Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children is a strong, effective, and trusted voice to improve the health, education, and well-being of the Commonwealth’s children. Their core strategies include research and analysis, strategic communications, mobilization, and government affairs. Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children focuses on 4 core areas: child abuse and neglect, early learning, health, and K-12 education.

State Allies:

Top Priorities for 2021

Increase the level of state and federal support for child care by working in partnership with the Start Strong PA campaign and by cultivating grasstops voices in the business community.

Embed racial equity into internal and external policy analysis and advocacy outreach.

Streamline the state’s early learning coalition (currently comprising of child care, pre-k, and home visiting campaigns) to encompass broadened PN3/PN5 policy work, with dedicated structure and support for a child and maternal health campaign that includes work on maternal health, reducing the child uninsured rate, and reducing lead exposure.

Ensure that all children grow up in homes that are safe and healthy by advocating for prevention programs and services, incentivizing informal kinship care and policies to improve permanency, and identifying linkages between child welfare and other family support systems such as home visiting, early intervention, child care, and K-12 education.

Pennsylvania’s 2020 Early Childhood Policy Landscape and Progress:

$34.6B STATE BUDGET
Estimated FY20 State General Fund Expenditures

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

39% LOW-INCOME
478,703 Young Children (0-8) are Below 200% FPL

Pennsylvania faced a dismal fiscal outlook and a projected budget shortfall as a result of the economic downturn. In May 2020 Pennsylvania passed a five-month budget. Most lines, like child care, were funded for this time, while education-related lines (including pre-k) were funded for 12 months. The legislature met again in November, and funding levels for preschool and pre-k, Head Start, and home visiting remained level.

S934 amends the Human Services Code, relates to departmental powers and duties as to licensing, provides for the right to enter and inspect, requires all child care centers and family child care homes to have a fire detection device or system that is operable and properly maintained (NCSL).
S1108 provides for an additional $125 million in state-allocated federal stimulus funding for child care as part of Pennsylvania’s five-month stopgap budget passed in May 2020. This is in addition to the $106 million the state received for child care specific to CCDBG from federal packages. The funding will support the industry, which largely closed during the pandemic. The federal stimulus funds were allocated by the state house/senate across several areas, with child care receiving one of the largest allocations. Specific split was $116M for child care/$7M for pre-k/$2M for Head Start.
Secured 12 months of funding for pre-k and Head Start in both portions of state’s two-phase stopgap budget. These allocations are at level funding to the FY19-FY20 state budget.
Secured 12 months of funding for home visiting in both portions of state’s two-phase stopgap budget. Allocations are at level funding to the FY19-FY20 state budget.

*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 Pennsylvania:

Pennsylvania Goes 2-for-3 in Early Learning in 19-20 State Budget

July 29, 2019

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, the only statewide non-partisan advocacy organization with a public policy agenda that spans the life of a child from birth to adulthood, reports on the outcomes of the state’s FY 2019-20 state budget — which includes a $30-million increase in pre-K funding and a $5-million increase in home-visiting funding, serving in total an additional 3,000 children and families.

One Step Forward, One Step Back in Pennsylvania

December 6, 2017

Governor Tom Wolf set the tone in his budget request by increasing state investments in early learning, and legislators from both sides of the aisle came together to prioritize Pennsylvania’s children in the 2017-18 state budget.

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.

The Alliance for Early Success is achieving large-scale, long-lasting change for the state’s young children by providing our allies with powerful advantages that help them shape Pennsylvania early childhood policy.