what more they could be doing.

Children’s Institute’s Director of Policy & Advocacy, Dana Hepper contributed to the Revenue Work Group for this report.

Tools of the Mind with Deborah Leong

by Melissa Duclos | Sep 25, 2019 | Featured Programs, Podcast, Professional Learning

Deborah Leong is professor emerita of psychology at Metropolitan State University of Denver where she taught for 37 years. She is co-founder and executive director of Tools of the Mind, a curriculum and professional development program that was developed more that 25 years ago for early childhood classrooms to improve how children learn and how teachers teach. Dr. Leong also has extensive experience working on and publishing about early childhood assessment and standards. In this episode, we discuss the history and development of Tools of the Mind, brain development and the importance of play, and the role of assessment in early childhood settings.

Early Mental Health Support Is Vital

by Melissa Duclos | Sep 20, 2019 | CI in the News, Health and Kindergarten Readiness

Writing in The Oregonian today, CI’s Senior Health Policy & Program Advisor Elena Rivera argues for the importance of programs and services to support early childhood mental health.

Research tells us that children who suffer from abuse, neglect or trauma—especially those facing additional barriers such as poverty—are more susceptible to mental health issues. Early intervention is effective and shows lasting benefits.

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Expanding early screening for mental health issues; providing adequate training for people who work with infants, toddlers and their families; integrating mental health consultation and programming into child health and education services; and making sure insurance policies include mental health treatment for our youngest are all ways we can improve the network of support for our youngest children.

Read the Full Article

We Need a Comprehensive Approach to Childhood Adversity

by Melissa Duclos | Sep 10, 2019 | Health and Development, Health and Kindergarten Readiness, What We're Reading

In the 20 years since the first study into Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), health care professionals, educators, and policy makers have become increasingly aware of the long-term consequences of exposure to adversity on children’s health and development. As state lawmakers increasingly call for routine screenings of children to identify ACEs, Child Trends has released a new report cautioning about the limitations of a screening-only approach and providing recommendations to address childhood adversity that go beyond screening.

Titled “Childhood adversity screenings are just one part of an effective policy response to childhood trauma,” the report offers the following strategies to more effectively address ACEs:

Train service providers across child and family service systems in trauma-informed care.
Promote adversity screening only as one component of a comprehensive, trauma-informed, strengths-based approach to addressing childhood adversity.
Support research to develop more sensitive tools for assessing adversity exposure in young children.
Increase the availability and accessibility of evidence-based therapies.
Implement preventive strategies that reduce the likelihood of early adversity and its harmful effects on children and promote resilience in development.

Elena Rivera, Children’s Institute’s senior health policy & program advisor, explains the connection between this new report and our health work:

Children’s Institute believes that all children deserve the best start in life, and we are working across systems, policies, and programs to ensure all children have access to supportive early environments and relationships that prevent adversity, as well as services to address and mitigate the harmful long-term effects of adversity that children have already faced. Children’s Institute and our partners successfully advocated for a historic state investment in early childhood and family support services in the 2019 legislative session, many of which seek to address the root causes of child adversity and provide essential support to families. In addition, through our Health and Learning Initiative we are collaborating with partners to improve health care service delivery and coordination for children. Our goal is to ensure all children have access to health care that supports their physical, oral, and social-emotional well-being in the first few years of life, when children’s foundation for all future learning is being laid.

Read the full Child Trends report

Learn more about our Health and Learning Initiative

We’re Working to Ensure the Benefits of Preschool Last

by Melissa Duclos | Sep 9, 2019 | Benefits of Preschool, National Research, What We're Reading, Early School Success

In 2015, a landmark study by Vanderbilt University found that the benefits of Tennessee’s pre-K program didn’t last. It’s not the first time researchers have questioned the long-term impact of high-quality preschool.

“Many early childhood stakeholders have been discussing and arguing about whether Head Start ‘works’ ever since the beginnings of Head Start. The first big report on the ‘fadeout’ effect of Head Start was in 2010, and that raised questions as to whether or not Head Start was effective in improving academic outcomes for children,” says Soobin Oh, Children’s Institute’s senior early education advisor.

Why Do Gains Made in Preschool Fade?

New research into the same Tennessee program, released in July and discussed in Chalkbeat last week, begins to answer the question of why gains made in preschool might not last. According to Chalkbeat:

“Pre-K benefits wore off if participants went on to classes with ineffective teachers, in low-quality schools, or both—with preschool graduates eventually faring even worse than their peers who didn’t attend pre-K.

“The study adds to emerging literature showing that pre-K is not a cure-all to later factors like poor instruction and a poor learning environment, said Dale Farran, a Vanderbilt University professor involved with both studies.”

“We can’t depend upon pre-K to cure a K–12 system that’s not working for poor families,” Farran said. “We can’t put the blame on children who are placed in low performing schools and then just say that they weren’t ready. If we really care about children from low-income families and the schools that serve them, we’ve got to take a bigger view.”

Early School Success Is an Approach to Sustaining Preschool Benefits

The idea that instruction during elementary school must build on preschool is the basis of our Early School Success (ESS) initiative. “This Tennessee study supports our new work with districts to build high-quality, well-sequenced experiences for the early elementary grades. This will ensure investments in preschool pay off in the long-term,” explains Dr. Marina Merrill, our director of research & strategy.

Soobin Oh adds:

“Early childhood education and care does not exist within a vacuum. Ensuring practices are consistently high-quality and aligned is critical to sustaining benefits. We need to move towards applying the research of child development, which implies that childhood should be treated by the education system as one continuum, whereas most people tend to separate and make distinctions between birth to 5 and elementary education.”

Learn More About Early School Success

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