Newly formed early child care coalition aims to drive home importance of work

Alex Edwards kneeled on the carpet to calm down Zuri Kafuko, 3, by twisting part of her hair back in place. About a minute later, Edwards was sitting beside Sebi Lewis, 4, as he played with letters that could be transformed into small robots.

It’s just a snippet of Edwards’ daily work as an early childhood teacher at Journey Preschool, a family child care program operated at the Montgomery County home of Jenn Nicholls.

“If early childhood education was a respected, valued field, everything else would fall into place. Wages for the workforce, career pathway for the workforce, affordability for parents,” Nicholls said Thursday sitting at a small table before the students did yoga exercises.

“Early childhood education has always been left on the back burner because it’s women’s work, right? It’s just babysitting,” she said. “Early childhood education matters.”

A newly formed statewide group hopes to drive home that point.

The Maryland Early Care and Education Coalition’s “call to action” plan includes development of a statewide early care and education workforce registry, and coordination with the Governor’s Workforce Development Board to help with strategies to grow the early childhood workforce. It also recommended a “career lattice,” a nontraditional structure that lets employees work in various roles and learn other skills, as opposed to a career ladder where they follow a vertical path in a certain position or department to senior-level positions.

Chris Swanson, executive director of a nonprofit organization called C-Impact, that will serve as the backbone of the coalition, said one of the main goals is to “increase collaboration over competition.”

“Maryland has lagged behind, certainly post-pandemic, in terms of our [education] recovery, and investing in our early childhood infrastructure enables that,” Swanson said in an interview this month. “The coalition is the first time that Maryland’s major advocacy and implementation organizations have formally come together to create stronger alignment and coordination and overall strengthened implementation of Maryland’s childhood system.”

Beside C-Impact, other organizations that will serve in the coalition’s leadership include the Maryland Family Network, the Maryland State Child Care Association and the Latino Child Care Association of Maryland.

Invest in early care

The three recommendations stem from work by Montgomery Moving Forward, a 13-year-old organization that will dissolve this summer. The group started to strictly focus on uniting business and community leaders to boost Montgomery County. It expanded its outreach in 2024 for a statewide initiative to improve early childhood workforce.

Among the data in a report it released last year:

• About 430,000 children aged 5 and younger live in Maryland, with 71% of those in households where parents work outside the household;
• Since 2020, more than 1,000 child care programs have closed in the state;
• St. Mary’s and Calvert counties have experienced a 27% and 18% decrease, respectively, in early childhood educators.

Sharon Friedman, executive director of Montgomery Moving Forward, said Maryland is one of four states without an early care and education workforce registry.

“We realized that in order to affect real system change, you needed to work at the state level,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “I hope they [state lawmakers] would invest in what I call the foundational system-building elements of an early care and education system.”

Early child care advocates are still thankful for some legislation approved this year by the General Assembly, such funding for the state’s popular child care scholarship program. Those bills are scheduled to be signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore on Tuesday.

Lawmakers also passed House Bill 1441 in 2024, part of which requires the state Department of Education to create a career ladder for teachers and assistant teachers employed by eligible private providers. It also said that, by July 1, 2027, early childhood teaching assistants must earn and maintain a child development associate certification or hold an associate degree in early childhood education or child development, or have documented experience in early childhood education of at least 15 years.

That’s why Swanson and others are working to possibly get legislation approved next year for early care workers who work with children up to 5 years old.

“We are hopeful that we’ll be able to see a birth-to-5 career lattice implemented within the state,” said Swanson, a former professor who also created education initiatives at Johns Hopkins University.

‘This is fun’

Back at Journey Preschool, students helped to lay down mats to prepare for yoga time.

Rowan Echeverria, a Montgomery College student who is one of four teachers at the preschool, led stretches, poses and other exercises for the students who included a smiling Rayan Hossain, 4. Nicholls said Rayan arrived as a nonverbal student. He’s diagnosed with a form of autism.

But Rayan still followed most of the directions as he laid down on his stomach, cradled on the mat and of course, jumped up and down. He even yelled and hugged Echeverria and said, “Look.”

Echeverria did and hugged him back.

As the students transitioned from yoga to art, Rayan handed Echeverria his mat. After one of the children yelled, “This is fun,” Rayan laughed.

Edwards, 20, one of the preschool teachers, led the art lesson for children to make dragonflies. She walked back and forth to the two small tables passing out wings, stickers and other materials for the art project.

She acknowledged it requires “lots of patience” to work with young children, but she’s gaining work experience being at Journey for at least two years. She also attends Montgomery College and then plans to attend the University of Maryland, College Park, to study child psychology.

As Edwards continues her college career to become a child psychologist, she said Journey Preschool remains a major influence.

“By coming here and learning how children work and all their behaviors, I’ll be able to further back up how those behaviors are connected to mental health,” she said. “It’s just a lot easier in just being able to transfer all my knowledge to psychology. Psychology is connected to everything. I’ve understood children better as a whole being here.”