West Marin teachers and community members gathered at the Dance Palace last Wednesday to discuss the area’s pressing childcare and early-education needs. Participants particularly stressed the need for better funding mechanisms for programs and cost-of-living concerns for both teachers and families.
Bob Raines, superintendent of Shoreline Unified School District, underscored the importance of early childhood education. “Children reach kindergarten and there’s already an achievement gap,” he said. “In my career, I’ve known it all along and we haven’t—as a community, as a society—figured out what to do about that yet. If we don’t do incredible backflips, that achievement gap grows.”
The meeting was designed by the Marin County Child Care Commission to gather information for the next installment of the county’s childcare master plan, for 2020 to 2025. (Other meetings have been held in Marin City, the Canal and Novato.) According to Erika Erickson, the commission’s coordinator, the meetings are “an opportunity to share with us their concerns: what is working, what solutions they think we can implement in order to address the problems.”
The commission last week also shared a needs assessment, which contains data on the supply of and demand for childcare, the cost of childcare and the cost of living for childcare providers. The report, Ms. Erickson explained, will constitute the quantitative component of the master plan, and the information gathered at community meetings will make up the qualitative component. Data-gathering through meetings is especially important for West Marin, she pointed out, as countywide data does not necessarily reflect the particular problems in rural communities.
Many spoke on Wednesday about problems with the way funding—be it on a state, federal or local level—is distributed. Because the population of West Marin is small and dispersed, they said, obtaining grant funding and scholarships for students is often a challenge.
Daphne Cummings, director of Shoreline Acres preschool, said she isn’t able to pay her teachers if the pool of registered children in the school dips too low.
“I almost feel like the system of funding scholarships is a poor system for us out here,” Ms. Cummings said. “We have baby years and then no-baby years. But we need to have quality programs consistently out here so that families want to stay.”
Ms. Cummings suggested that the state and county provide funding tied to teachers instead of students, which would enable funding streams to stay constant through baby booms and busts.
Maria Niggle, chair of the West Marin Collaborative, pointed out that funding tied to population data is often flawed, as much of West Marin’s Latino population is undercounted by the census. That’s a problem, she added, that is likely to grow in the 2020 census because of a question regarding participants’ citizenship.
“If you determine who gets what based on numbers that are not good, then we need to think about how to re-structure some of those funding streams and how funds are allocated,” Ms. Niggle said. “Even when there wasn’t a fear in the community, it was impossible to get data, to get to a ranch out in the middle of nowhere, when people are living there that shouldn’t be there. It’s impossible to capture. Here there’s not a breadth of need, but a depth of need.”
Everyone agreed that teachers need better pay and more support. The entire education system, one participant noted, “is subsidized by low wages.” Peggy Dodge, a teacher in the College of Marin’s early childhood education department, has noticed a drop in enrollment in the department’s classes. “When there’s a good economy, we don’t have students,” she said. “You can walk dogs and make more money.”
The county’s needs assessment notes the high rate of teacher turnover. In 2014, nearly 75 percent of childcare centers saw at least one staff member quit; over half of those were teachers. In 2015, the average hourly wage for the highest-paid teachers at childcare centers was $25.46, and the average hourly wage of lowest-paid teachers was $17.49.
“It seems our highest-paid teachers fall below [living] wages, so why would anyone want to be a preschool teacher?” asked Susan Tacherra, director of the Bolinas Children’s Center. “I advised my daughter: do not do this.”
Victoria Maier, who teaches at the Bolinas-Stinson Union School District’s free 4-year-old preschool, said the county needs to encourage young people who are interested in teaching.
“I can see in our community there are a handful of really outstanding young adults who want to get into this field but have a lot of challenges in front of them,” she said. “If there aren’t mentors here, they can go to the College of Marin, which is wonderful, but then they have no connection out here. It would be sad to see Susan’s daughter leave: she’s fantastic, she knows the community, she knows the kids. Why are we letting that slip through our fingers?”
Mr. Raines suggested that partnerships could take some of the burden off of early childhood education providers. He suggested that colleges work with local schools to offer professional development closer to home, and that K-12 schools engage more with preschools. “Can’t we say, ‘I’ve got real estate and furniture, you’ve got experts, let’s figure this out?’” he asked.