OP-ED BY OLGA GRAYS
I’m proud to be an early childhood educator in the first state to offer universal childcare! I’ve spent over 20 years as a home-based educator, and for the past few years, my fellow providers and I have knocked on doors, testified at the Roundhouse, and campaigned to win funding for universal childcare. As Governor Lujan Grisham prepares to leave office, however, we are looking forward to working with a new governor to address the program’s many flaws.
New Mexico has exploited its early educators for generations, and providing free child care to the wealthiest New Mexicans while we struggle to pay bills is just wrong. So when I read the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Sept. 14 article on ECECD’s latest plan to delay raises for early educators yet again, I felt what many of us feel: frustration that we’re still fighting for what was already promised.
My community has built much of the universal child care system we see today. We sued the Martinez administration in 2018 and forced the state to raise child care income eligibility. In 2019, we helped pass Senate Bill 22, creating ECECD itself. That law required the department to create a Wage and Career Ladder for early educators — a requirement now seven years old. We helped elect new legislators in 2020 to replace the leaders that had blocked early-ed funding for so long, and in 2022, we won the constitutional amendment to guarantee permanent funding for early childhood education.
Our pursuit of professional wages has been a tougher climb. ECECD’s Wage and Career Ladder—which is meant to raise provider wages based on experience, education, and credentials—has been in development or quietly shelved for six years. This year, we asked legislators to earmark $60 million in the state budget for raises through the Ladder, and they did. But ECECD also revealed in that article that they won’t spend that money as written. They will lump it into childcare reimbursement rates to providers, who can choose to use the funding for wages or not. This loophole betrays the providers who have championed universal childcare, and the legislators who budgeted this item and told their constituents that raises were finally coming.
ECECD also announced a five-year plan to cover 75% of workers by 2031. This plan is a commitment to exploit child care workers for the foreseeable future, and it will impact children and parents as well. ECECD recently released a study showing that they are well behind the goals they announced a year ago to create new child care capacity, meaning thousands of parents still can’t find free child care for their kids. That is unlikely to change as ECECD remains committed to paying poverty wages. Plus, as high turnover among early educators continues due to low wages, the quality of early childhood education in the state will suffer, as young children have to restart their learning process every few weeks or months as they build trust with a new teacher.
Universal child care is here to stay in New Mexico, and we will fight to defend our pioneering childcare program. We will also fight to make it the model our communities need, and one the whole country can look to. But as long as teachers are exploited, supply is limited, and quality suffers, New Mexico’s system remains a work in progress. We look forward to collaborating with our next governor to build a model universal system.