About 21,000 families are on a state waiting list for state subsidized day care for children of low-income people.
Gov. Deval Patrick speaks about the need to invest in early education during a summit of business leaders on Friday in Boston.BOSTON – Business leaders from the Springfield area joined in a national effort on Friday to underscore the need for effective education and care for children at the earliest ages, well before they reach the public schools.
Business owners and executives said the best returns on tax dollars come from investing in early education and care and giving pre-school children a big jump on their futures. High-quality child care can help assure the skilled workers needed to attract businesses to Western Massachusetts, they said.
"When we are investing in our children, it is risk-free with a guaranteed yield," said George Burtch of Ludlow, a vice president with Hasbro Inc., a toy and game company with a manufacturing facility in East Longmeadow.
Burtch was among about 14 people from the Springfield area to attend the 2011 National Business Leader Summit on Early Childhood Investment at the Boston Harbor Hotel.
Pre-school care and education are provided in multiple ways, including mostly licensed private child care centers run by various organizations.
Business owners from Springfield said they face issues such as poverty, state budget cuts and a long waiting list for state subsidies for day care for the children of low-income families.
"It's truly a massive task we face," said Gayle Rediker, co-owner of Rediker Software in Hampden, who attended the event. "We need to get business people involved."
Sherri Killins, Department of Early Education and Care commissionerSherri Killins, commissioner of the state Department of Early Education and Care, said her agency is working with hundreds of programs in the state to rate them on quality and provide them with ways to improve.
She said 21,000 families in the state are on a waiting list for state subsidized day care for the children low-income people.
Right now, 57,000 children receive subsidies through certain state programs, she said.
According to statistics provided by Killins's office, 5,758 children from Springfield and 1,293 children from Holyoke received subsidies for day care during a recent 12-month period. In Chicopee, 956 children received subsidies and in Northampton, 199 children.
During the summit, Linda M. Noonan, managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education in Boston, praised the work of Springfield Business Leaders for Education, a group of business leaders that advocates for public schools and also demands accountability and progress for children. Noonan said the group is a national model.
Nicholas Fyntrilakis, assistant vice president at MassMutual Financial Group.Nicholas Fyntrilakis, an assistant vice president with the MassMutual Financial Group in Springfield and co-chairman of business leaders for education, said the summit reinforced the need for a strong connection between early education and care and public schools. "You can't consider it a piece on the side," he said. "It needs to be folded in."
The summit included speeches from Gov. Deval L. Patrick and panels with experts such as David Lawrence Jr., former publisher of the Miami Herald and now president of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation at the University of Florida.
Attendees from Springfield said that more quality early education is critical.
"Unless little kids get what they need, we as citizens are not doing our job," said Nancy Urbschat of Springfield, owner of TSM Design in Springfield.
Nancy Urbschat, owner of TSM Design in Springfield.Michael J. Moriarty, a lawyer in Holyoke and member of the Holyoke School Committee, said it's clear that government alone can't do the work of improving early education.
Moriarty is a member of a task force working with Holyoke school officials to boost reading scores of grade 3 students over the next three years. Moriarty said poverty is the root cause of Holyoke students having the lowest reading scores in the state for grade 3 students.
Sally Fuller, a project director for The Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation in Springfield, said that only half the families in Springfield send their children to any formal family or center-based child care.
Advocates face a difficult challenge, partly because of a long state waiting list for subsidized day care and state budget cuts.
State funding for early education and care is $506 million for the fiscal year that began July 1, down 2.6 percent from the prior year and down an inflation-adjusted 17.2 percent from three years ago, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center in Boston.
The summit was hosted by the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley and partly sponsored by the Partnership for America's Economic Success, a project of the Pew Center on the States.