HARRISBURG — On Tuesday, the state’s Early Childhood Education Caucus hosted a rally with child care and pre-K students, teachers and parents as well as other advocates to underscore the worsening impacts of the commonwealth’s early learning teacher shortage.
The caucus co-chairs include Sen. Pat Stefano, who represents Bedford County and surrounding areas. Also there were Sen. Judy Schwank, Rep. Pat Harkins and Rep. Shelby Labs, who are working with Stefano to build support for recruitment and retention investments that will help to remedy the teacher shortage and ensure that early learning supply can meet the demand from working families.
“This is an issue I have heard from early learning providers throughout my district,” Stefano said. “We must work together to prioritize funding to help the early learning sector attract and retain its workforce.”
“We all understand that the state of child care in Pennsylvania needs to change,” Schwank said. “Low pay for childhood educators, long waitlists and high prices for parents are just a few of the major problems we need to address at the state level, and we have an excellent opportunity to do that in this year’s budget.”
Speakers detailed how low teacher compensation fuels the shortage which leads to a growing number of child care and pre-K classroom closures, and drives up waitlists for working families.
Dr. Leah Spangler, CEO of The Learning Lamp Early Learning Centers, stated that child care in Pennsylvania is “on life support” as her organization is currently seeing 97 job openings and 546 children on the waiting list for care.
Spangler believes that with better pay leading to filled job openings, they would be able to serve an additional 1,286 children. She also noted that child care programs cannot pay wages that match those of other businesses, like convenience stores and grocery retailers, and that this causes a staff turnover rate of more than 50% annually.
“Other states have established revenue streams to better support their early learning workforce and it’s time we do the same,” Stefano said. “Though not everyone in the commonwealth has a young child at home, the aggregate effects of the early learning teacher shortage impact everyone. When a parent wants to work but cannot find child care and then needs to stay home full-time, our workforce, and thus our economy, suffers.”
