AURORA | The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is the workplace for thousands of medical professionals. For many of their children, it’s a daycare.
Tucked in a corner of the campus off of Wheeling Street, Fitzsimons Early Learning Center, managed by Bright Horizons, cares for the children of CU Anschutz employees. Since they were serving the children of essential workers, the center never closed during the pandemic when many other schools and childcare facilities shut their doors during lockdown.
Having access to childcare was crucial for working parents who filled essential positions during that time, including doctors, nurses and other medical staff. In an interview with the Sentinel during the pandemic, CU Anschutz Dean Don Eillman said that figuring out who was going to take care of their family members during the pandemic was a major challenge for employees.
“The various school systems going either fully remotely or partially remotely has put a greater burden on members of our community to try to find ways to get their work done and take care of their families, or in some cases eldercare,” Eillman said at the time.
Years later, schools have opened back up and COVID-19 is no longer considered a pandemic, but the shortage of accessible childcare options remains. That’s driven in part by a shortage of early childhood education, or ECE, providers. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of May there were over 54,000 fewer ECE providers nationwide than there were before the pandemic. That’s in part due to the low wages across many parts of the sector, which generally pay less than those working in K-12 education and are highly demanding.
At the Fitzsimons Early Learning Center, a unique incentive is helping to recruit and retain providers. The Horizons Program, launched in 2018, allows providers at Bright Horizons locations across the country to receive an early childhood education degree online for free while employed with the company.
Unlike many similar programs, Bright Horizons pays the costs up front instead of requiring employees to front the costs and be reimbursed. Rachel Robertson, the company’s vice president of education and development, said that’s how the program originally was structured, but employees weren’t taking advantage of it since it was too cost prohibitive. The company then restructured the program so that employees didn’t have to front any costs.
“Our main goal is to remove those barriers and make sure early educators could advance their careers and work in early education without school costs or loans,” she said.
Employees who participate in the program have higher retention and promotion rates, she said, and many employees have said it was a factor in what motivated them to apply to work at Bright Horizons.
The program is beneficial for the employees as well as the children they serve, Robertson said.
“It’s a very important part of education that has not been given the respect and credit its due according to the research that tells us how critical brain development is in the first five years,” she said about early childhood education.
As of late last year, over 3,000 employees had received a child development associate certificate, a one-year program that is recognized by most states as an entry-level credential, at least 200 had received an associate’s degree and at least 400 had graduated with a bachelor’s degree, with hundreds more currently enrolled in one of the degree-granting programs.
One of those employees is Ruby Saldana, who has worked at Fitzsimons since 2014 and is in the process of working toward a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education administration. Saldana had to take a break from the program during the pandemic due to how demanding their work was at the time, but said she hopes to graduate next year.
Saldana, whose own two children currently are at Fitzsimons, initially began working as support staff in the infant daycare section and worked her way into a leadership role. While she still loves working with children, she enjoyed the opportunities for growth that working in the administrative side gave her.
“If we don’t strive for growth or development we kind of just settle, and what’s the fun in that?” she said.
Saldana said that she jumped at the opportunity to participate in the program as soon as it was introduced in 2018, and she hopes to be able to pave the way for others at the center as well.
“I want the people that are in the classroom right now to be able to look up to me and say ‘I want to be Ruby one day.’ she said. “I want to inspire the people around me to say ‘if Ruby did it, I can do it.’”
Preschool becomes a statewide focus
Childcare is something that’s been on the mind of many other people in the state and, come this fall, will be available to many more Coloradans as Gov. Jared Polis’ universal preschool program rolls out. Touted by the governor as part of last year’s reelection campaign, the program guarantees families at least 10 hours of free childcare for 4-year-olds for the upcoming school year.
Families who meet certain qualifying criteria, such as being homeless or below a certain income level, having a special education student or having a student who is a dual language learner can qualify to receive more hours or to be able to enroll 3 year-olds in the program. The pre-k services are provided by licensed childcare providers throughout the state, and families are matched to locations in their area by the newly created Department of Early Childhood, which administers the program.
The providers include many of the state’s public school districts, including Aurora Public Schools and the Cherry Creek School District, which both had ECE programs before this began. Officials in both districts said that increasing the scope of their early childhood offerings would be a net positive. However, they said the rollout of this program has been challenging for schools and questioned the state’s ability to fund the program without drawing on funds from its already-limited pool of money for public education.
“Those of us who have been doing this for a long time — our opinions, our knowledge, have been totally disregarded from the beginning, and it’s been really unfortunate to be honest,” Scott Smith, Cherry Creek Schools’ chief financial officer, said of the rollout.
Smith said there has been “very little understanding” at the state level of how schools deliver early childhood education, and of how this would affect the overall education budget, which because of how Colorado limits collecting tax revenue is consistently under strain.
The district still doesn’t know how much money it can expect to receive for the inaugural year, despite having to put together a budget for the upcoming fiscal year on June 30. In a best case scenario, Smith expects Cherry Creek Schools will break even on the program, but that at the state level he expects it to be subsidized with money from the state’s general fund for education.
Because of how education funding works statewide, that could significantly cut into the money that rural districts receive for special education students, which Smith said troubles him. He also questioned the wisdom of creating an entirely new department to manage the program instead of trying to do it in a simpler way.
“It’s not necessarily an unfunded mandate but certainly an underfunded mandate,” he said of the program.
School districts that don’t already have large pre-kindergarten programs are also having to put up significant up-front costs this year as they work to meet licensing requirements. There are different standards for the facilities that serve preschool students including something as minute as the depth of sand in the playground, which is required to be deeper than those for K-12 students.
Cherry Creek Schools has spent $6 million so far on equipment for 56 new preschool classrooms and 17 playgrounds that it won’t be reimbursed for. Early Childhood Education Director Stacey Peoples said her team has been working “around the clock” this summer to put the new classrooms together so that they’re ready for inspectors to verify.
Starting this coming school year, the district will have pre-kindergarten classrooms in all but one of its elementary school buildings, where before it had sites at 23 schools, Peoples said. The district will offer 10 hours a week of free preschool Monday through Thursday in either morning or afternoon sessions, with the option for families to pay for an all-day session that includes lunch and follows the same schedule as a regular school day.
Enrollment is currently open, and as of July 10, just over 1,500 students have signed up, Peoples said. To make the program work on the lower end the district needs about 1,600 and could accommodate about 3,000 at maximum.
APS will be serving about the same number of students — about 2,100 — that it did in its own pre-kindergarten program prior to the implementation of universal preschool. The main difference for the district will be the amount of hours provided. With the new funding from the state, it is shifting from a 2.75-hour, four-day program to three full hours, five days a week.
Before this school year, APS received funding from the Colorado Preschool Program, which placed a cap on the number of students it could serve because it was a limited source of money. Outside of DPS the district had one of the largest CPP programs, however, which puts it in a better position compared to many other districts in preparing for universal pre-kindergarten.
“The difference between APS and other districts as we move into the universal pre-k construct is we already at least had an apparatus to serve these kids already,” said APS Chief Financial Officer Brett Johnson. “A lot of districts are having to start from scratch.”
This year, the CPP funding is being transferred to the universal pre-k program, and the increase in revenue means there isn’t a cap on how many students the district can serve beyond how many it can physically accommodate. The district expects to serve about the same number this year, but will use the added resources to increase the amount of students who are in a full-day pre-k program to just over 1,000.
“The biggest difference for us between this year and next year is that fifth day,” Johnson said.
APS would eventually like to be able to offer full day preschool for all its students, he said, but that isn’t feasible right away.
The district will largely use the same facilities for ECE programs as before. It has four standalone buildings for preschool programs as well as some classrooms in elementary and P-8 schools.
Its biggest addition will be the repurposing of Sable Elementary School into an early childhood education facility, which was the option the district selected for the school out of a list of options for repurposing the school in northwest Aurora, which closed at the end of the school year due to declining enrollment in that region of the district.
Johnson said that the Sable site, which won’t open until the 2024-2025 school year due to some renovation work needed to retrofit the building for preschoolers, will be used for all-day programs.
Staffing the programs is another part of the puzzle. Despite serious shortages of paraprofessionals and other educators during the past several years, each district said they are in relatively good shape for the upcoming year. That’s in part due to pay increases for paraprofessionals that the districts hope will incentivize employees to want to work for them.
APS has about 250 ECE employees, the majority of whom are non-licensed staff. Due to the labor market the district is moving ahead with what Johnson described as an “aggressive improvement” to its classified salary schedule, which will include a starting pay increase for paraprofessionals from about $16 to $20.
Johnson said he hopes the substantial increase will help address the paraprofessional shortage and give staff members a reason to stay with APS instead of working for one of the neighboring districts, which are also looking to hire their own unlicensed staff.
“We’re really excited for the potential for filling more of these para vacancies,” he said.
In Cherry Creek Schools, paraprofessionals received a pay increase of 15% last year as part of a scheduled market study conducted by the district. This year, they received an 8% increase along with the rest of the staff.
Peoples said it can be a struggle to keep up with the market the district competes in, but that the district is in a much better place in regards to hiring unlicensed staff than it was a few months ago. The district still has openings for paraprofessionals, particularly those who can work with special needs students, but not to an extent that is overwhelming.
“We’re finding passionate people with big hearts and patience who want to work with our youngest students,” she said.
Despite implementation challenges and all the work going to get the program ready for the upcoming school year, the districts said they were excited to meet the desire for more childcare options in the Aurora area.
“It’s obvious there is demand for this,” Johnson said.