Early education is a crucial part of a child’s development process. Yet, so many childcare services are prohibitively expensive, leaving both kids and parents out of luck. Porter-Leath’s NEXT Memphis initiative, part of the First 8 Memphis education strategy, seeks to change the game by providing an affordable infrastructure of collaborating centers around town. Memphis Parent spoke with NEXT Memphis director Chloe Moore on the benefits of early childcare and creating an improved network of services in the city.
Memphis Parent: What is the purpose of the NEXT Memphis initiative?
Moore: We know that childcare is one of the most essential services to support a community, both in terms of supporting children to be ready for school and life and also allowing families and caregivers to pursue a job or further education. Not only does it help little ones now and our adults now, but it really helps build our future.
In addition, early childhood professionals who work in the industry are some of the most passionate and talented folks, who are also raising the next generation of leaders, creatives, and thinkers. Supporting their work and making it feasible for them is a necessity. Since we’ve created a supportive infrastructure for childcare centers, the staff and childcare centers can now focus the majority of their time on children and families.
What drew you to this type of work?
I came into the early childhood field a bit by accident. I was working at a research firm and was doing a lot of work with refugee and immigrant entrepreneurship. They asked for an anthropologist to be on an early childhood project, and I was one on staff. They switched me, and I thought to myself, OK, I’ll work on this project for three months and go back. But as soon as I got to speak to people who worked in early childhood education, I immediately felt in my gut that this was a different space. Every single person I spoke to, the first thing they talked about was a passion for children; very rarely did they talk about making money. In fact, the only time we ever discussed making money was so that their centers could stay in operation, and it never was about profits.
That really struck me because it was this field of people who are so dedicated to children and families and seeing their community do well, and who also aren’t given the appropriate resources. Those things had to change, especially because our education system doesn’t include what happens from 6 weeks through 5 years old as part of formal education, yet 90 percent of our brains develop in that period.
So these are the people who have some of the most critical jobs in terms of setting the foundation for child and human development, and yet they’re sometimes paid minimum wage. Whereas other teachers, while they still don’t get paid enough, are making a salary. There are huge discrepancies in the resources that are afforded for such an important task, and seeing the passion of the people in this space, and how much of their own personal finances they would sacrifice, really committed me to helping this cause.
Last month, NEXT Memphis announced its first cohort of partner childcare centers. How did you go about selecting those businesses?
For the selection process, we tried to make it as objective as possible. We gauged people’s responses to what quality looks like, what drives them in their work. Then, taking into account the resources we have, how do we best make a partnership with their visions? We had a set of criteria that was publicly available, and we went through a recruitment process where we invited hundreds of operators from Shelly County. We had about 120 people RSVP and about a hundred people come to the open houses. They all filled out applications, and we went through an internal process of reviewing them and selected our first 11.
Why is it important for both children and parents to have access to early education programs?
Early childhood education is incredibly important because it sets up the foundation for learning throughout your life. As I mentioned, 90 percent of a child’s brain is developed by age 5. What that means is when children have nurturing learning environments, their brains develop in a way that has this beautiful architecture, where they have so many connections and pathways that, going forward, they can take in so much information.
Data locally and nationally shows that children who have access to early education programming before they reach kindergarten are outperforming their peers who did not have access. And those data points hold regardless of race or economic status. There’s a statistic where in third grade, children switch from learning how to read to using reading to learn. When children make that switch, it allows them to use reading to continue their education. But when children fall behind, it’s really hard for them to catch up. That switch is the biggest predictor of adult poverty for all education indicators.
Put very simply, when children don’t make that switch, they are more vulnerable to experience poverty as adults. In Memphis, where we have more than 260,000 adults living in poverty and a 45 percent child poverty rate in a city that is 65 percent or upwards of Black residents, that alone shows huge potential for racial disparities and generational poverty to continue.
When they can’t access childcare, not only do the children not receive the same level of support from a program as they should, but the parents or the caregivers are then forced to find other means of caring for their children. That can stunt what kind of jobs you’re able to take. In the most recent U.S. Labor Report, 70 percent of women who were not in the job force cited childcare as the No. 1 reason they weren’t working. You can just imagine how many women are not able to pursue full-time work because their priority is taking care of their children. And that’s wonderful, but we shouldn’t make it a choice of survival, between caring for your children or having a job full-time.
For the first centers that you’ve partnered with, what does the cost model look like for parents who are looking to utilize these
services?
Each of our partners, on average, will receive $300,000 worth of support. So it comes at virtually no cost to parents. That’s part of how we’re changing the business model. We’ve worked with private philanthropy, private investors, and also the department of human services to shoulder this cost. When thinking of how we increase quality and increase access to programming, we can’t put that cost on parents. For now, we are taking the cost of that and are working to hopefully get the state on board to fund this long-term.
For more information, visit porterleath.org.