2019 has been an incredible year for early childhood. We recorded 13 episodes of The Early Link podcast this year. For this, our 14th show, we review some of the common themes shared by our many esteemed guests, and share what’s on our minds as we move into 2020. This is our final Early Link podcast of the year, a 2019 year in review and look ahead to 2020.
This week, The Ounce of Prevention Fund named Dana Hepper, our director of policy & advocacy, one of their Early Childhood Advocacy Heroes.
In her interview with The Ounce, Hepper describes the long path to passing the Student Success Act, an historic state investment in education that includes $200 million per year for early childhood. She also shares what she is most excited about with the rollout of the Student Success Act:
“When the first draft of the Student Success Act’s early learning investments came out, some of the investments we were advocating for were left out. Legislators understood preschool (including Head Start and Early Childhood Special Education), and they were prioritizing these investments over others that start earlier. I’m most excited that we were able to shift the conversation to acknowledge that learning starts at birth (and before). We won meaningful investments in infants and toddlers, including $20 million to expand Early Head Start.”
“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.
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.
Dana Hepper is Children’s Institute’s director of policy and advocacy. Below is her public comment on behalf of CI in response to the Trump Administration’s changes to the public charge determination.
Last year, the Trump Administration proposed changes to a federal rule known as “public charge” that would impact millions of working families across the country. Children’s Institute opposes this change as a racially motivated “wealth test” for immigrants and their families on the path to getting green cards.
Public charge is a determination used by immigration officials to refer to legal immigrants who are dependent on the government for financial support or likely to become so. Immigrants seeking legal permanent resident status who are deemed to be a public charge can be denied a green card. The Trump Administration proposal, which would define public charge much more widely than ever before, would force many immigrants to either forego essential supports like health care, food, and housing, or risk their immigration status.
In the last year, individuals and advocacy organizations across the country, including Children’s Institute, spoke out against changes to public charge. The proposal provoked a record 200,000 comments opposing the change. Despite this overwhelming opposition, the administration announced Monday that it is adopting this cruel and unnecessarily punitive rule change. The change will take effect October 15.
According to the White House, the administration’s proposal simply seeks to enforce a law that has long been ignored.
“President Trump is enforcing this longstanding law to prevent aliens from depending on public benefit programs. The Immigration and Nationality Act makes clear that those seeking to come to the United States cannot be a public charge. For many years, this clear legal requirement went largely unenforced, imposing vast burdens on American taxpayers. Now, public charge law will finally be utilized.”
While the term “public charge” does appear in immigration laws, there is no “public charge law” that defines how an immigrant’s dependence on government support should be measured. The administration’s claim that it is attempting to enforce an existing law is false.
In the absence of any law defining what it means to be a public charge, INS officers historically interpreted the phrase themselves, applying inconsistent standards and requirements to green card applicants. In 1999, INS moved to clarify the guidelines, introducing a rule that defined a public charge as someone who receives most of their cash income from the government. The government further clarified that the use of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or other non-cash programs would not be factors in public charge determinations.
This clarification was deemed necessary because confusion over these benefits “deterred eligible aliens and their families, including U.S. citizen children, from seeking important health and nutrition benefits that they are legally entitled to receive. This reluctance to access benefits has an adverse impact not just on the potential recipients, but on public health and the general welfare.”
The Trump Administration, it seems, wants to deter working immigrants from accessing—even for a short period of time—Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare Part D prescription drug support, or housing assistance. According to Elena Rivera, Children’s Institute’s Senior Health Policy & Program Advisor, “The new public charge rule will punish immigrants for seeking services to meet their family’s most basic needs of food, health care, and housing. Even worse, this rule is yet another tool being used to create an epidemic of fear and isolation across our communities, causing lasting harm to mental health and community well-being.”
This is not, as the administration claims, simple enforcement of a long-standing law. It is another weapon in a war on immigrant communities that will have a disastrous impact on those—including millions of children—who rely on these benefits.
If you or someone you know is currently applying for a green card, or will be in the future, learn more about your rights and how this rule change might affect you from Protecting Immigrant Families. The new rule is set to take effect on October 15, though legal challenges could delay this. Under current interpretations of the rule, green card applications that have already been submitted will not be subject to these rules, the use of non-cash benefits prior to October 15 will not impact future green card applications, and programs used by your U.S. Citizen children will not be used against you.
The profound cognitive, social, and emotional experiences children have in the first five years of their lives set the foundation for all future learning. “If we want to improve health and education outcomes in Oregon, we need to ensure all kids have equitable access to high-quality early care and education,” says Swati Adarkar, president and CEO here at Children’s Institute. “Lawmakers need to understand the connection between the early years and long-term academic success. We work alongside partner organizations around the state to make that case.”
Making the case takes more than presenting decades of research on the long-term benefits of high-quality early education. In 2010, we launched the Early Works initiative to demonstrate the impact of combining high-quality preschool with other supports like infant and toddler play and learn groups, health care and housing supports, and parenting education.
Adarkar explains: “Our Early Works sites at Earl Boyles and Yoncalla Elementary Schools have served as learning laboratories. Lawmakers and educators can see firsthand what happens when families and schools meaningfully partner together to make sure kids get high-quality early childhood experiences.”
Educating lawmakers on the importance of early childhood was only the first step. Because we’re still in the process of developing a comprehensive system for children under 6, it’s not possible to “invest in early childhood” in the same way the state invests in K–12 education. Instead, lawmakers needed to determine which programs and services to fund, and how much money to give them.
The nearly 40 advocacy organizations in Oregon’s Early Childhood Coalition (ECC) played a key role in helping legislators make those determinations. Dana Hepper, our director of policy and advocacy, helped lead the coalition, which formed in December 2017. “The investments in early childhood that were ultimately included in the Student Success Act were based on recommendations developed by the ECC. We worked together over six months to determine which programs and services needed to be funded and at what levels, educate lawmakers about their impact, and engage Oregonians to support the investments,” Hepper explains. Thanks to Governor Brown’s leadership leading up to the 2019 session, the ECC was able to use investments in early childhood included in the governor’s recommended budget, released in November of 2018, as a starting point for their legislative agenda.
Speaker Kotek echoed the importance of this advance work to determine the coalition’s priorities. “Success [in the legislature] is grounded in the hours and hours of work that are done even before the session starts in January,” she told attendees of the City Club’s Friday Forum last month. “Education experts consistently told us that more resources for early childhood education were necessary if every student were to be able to succeed.”
The consistency of the message was key. “The ECC was successful because we aligned our efforts by aligning our missions,” says Cara Copeland, executive director of the Oregon Association of Relief Nurseries. “When early childhood providers work and fundraise in isolation, they lose sight of the fact that families raising young children need a variety of supports in order to thrive. A family may receive support from a Relief Nursery to help build their protective capacity, but after that child leaves our therapeutic classroom the parent must still have affordable child care and a plan for quality preschool.”
The ECC’s requested investments in Relief Nurseries, Early Head Start, parenting education, Oregon Pre-Kindergarten, Preschool Promise, Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Education, an Early Childhood Equity Fund, and opportunities for the early childhood workforce were all included in the Student Success Act.
ECC recommendations to fund the universal voluntary home visiting program “Family Connects” and launch a task force to address Oregon’s child care crisis were also passed by the legislature this year in separate bills.
Evidence-based policy recommendations on their own are never enough to sway lawmakers, especially when it comes to allocating record amounts of money. To pass the Student Success Act, legislators needed to hear from those most impacted: parents and educators. When the Joint Committee for Student Success (JCSS), co-chaired by Senator Roblan and Representative Smith Warner, announced their state-wide listening tour to formulate a plan to improve education in Oregon, the ECC pushed for early learning sites to be included.
The JCSS sought to understand Oregon’s education crisis: the state ranks 49th in the nation for high school graduation, has the fourth-worst chronic absenteeism rate, and is in the midst of a behavioral crisis. “Research shows that all of these issues are tied to early childhood experiences,” explains Danielle Pacifico-Cogan, our director of community affairs. “But stories from real people have a bigger impact than statistics. When lawmakers visited early learning sites, they were able to hear directly from parents who want and need high-quality early care and education for their young children.” Members of the JCSS reported to Speaker Kotek that this listening tour was one of the highlights of their legislative careers.
“The message they heard was consistent across the state: early childhood services and programs deliver huge benefits, but many families don’t have access to them,” Pacifico-Cogan says. Thirty-thousand children living in low-income families in Oregon currently lack access to high-quality preschool; child care in the state is just as scarce.
Amanda Manjarrez, director of advocacy for Latino Network, participated in small group meetings between constituents and lawmakers throughout the day.
The coalition also engaged supporters who couldn’t make it to Salem. Attendees of two screenings of the early childhood documentary No Small Matter wrote postcards to their senators in support of early childhood investments; hundreds of other voters sent emails. All of this was part of the ECC strategy to enable constituents from across the state—particularly those represented by members of the JCSS—to share their lived experiences with lawmakers, and to support these stories with data. The end result: lawmakers learned that in Oregon—like in many other parts of the country—there is broad support for funding for early childhood.
This year’s historic investments in early childhood followed years of research, innovative initiatives, partnerships, and community engagement. Following the announcement that opponents of the bill will no longer be working to refer it to the ballot, this funding is now one step closer to reaching critical early childhood programs and services. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to work with our ECC partners to share personal stories from across Oregon about the impact of early health and learning. We’ve seen how important the voices of parents, educators, and health care providers are, and we’re committed to making sure they get heard. If you’d like to add your voice to this movement, use the link below to share with us why early childhood matters to you.
