Child Care for Early Educators
Early educators are engaged in incredibly difficult and complex work that is essential to children’s learning and development, supportive for families, and foundational to the economy.
\Recruiting and retaining early educators has long been a struggle, but it has recently reached a crisis level. While comprehensive and sustained investment in early educator compensation is needed, the state should explore creative ways to bolster educators’ economic security, such as adding the early childhood education workforce as a priority group for Georgia’s Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS) Program. CAPS provides scholarships to help some working families afford child care.
Adding the early childhood education workforce as a priority group would ensure that all of Georgia’s early educators can access child care for their own children. To promote successful implementation of this new priority group, we urge the Georgia General Assembly to allocate additional funding for CAPS specifically for this purpose. Quite simply, professionals who work hard to provide quality care and education for others’ children should not have to worry about affording such care for their own.