Massachusetts

Strategies for Children works to ensure that Massachusetts’ children have the support they need in the early childhood years to be ready to succeed in school and life. They engage in policy advocacy, research, communications, and constituency building at both the local and state levels to ensure all children have access to high-quality early education, enter elementary schools ready to succeed, and are proficient readers by the end of third grade.

State Allies:

Top Priorities for 2021

Sustain child care in the time of COVID-19 by advocating for public funding and policies that help the system recover and rebuild stronger, informed by changes in parents’ demand and program supply.

Continue our advocacy for investments in high-quality early education and care, including preschool expansion, affordable child care, and workforce.

Develop and strengthen existing supports and TA for the early care and education (ECE) community in response to the pandemic (e.g., daily calls, advocacy webinar series, facilitating local collaborations), informed by lessons learned from our Community Readiness initiative.

Develop a “speakers bureau” for ECE advocacy that includes educators, directors, family child providers, parents, and emerging leaders that reflects the demographics of the people most impacted by policy decisions, using our Collective Statement on Racial Justice as the foundation.

Advance the work of the Massachusetts Partnership for Infants and Toddlers by documenting and sharing lessons learned during COVID-19 (e.g., program adaptations for family engagement).

Massachusetts’ 2020 Early Childhood Policy Landscape and Progress:

$35.18B STATE BUDGET
Estimated FY20 State General Fund Expenditures

UNALIGNED GOVERNMENT
House (D), Senate (D)
Governor (R)

26% LOW-INCOME
167,186 Young Children (0-8) are Below 200% FPL

As of late November, Massachusetts has not passed a FY21 budget. State leaders are waiting to see how much tax revenue is available, and if there will be more federal relief to states and child care specifically. The child care sector lost an estimated $250 million each month of the state’s three-month closure period, due to the loss of private pay fees. Since COVID-19 hit, the new goal of preventing the collapse of the child care industry has superseded the ally’s prior goals.

38 percent increase in FY20 General Fund over FY19. FY20 total is $185,239,872. There was an overall increase in child care from state and federal sources combined (NCSL).
3.5 percent increase in FY20 General Funds over FY19. Total in FY20 is $15,438,152 (Mincic, 2020).
25 percent increase in FY20 General Funds over FY19 for Head Start State Supplement. Total in FY20 is $12,000,000 (Mincic, 2020).
8.8 percent increase in FY20 General Funds over FY19 for Early Childhood Mental Health. Total in FY20 is $696,953 (Mincic, 2020).
Budget establishes a new $500,000 Early Education and Care (EEC) Public-Private Trust Fund to provide technical assistance to child care providers in their reopening and recovery efforts. Nonsubsidized providers make up 50 percent of all licensed programs. These programs are facing dire financial hardship and are ineligible for CARES Act funding or other future aid that would flow through CCDBG.
Work of Strategies for Children led to executive order to allow licensed programs to expand their licenses to care for school-age children during hybrid learning, and a new license-exempt designation for Remote Learning Enrichment Programs, new arrangements that entities can operate with partnership and approval from local municipalities.
CARES Act funding for child care was appropriated through the state's supplemental budget. This budget includes $45.6M in child care funding that EEC will administer as reopening grants to providers who serve subsidized children or essential workers. It also included emergency child care—$36M to cover EEC costs in administering emergency child care for essential workers and covering parent fees for state-subsidized providers.
Helped to create new emergency system of child care, providing free child care for children of essential workers from March 23-July 3. Emergency child care enrolled 4,700 children at its peak. During closures, EEC paid for emergency child care for essential workers, available at more than 500 sites statewide.
Department of Public Health is directed to collect and publish COVID-19 positive cases among child care staff, children, and families, in coordination with Department of Early Education and Care.
Department of Early Education and Care made a commitment to continue to pay all subsidy providers based on enrollment numbers in March 2020.

*Early childhood policy progress in a state is the result of numerous efforts — by those listed on this page and many others — who worked both independently and collaboratively to achieve wins for young children.

More from Massachusetts:

16 States Selected as Finalists for Child Care NEXT Transformation Grants

June 24, 2021

After receiving dozens of applications and collecting feedback on them from diverse review teams, the Alliance for Early Success (the Alliance) announced today that 16 states are finalists for Child Care NEXT — a grant program to support transformational change in a state’s child-care system.

Download the full 50-State report.

The Alliance for Early Success 2020 50-State Progress Report on Early Childhood Policy expands state data (disaggregating low-income young children by race) and provides high-level state policy trend analysis for the nation as a whole. Click the icon to download the report.

State Budget Data: National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), “Table 4: Fiscal 2020 State General Fund, Estimated (Millions); The Fiscal Survey of the States.” Spring, 2020

Low-Income Data (including disaggregation by race): National Center for Children in Poverty, “NCCP Analysis of ACS 1-year Estimates—Public Use Microdata Sample, 2019.”

State Action Data: Provided by state advocates, October-November 2020, with analysis and synthesis by Frontera Strategy for Alliance for Early Success, “Protecting Progress and Investing in Scale: The 2020 50-State Progress Report on Early Childhood Education Policy.”

Additional State Actions: Mincic, Melissa, Early Care and Education, State Budget Actions, Fiscal Year 2020. National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), October 2020.