March 10, 2026 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Great, thank you. So first thing on the agenda is just approval of the minutes from February 2nd. I wasn't here for that meeting. So moved. Thank you Al. Second. Second. All in favor, document minutes. Thank you. So old business, I don't believe we have anything here other than the old business that we've been grappling with and we'll continue to discuss today. So new business, I see Rachel, conflict of interest disclosures.
Yeah, so we had you all do your annual disclosures for the conflict of interest. There weren't just a couple of people that had disclosed that they had some affiliation such as maybe their children went to one of the centers or attended summer camps. Joe was the only one that disclosed that they do some contract consulting for one of the grantees and they're going to recuse themselves from scoring that application as well. So that's the only ones that disclosed any conflicts of interest.
Just to put a finer point on that when I forget the particular one. But whenever we see the total scores, we will not have 14 reviewers on one of the proposals. It'll be only 13. And when we look at the number, we'll just have to keep in mind because one of your polling questions on the on the score sheet is whether or not you recommend the project for funding yes or no or partial. We'll look for a majority. And so we'll just remember that there are denominator for that one is not the full group.
Set up the discussion? I do. I do wanna do a little set up and first of all is to thank Dan for saying yes to working with us. I think y'all will remember that Comb County has now engaged in a consulting contract with your firm to provide support to the committee and also to staff as we work through this focused investment project, which the timeline carries us through July of next year. So we've got another 15 months or so still on the clock, but we have some milestones in our project timeline so that this summer hopefully we will have honed in on the areas that the committee would like to have considered as, let's call it for the sake of conversation, finalist ideas to move forward into scoping and, and putting and things of that nature. What I wanted to say before our conversation today is that it will take a little bit of mental discipline to separate this current funding cycle that you're all like in very much right now because you're reviewing proposals from the future state.
So as of now, we have those five funding strategies that community organizations could apply under. There's no priority. Sarah and I have been talking about the idea of prioritizing there. There are no priorities dollar wise or otherwise within those five strategies. So we could be, you could be looking at operational grants from a childcare center. You could be looking at a workforce program, you could be looking at a behavioral health application. You could be looking at one time special projects that a center wants to do. And each of those is to be considered on its own merits within the scoring criteria that exists. The idea that we have for a future state is to potentially focus and not have all five strategies or maybe the strategies are more defined. So there's goals within them and specific targets we're trying to get to. Maybe we have different processes for providers of one or another kind of idea.
I have the list of ideas that came out of our fall conversations and I think we were working on it all the way into the December meeting. There was a request from committee to work on that list and categorize our ideas. And we've taken it a step further where we're also assigning loose categories of cost. Would this be a low or a medium or a high cost idea? Complexity, same, and implementation considerations. Like how exactly would a project work? For example, if we said one of the ideas that was thrown out on the table was to do a three a program focus on 3-year-old. So we put a little scope scoping context there so that by the time we get to May, we can get that list of ideas back out and talk about which ones stand out to us, which ones we're curious about and wanna know more about ultimately as a part of our narrowing down process.
But that's a completely separate, we get our project plan, we have the left side of the page and the right side of the page. And the left side of the page was keep the grants going as is while we work on the future. So my ask is to try to keep the dialogue today focused on the future state rather than talking about the grants that will be made for July one. We're gonna focus during our April meeting on that grant making after all of the review recording has been complete. Any other things that I could add questions for me?
Dan, you did a great presentation with the team at the last month's meeting that was very much focused on why this matters. And we talked a little bit about, okay, now what and how. And so we met together and came up with some guiding questions that he will lead us through using your experience and probing questions on your expertise. We, we do have two members of the committee who are online. So Stacy and Emily, we can see you if you want to come off mute at any time, we'll be on the lookout for that. If you put things in the chat, that's trickier for us to see. But Angeline can message me and, or you can use the little raise your hand feature that's built into Zoom. Oh, there's chat. We can zoom chat. So we'll do, our intent is to be inclusive of you all, just as the folks who are in the room and just let us know if we can do better. Thumbs up. Okay. Angela, would you pull up those slides please? Now we no longer see your faces before the chat, so we might have you here raise the hand feature and I'll keep my eyes on my chat in case Angela wants to flag me. Take it away. Good. Are
We good? Alright. Well first I thank you for the, the chance to be here. It was so nice if, for those of you, if anybody was not, I know Adrian wasn't at the last meeting. I'm Dan Waray. I have been working in this field for 30 plus years. I hate to admit I was the, the deputy director of South Carolina's early Childhood Agency for about 15 years was here in North Carolina, the founding director of early childhood at the Hunt Institute and in Cary, and had a chance to work through that role all across the country with governors and state lawmakers. I think our conversation last month was, was mostly sort of around my book and the, the why of, you know, why, why all of this matters. But Rachel and I have, as she mentioned, been really engaged in this question of sort of now the, the how and the what's next around this whole conversation.
And so you heard a lot from me last meeting. You're gonna hear much less from me probably this meeting. Our hope is to really engage you all in, in conversation this meeting. And again, you know, as Rachel mentioned, you know, you're in a, in sort of a strange place, you're scoring these grants for the, you know, for the present. It's, it's probably too late to make any sort of, you know, major, major shifts given where you are right now in the process. But also, you know, acknowledging that the group wants to be forward thinking and, and, you know, give some thought to, you know, how or if grant making might change in the, in the future, that's a, an important and ambitious goal that then also has to be balanced against. You have some longstanding investments in the community as, as well. And so, you know, a challenging conversation in a, in a lot of ways, and if you wanna move to the next slide, we, we structured this conversation today around some of the language that the commissioners actually passed in creating this, this fund and this and this group.
And so we, we thought we would sort of parse and, and dig a little bit deeper into, I sort of jokingly said, I think I sent Rachel these slides the day after the state of the union address. And so I said this is like a, a state of the, the fund conversation. But what begin here with this slide, this is actually, other than the bullet points, which I just sort of broke this down, this is, is taken directly out of the enabling language that created the, the fund. And so these, these three things that the purpose of the the fund is, you know, first as you see here, to ensure that every child in Buncombe County has an equal opportunity to thrive during their first 2000 days. Which by the way is five and a half years, including access to early childhood education. And then, oh, I'm, I'm advancing slides on my own computer. Thank you. Let me, let me get so that I can, so that I can see it too. These are, these are sort of additional charges that were issued. Rachel, did you want to talk to these at all or
Well, how it came about was the commissioners one, we had commissioners who had kids, you know, young kids, but a lot of us had talked to a lot of people. And I spent 40 years in banking. And one of the things that the end of my career, one of the problems I saw in different cities, I worked from Boone to Murphy in Western of North Carolina, but I saw from Asheville to Murphy, we all had the same problem with childcare. And what do we do? How do we solve the problem? We even tried to do it in Asheville with the banks, but it, it didn't work because they thought one or two of the larger banks of us, we fund it all. But you know, we, we didn't see it eye to eye on that. But as a result of, you know, what some of us had seen what other commissioners were going through, we said, look, what can we do to really, it was all started to increase the number of slots in Buncombe County, but it ended up through c and other situations that we went through at the time that we ended up in just keeping what slots we had.
This was starting to lead to universal pre-K in Buncombe County. That's our end goal. But we realized early on the three 4 million that we are giving just from taxpayers won't do it alone. We're gonna need a lot more. And now as we move to the next level, not only we want to look at the way we are giving the grants out still how we do it in the future, but what do we do to take this to the next level? And I'll be honest from me as a commissioner, I see it at some point in time, I want to push it away. I would like to see it as a 5 0 1 C3, some organization in the county that others are particularly that we have businesses, everybody and you know, the county, we could still make our contribution every year, but to use that is seed money to push it to where we want to go with universal childcare and also bring in the public schools because as they are going down as far as what's projected of kids in the next 10 years, they are going to free up some classrooms and they would be ideal, you know, for that looking and taking advantage of that.
But that in a nutshell is how it started, where we are and where we would like to go from here. And it is all about, you know, hopefully universal childcare and that will help us, we hope, keep more people in the county, especially young professionals that we need. Because childcare today is important. And when I hear people say that rather than two work, one stays at home because that's cheaper than paying for childcare, you know, and we see that happening. But that's a no win situation I think in some cases, but just the up that's the history of where we are. Well, and that's really, really important context. So let me, let me just reflect back to you all too. As someone who now has had the chance to work in states and communities all across the country and increasingly across the world, you know, I I think al you, you said something important but also something important to recognize.
$4 million I think you're right, is is not enough probably to comprehensively meet the needs of all of the young children in Buncombe County. And so that's, you know, one of the reasons that this conversation is so important that you, you know, that you are really strategic around how those, how those dollars are used, that it's, yes, maybe not enough, but the, you know, the important, but there is, how lucky are you that you have this $4 million investment? I mean, in most communities in this country there, you know, increasingly there are state level investments. There's only two or three states now that don't have any investment in public pre-K, but it is relatively rare, all things considered to have at the community level the kind of buy-in that that that Buncombe County is, is putting in. And so I think you, you know, there's a lot of reason to be proud. Is it sufficient to do everything? Maybe not, but boy, it's a whole lot better than, you know, you're, you're in a much better place to be able to have this conversation than most communities, the country. I see, I see. Stacy, you have your hand up. Yep.
And we have some now that at the point where they're half full one school in the county, only a hundred kids and we have a principal and a whole staff that have a hundred kids when down the street we have room and another primary school. But these are the issues we're gonna have to deal with in the future. But while we are dealing with that overall, we need to be able to take care of pre-K too.
Stacy. This, this may be what you were getting at or, or maybe not, but I, you know, I would just quickly, because I want to, I want to get into into your discussions, but I think it's important to say, 'cause al you raised so many, so many great points. You know, one thing that we have to be particularly careful of that I would advise you all to be really thoughtful about is this balance between placing programs in public school districts and the, the needs of the private and community based sector. Historically, early childhood has not been the, the domain of, of public schools. That doesn't mean they're not doing it in fabulous ways across the country. As a former public school kindergarten teacher and school district administrator who ran pre-K, you know, some of the very best pre-K programs I've ever seen are in, in public schools.
The problem in some cases, and you know, we're balancing and, and lots of communities are looking at this, you know, where, where populations are shrinking and there may be kind of physical space available in, in school district owned buildings is that, you know, that childcare in the private sector is in a really precarious place financially. And you know, one of the reasons for that is that infant care and toddler care are almost impossible to provide even at a break even point for business owners. I, you know, I frequently, and maybe I said this last time, but I, you know, I I frequently sort of only half jokingly, you know, compare infant care to those like doorbuster deals on, on Black Friday where you can get a TV for $30 or, or whatever, you know, they're, you know, that the stores are doing that at a loss, but they're doing it with the hope that you're gonna come into the store and buy other things.
Infant care is, is so labor intensive, you know, childcare needs so much in terms of physical space that it's just very costly to provide. And so the, you know, the challenge is that the, the way that childcare is able to keep its doors open, generally speaking, is by providing service to older preschoolers who can be served in slightly larger numbers. And so when, and I'm not suggesting that this is you, but I think it's important just to sort of keep in the back of our minds, if we go too far into the school district provision, it has the potential to really be an existential threat to infant toddler care in the, in the community and sort of upset the, that's why, you know, in, in South Carolina we have, and, and North Carolina pre-K is, is similar in some ways, but we have, you know, what we call a mixed delivery system of of pre-K where it is delivered in both public schools, but also in church preschools and private childcare centers and head start centers all across the, the state.
And then that it's important to sort of maintain that balance. The states that, yeah, California is a good sort of cautionary tale right now. They are moving really aggressively around expanding pre-K, they call it tk transitional Kindergarten California, but they're doing it only in the public schools. And we're seeing now childcare providers all across California struggling and, and beginning to close down as a result. So anyway, just as an aside, that's an important consideration as we go. So I can give you a good example of that. In Buncombe County, back in the early two thousands, I spent eight years on the city school board. We had probably the, one of the best five star programs in the state. You know, pre-K toddlers and all that program doesn't exist today.
That's a good example. Well, let's jump in. We, we've got about an hour. I know before our time is up and I'll, I'll, I'll play timekeeper a little bit here. Rachel and I, were sort of debating whether we could get through all of this in an hour. So we've got sort of three slides with the, you know, associated sets of questions here. Going back to that sort of mission statement or whatever we, well, I don't know formally if it's a mission statement, but it's sort of a good, a good example of one. So let's, let's start by just sort of dissecting that and, and giving some thought to where we've been and where you, where you want to go. So we'll start here with this idea that all children in Buncombe County have an equal opportunity to thrive. So let's, let's start for just for a couple of minutes here around the question of what, what does it mean to you to thrive? What would it look like if if, if children were thriving in Buncombe County? What came to my mind Valley? Yeah. Coming to school
Nurturing care framework. And off the top of my head, I, I'm thinking of safety, health, nurturing care, you know, responsive caregiving and fostering development as I recall it. It's a very nice and evidence based schematic that I think defines thriving in early childhood. Anyone else wanna weigh in on that? The, the question of what, what it means to thrive food security that, oh, food security. Food, food security. Yep.
I just pulled up the model that Adrian shared the nurturing care framework, and it does have adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, safety, security, good health, and then also opportunities for early learning as one of the many, that's one of the things that I'll disclose, I'm listening for as we go on this journey. When we say early care and education, do we specifically mean childcare? And if so, let's be clear that we, that we mean childcare. If we mean more than only childcare, what else do we mean besides childcare? So in this framework, opportunities for early learning is one of multiple things with health safety. You know, when you say childcare, like I think quality childcare is not different than opportunities for learning, right? I don't know that you can or should sometimes, right? I think when I pre, when I verbalize that distinction, what I meant was licensed program where getting at part of what Al was talking about, the original intent of having spots. So when a parent needs to work a place that they receive care and also learning and development while they're there, versus learning in other settings throughout the life of the family.
Family, family involvement too. So I, I would caution you to be a little bit careful about the, the, you know, because this is only about about childcare question. And I want to, I want to get in a minute to this question of do children in Buncombe County have the opportunity to do all of those things? But before we do, let's look at the second question around, you know, it's interesting, it's not just that we want children to thrive, it's that we want them to have an equal opportunity to, to thrive. What would that look like?
The equal versus equitable. The people standing on the, on the blocks looking over the fence at the, at the baseball game. The, that has been dissected and critiqued in a lot of different ways. So I decided not to, not to bring it, but I think broadly it raises an interesting question around do we, you know, does this equal opportunity involve sort of the same opportunity for everyone? Or are we looking at investing really specifically at kids who are at greater need potentially. Do you have thoughts, thoughts there around where the fund might go for how or how you're addressing that currently?
I mean, I have, I'm not gonna answer your question exactly, but I have thoughts about collaboration and how they, our community has silos. And so like in terms of our ability to support children and families thriving, I really think it is systemic in terms of like social determinants of health and like how do we work together in different systems and agencies and, you know, stakeholders to, to reduce the barriers to equal opportunity. Like what does that look like? It's not gonna all happen under one hub.
Loose? I think loose structures of, well, we could get into funding issues, but I won't. But I think like in our community there's, in many communities that's a, there's silos where pockets of money and people have responsibilities, but often aren't connected. And I think connection and collaboration are often huge issues that no one has time to really identify or strengthen. Fill up those gaps. Yeah, fill in the gaps.
How about, how about within the fund's, current investments? I know you're, we're not gonna get deep into current grant making, but are the, are the strategies that you're funding currently sort of broadly open to any child in, in Buncombe County who's in the right age range, for example? Or are they targeted more specifically at, at children that have particular risk factors? For example?
I know for example, that there's a, you know, a large head start grantee that you're working with, you know, which is limited obviously to young children in poverty generally. What, what are the barriers to, to thriving in, in Comb County right now? Work issues clearly important, not just in terms of availability, but also in terms of continuity. You may need that kind of continuity for ongoing social emotional development. And that's, you're talking about the, the childcare workforce, right? The teachers, yes. Turning over, I don't know if you have any, any data on that specifically in the, in the county, but, you know, and it's, it's challenging because there's probably not good national data on this too, because it's largely from private businesses. But
But y y'all know what Bucky's is right back. Yeah. Gas station. You know, it was shocking to me a couple of years ago, you know, we got our first in South Carolina right on outside of Florence, off of I 95 and you know, for months they were advertising, you know, come, you know, 16, $18 an hour to start in a community where infant teachers again would be lucky maybe to be making eight or $9 an hour. And so, you know, to this question of turnover, we, you know, to the workforce thing that, that Adrian was, was mentioning, I have seen, you know, national estimates of up to 40% of the, the infant toddler teacher workforce leaving the field annually. And so, you know, there is, I know we, we talked about this last time, but a, a tremendous mismatch between the developmental needs of, of children at that age and our ability to provide them with stable, nurturing sort of continuity in those, in those relationships. So the workforce question here is a big one.
We're also one of the highest counties in the state to live in. And affordable housing is prob housing takes a bigger percentage of one's income than in other markets in the, in the country. And we have very little housing available obviously because, what was it we lost 120,000 houses due to Helene due to total destruction or damage.
It's so interesting too, Stacy, that you, that you say that I think we, you, you may have read and and heard of, you know, there's a lot of conversation around what we call childcare deserts in the country. There are, you know, fewer, fewer childcare slots than there are kids who need them. And we frequently think about those as being in very rural places. Certainly there are childcare deserts in very rural communities that just don't have the, the population and the, you know, the, the market basically to sustain those. But it's interesting that communities like Asheville that tend to be the more expensive communities in which to live, surprisingly, you know, we, we think of, we think of these communities as being relatively affluent, but it is very, you know, it's very frequent that we see childcare deserts in exactly these communities because the, you know, the, the adults who we need to work in those programs that are paid so abysmally just aren't able to live in the community.
Well a and I were doing a a, a visit to one of the centers in Black Mountain and almost all of their childcare workers live in McDowell County. They have to come up the mountain every day, which would drive me crazy because the cost of living in McDowell is so much cheaper than in bunkum and their childcare workers make that long drive every day so that they can work at that center. And that was, that was a center and that, you know, that adds a whole nother level of complexity for bad weather. You know, weather wor days and all that sort of stuff. 'cause they're not gonna be able to get over the mountain.
Yeah, you, you have in some ways the same problem I think that the coastal areas have, right? That it's very expensive right on the coast and most of the hospitality workers and caregivers, you know, probably live at least a county in inland so that that's not, not the same. Are there other barriers that you think of in, in Boca County to thriving? Availability in terms of choice, you know, that there may not be a range of options.
Yeah, mine segues with Adrian's, which is also that it's, you know, like what is available in terms of like emotionally responsive care caregivers or teachers and early learning kind of to Rachel's point versus childcare. There's a wide range in variation and, and what people can afford or not afford or what they're sold. And then, you know, that piece about low wages, just having a warm body doesn't mean, you know, emotionally responsive nurturing relationship, which is the foundation of all learning. You know, like that to me seems like a big barrier. County is huge and it's terrain vastly different compared to where you go. And I just, because I do live within spitting distance of another county, I'm very interested in making sure that these outlier counties at these outlier areas are being taken care of because there's hardly a sub super desert where we are.
Is there like something else getting in the way? Is there, is there knowledge gaps for parents or resource gaps for parents? Another one that comes to mind is because people have said it to me as I've listened lately, screens and the impact of screens for very young children is not a barrier contributing to their ability to thrive. Putting it out there for sake of brainstorm.
Yes. No, no, no, no. Also that didn't, we have a big drop in childcare homes over the past 10 years. So that option, even though it's not what we in this room would call quality childcare, it was childcare and that option is few and far between now and it was usually a lot less expensive.
Yeah. And then one other barrier that we haven't explicitly mentioned I think is trauma. That there are gonna be some kids and it's, you know, particularly after Helene and COVID, I think that percentage of the overall bunton county early childhood population is really pretty significant. I would just reflect back, I say we need to be careful about not suggesting that home-based childcare is, is not of of high quality.
Okay. Well it's almost, wait, I think we're just looking at the clock. Let me, let me just propose this, this last question too is, I mean, in terms of equal access or equity in, in this process, is there good data available in the county on who are the kids that are least likely to thrive, whether it's academically or health wise? Lemme I'll give you an example. One, you know, one of the things that South Carolina has, it, it's, it's a clunky process. It's very labor intensive, but they have something at the state lab, state level, what they call the, the state's data warehouse, where they have an opportunity to sort of connect data sets across agencies. Hopefully things are, are better now even than they were when I was there. But we had the opportunity, you know, years ago even to look at who are the kids that are really not succeeding by third grade, for example, who are the kids that are in the, the bottom quartile, maybe on the state standardized tests who are kids that have already been retained at the grade level by the third grade.
And we were able to do an analysis and look sort of back at, you know, sort of identifying who those kids were in the third grade. But then looking back retrospectively at what were the risk factors that they had as very young children. Were they, you know, were they born two teenage parents? Were they born at very low birth weight? You know, were they reflected as having been abused or neglected or in foster care? You know, we found that there was a, a set of risk factors that were very, very commonly associated with these challenges in the third grade. And I'm just wondering, is that, is that something that you have access to either, either through the state or, or more locally? Do we have, do we have good data? I
Would say various sources. My mind goes to this data presentation that strategy and innovation has done for this committee in previous years looking at kindergarten readiness as measured by NC Eli, the early learning inventory in which we see differences by race and other factors at kindergarten entry. The same thing happen as kids proceed in school with the subpopulations. But I did make a note, I'm wondering what the latest trends are from Child Protective services and foster care that might relate to this team's work.
It was, I mean I can, I can make available, I don't know that I have it with me, but I, I can, you know, show you, you know, we, we put together, and, and the data is probably quite old at this point, but just as an example of, you know, probably 15 years ago, but you know, a shocking number of, of kids, you know, Adrian, you'd appreciate as a pediatrician too, like, you know, kids that were born very, very prematurely. For example, more than a third of 'em were, were struggling by the, by the third grade. So, you know, kids that are, you know, deeply deep, you know, that were in poverty and, you know, receiving TANF benefits for example, you know, a huge number of them not succeeding. So I just raised that to think about, you know, if you wanted going forward to really give some thought to who are the kids that are in greatest need in the community that there might, that you wanna put together to, to give some thought too,
I would be interested in if it, if the on the county side we were able to access the subsidy data and looking at the children, the families who are deemed eligible for subsidy and then don't take up subsidies. And if they have administrative data that some that differentiates those families in some way or if they were willing to make some, do some phone calls or focus groups to understand why they aren't accessing the subsidy. That's not getting into outcomes, but it is getting into, we want kids who wanna be in classrooms and classrooms. And then I'd also be interested to know if our CCR and R and buncom, which I think might be buncom partnership for children, would be willing to maybe support a look at their data, who's calling, what questions are they asking, what challenges are they facing? And those are two data sources for proximal to access ECE access that I think would be useful.
That's a really interesting question, sir. Do you have, do you have knowledge even anecdotally of, is, is there a problem with families who could be receiving subsidy that are deliberately choosing not to? I've, I've run into communities where, where people say, oh you know, there's a, you know, culturally there's a great level of pride and that, you know, that families don't want to be associated with, you know, having received benefits they'd rather other, other people be able to access them. But the bigger problem probably in, in North Carolina, certainly in the country is that, you know, the only, you know if you, if you look federally at the childcare and development fund that you know helps, you know, makes, makes these plot grads out to the states to help to support childcare subsidy. The challenge is that only about 14% of the eligible kids, the low income eligible, you know, if you looked at the law and said, you know, to qualify for this you have to be under X income. Only about 14% of the eligible families are actually able to access subsidy because it is so dramatically underfunded. I
Recently completed a study in New York City that was exactly this design that I just posed and we found that families have trouble accessing the slots that they want. So it's access to slots that are the right time near them geographically have extended day programs. So able to move beyond just the CPDF coverage. And then also there's a lag in, in New York at least there was a lag in distribution so that by the time some families became eligible and got their voucher, their kid was already in a head start program or a kindergarten program. So I think there are specific barriers that could be identified if we were to ask parents
Alright, Angela, can we move on to the next slide just in the interest of keeping us going. So the, you know, the first, the first part of that statement was around, you know, all children having equal access. The second part of it then speaks to this question of the first 2000 days, right? So just, you know, deposing the question to you thinking about what you have funded historically. And it is, and I I'll say upfront it's interesting because the enabling legislation or whatever, whatever we want call it at the level, we
Resolution. A resolution sort of both, both says across the first 2000 days and with an emphasis on pre-K, right? So it sort of emphasizes four year olds, but also says we ought to be looking at the first 2000 times thinking about what you have invested in thinking about the applications you're reviewing now, do you feel good that is the, is the fund reaching kids all across that age span or is it really mostly focused on, on pre-K
I don't know. I'm, I'm asking Yeah, I don't know what what, what, you know, how how we would look at the data Exactly. To answer my impression very loosely is that it has been focused more on pre-K development and that there may be my impression perhaps more of a need currently for the younger kids, infant, toddler, and three year olds.
I think it's been more, more on pre-K give you a good example. A few years ago we had a church to apply for infant toddlers and they were going, I think it was 25 or 30 slots if I remember right. We gave them a grant. They never took the money because they couldn't, they had not done their homework. We didn't realize that they couldn't find employees or it was a mess, you know, we ended up reinvesting money somewhere else. As a commissioner, does it give you any heartburn to, to think about the idea of, of shifting a little bit toward the younger age range if that's what the group decided to do? No, no, it doesn't give me any heartburn. My heartburn is that we need to do something you, that's, that's where I'm uncomfortable, but no, you know, we need to shift. Let's do it.
You know, it's interesting as a staff person who has sat alongside Al and the other members of the commission that have changed in and out over the years, when we use language like universal pre-K or universal childcare, sort of probing what we mean by that to make sure that it, I'm capturing it correctly and showing it back, which is kind of how we landed on this emphasis on, on on pre-K. There were voices in the room following part of when the, when this started, there was a lot of movement about universal pre-K. There were communities trying that and we wondered if, if we might get into that, but not, didn't wanna do it at the expense of anything else. And so what we've ended up with is that arbitrary perhaps spreading of money between zero and five as opposed to intentional spreading by prioritizing dollars.
Yeah, and just to add, like, this is my third year in the committee. So like the historically, the entire time, the three years there has been heavy emphasis on bk. Like I've been uncomfortable at times to be candid. And I also wanna name that there's, you know, there's always behavioral issues are identified, right? Like more of the mental health and the social emotional development behavioral concerns come out and the issues. And so by the time, right, so we, you know, a lot of times grant requests are around those issues and for the BK population and so like that just leaves this parcel over here, toddler. And especially with that's going through, well these children being COVID, I think COVID babies, but COVID and Helene and their lack of social, you know, I guess just exposure even with the masks on understanding expressions and faces and yes, you're gonna see that there's problems as they age into primary school, but you know, I I think we need to hit that off before they even get there.
Heather, I don't want to, I don't wanna assume. I, I I think I know what you're saying, but I don't want to assume, so I just put probe on this one thing. Are you, is is your concern that these behavioral issues sort of have their roots much earlier and now we're trying to remediate them at at age four,
It's interesting. We're, we're seeing that a lot in terms of states literacy interventions. For example, you, I I think North Carolina has one, but almost every state in the country now has what they call a third grade reading law, right? Where if you, if you aren't reading proficiently by third grade that they'll hold you back or, but they're, you know, they're investing untold millions and millions of dollars on kind of remedial approaches to, you know, the literacy coaches and interventions sort of in the, in the first and second grade right before they take standardized tests as opposed to beginning where literacy actually begins and sort of That's interesting. Can I ask something about just a question real quick though. I wanna list up from earlier about silos because I think thinking of this fund as a sole solution for the complexity of the issues and the ecosystem of early education can, can force us into some, some scarcity based solution development here in this committee.
That this fund, as amazing as it is for this community, is only $4 million and can only ever be one part of the solution like partnership is required across universities and across K 12 system and like bringing those folks around the table to address other pieces of the issue. So I think like the question for me is like, has the E-C-E-D-F fund, has it played its role within the ecosystem? Not has it solved the, the issue that is early childhood education because it never will. And if we continue to approach it as the full solution, then we're gonna keep missing the mark and keep having this conversation.
I was just thinking a little bit about like who are our highest needs kids. This is a bit off track, but, and like our partners, we don't really talk about like our early intervention services. So that first to three group that are doing those early invention, those are gonna be your highest needs kids. And if there's a way to kind of target that population, because we know they're gonna be more likely to have problems in school
When you think of the resources that go into developmental therapies for that very vulnerable population compared with, you know, resources that might otherwise help to support responsive caregiving and, and aspects of social emotional development not directly addressed in the form of developmental therapies. Right? But again, to, to Joe's point, you know, these are sort of systems issues and it becomes difficult to really think about just what role this committee and these dollars may have sort of addressing the bigger picture in the interest of time. You'll see questions B and C are are sort of the same question at, at two different age groups, right? Like what do we, what do we know about sort of the wisdom of investing in the earliest years and what do we know about the wisdom of investing in in pre-K? Do you have thoughts you wanna share on sort of, I think the offices are in this book that I kind, I have to say I that's an excellent,
No, it, it wasn't me, but I was just gonna chime in. I know everybody's already like seconded Joe's comment, but Joe hit the nail on the head for me and I think I would just add, you know, I don't think it, this particular comment pertains to B or C necessarily. I think, I think what makes this so complex for all of us and continues to be so complex is that this issue is so acute because of its domino effect on family at various income levels. And so trying to think of a very eloquent way to to say that I think our policy makers and and funders are, you know, beginning to realize that the acuteness of this issue exists because it affects virtually every corner of society. And I think that makes our challenges, you know, even more important but even more severe. So yeah.
Hi. I don't know if you can hear me. I'm driving, but I did wanna give some contribution just to the discussion and lift up what Joe mentioned with regard to the fund is only so limited to help to support some of the solutions that we've been looking at. And just in my time on the committee, I think that there's been a diversity of different solutions from infant to all the way to pre-K, but I do think it, it does warrant based on the limited resources that we have is to target the strategy that we're focusing on to really be effective and go a little bit deeper in providing some more systemic change versus what I think is more stabilization in the last several years that we've seen with disruptions of COVID and Helene in our community is really just to try to maintain what we have. And I, that, that is a little bit of my worry is that pulling back and narrowing is going to have an impact, but I think it ultimately, I think it's necessary to have deeper impacts. Thanks.
You know, one more thing too, the school, the two school systems and evaluating whether they should merge or not. A study was done and al give me more background on this, but it determined that neither of our schools kids are not performing at age level. And I think, you know, this goes back to, you know, your zero to birth age group that they're not getting the development they need zero to five and it's affecting what they're doing at age 17. And it was very, very, it, it was a huge shock for our school systems to realize just how poor performing our students were as a gen and a general evaluation.
I think that, yeah, absolutely. I i I won't insert too much personal opinion here, but I will tell you as I, as a former kindergarten teacher and a former public school pre-K administrator, one of the reasons that I am now more focused on infants and toddlers is just the, I mean, it was a real eye-opener to me early in my career to see the disparities that were already evident at at four, right. Coming in, you know, the, you know, and, and i, I taught in an unusual place. It's sort of the neighborhood school of that serves both a, a relatively affluent subdivision but also some very rural outer parts of our, of our county. And you know, I had kids who at five were going to Switzerland for spring break and I had kids who literally didn't own a book in their, in their homes. And so it, you know, it just drove me a little further into that lower age range.
So we, we'll need to move on. I wanted to say that on that previous slide, those questions were intended to say we're holding research that shows us how important those infant toddler years are. And we're also holding research that shows us how effective pre-K investments are and both things are true. And this conversation intended for us to ponder that as we prepare for a future conversation month after next about if we were to narrow, what would narrowing potentially
Alright, so onto our last slide. So we just got a, a couple of minutes then you might've noticed that, and I, I sort of highlighted it on that first slide where we were dissecting the thing, but you know, one of the, one of the things that it said was that it could make, that you could be making investments including early childhood education, education. What is the, what is the work inclusion of that, of that word mean to you? There's
Yeah. I mean, well that there may be other, other, other ways other than access to early childhood education, just raising awareness in, in the county among young families or among business owners raising the awareness of the importance of this as part of the infrastructure of the county. Are there investments that I know are rich and I have sort of, I I I've had a chance to just sort of quickly glance through the existing grants. Are there any that are not focused on, on early childhood education?
Well, when we say early childhood education, do we specifically mean c childcare? Most our, most of our investments are focused specifically on the childcare system and childcare providers and program student services to help make that more effective, even the behavioral health specific investment. While that isn't a childcare provider, they're partnering with childcare centers and providers to deliver that service. So again, if, if the lane that we want to be in is childcare, if we mean when we say early childhood education, we mean childcare, we can be about that. If our lane is potentially to also include parenting resources and support or other things that help children thrive, we've got like roughly 30% of kids, infants in kindergarten participate in a licensed childcare program in our community. Do we wanna put all our eggs in that basket?
Yeah. So be opportunities outside of that. And it has struck me just at the visits that we've made, how, how, how many classrooms are, how many spaces are not filled there? There's availability, but, but there's an enrollment problem or you know, sort of a perception issue perhaps, or a a, you know, a lack of knowledge and understanding and appreciation of opportunities that are out there. But that has struck me just
Yeah, well I think, you know, I, no, no question these, you know, these, these questions are intended in part to help you come to the realization that there's a lot to grapple with here. And that you, I mean, I, my read of the resolution is that you have a lot of flexibility, right? In terms of determining the, the path forward. We have got an, an emphasis on pre-K, but also a charge to look at the first 2000 days, right? We have, you know, the, the question of equal access, I think depending on how you interpret that, that could be, you know, strategies for every child in the county. And it could also be very narrowly focused on, you know, the most at risk children in the, in the county. And this, you know, the, including early childhood education, you know, I think also gives you the leeway to look at any of a nu you know, food security.
It gives you the, the leeway to look at mental health and you know, you know, any of a number of, you know, we can make a, a long list. But I mean, I think, you know, as you grapple with sort of the direction you want to go looking forward, my sense is that you have a pretty broad set of parameters and that, I mean, Rachel, to your point, that can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing, right? So I mean, you know, maybe it would be helpful going forward to give more specificity, but it may also tie the hands of future leaders in a way that maybe you, maybe you're not interested in in doing.
Ian, can I ask one thing to that? The other thing is we do have a very strong community, like stakeholders that have been working in early childhood ed and providing, you know, services and support. So like I think this committee has tried to look at like the people that are doing this work well and support that process. So not just dismantling the entire, what we have going on in our county, right? Like, so there's grappling with these pieces too, what we have and what we need.
Quick just to sort of round out that you have a lot of leeway, you know, one, you know, the other, the other piece here that we haven't very explicitly talked about is high quality for the childhood education. How is, how is quality defined in the county when you're looking at these, at these programs? Or even more broadly, how is, how is quality defined within childcare or within NC pre-K?
One thing I was kind of curious about when Allie, you were talking about the preschool program that kind of ran back in the two thousands, like what worked there, what was, what were we doing then that was so successful that now we don't, we don't have in place and just kind of like of course looking towards the future, but like there were programs that were working really well. I love the idea of having supportive preschools that then feed into our public schools and that transition is so helpful for like disability of the kids and then also enrollment for our public schools,
Right? One of the things that worked well in for three years I represented the board on the board was that they had family members who were involved and it was just not, it was at every economic level, you know, from people who low income lived in the projects to one lawyer who was active on the board, but it was families, you know, who were involved in. And I think that meant a lot and even some, I know one went back to school and got her GED and continued on, she's an nurse now who had her kids in that program. But that's the kind of program I'd like to see in every school really, if we could do it. But yeah, that was successful. We had people coming in from all the, all over the state and other parts of the country looking at that group.
Well, I want be sensitive. I know we've, we've got a public comment that we need to get to too. Thank you for indulging in this in this conversation. Hopefully you, there's a lot, a lot to chew on here as you guys, you set up a path forward, but I think, you know, you, you're lucky to have these resources and in a lot of ways I think you're lucky to have the kind of broad parameters that you really do have because it, it opens the door to any of a number of, of really thoughtful Thank you very much. Yeah,
Dan, and I'll continue working together particularly on following up on some of these ideas of data that we could look into or models. You heard me mention Sarah doing some research for us. She's planning to be part of our May meeting. So more to follow and yes, Heather, if anyone, if you or anyone has ideas taking a lot of coffee meetings, let brainstorm and, and talk about the what ifs together. Share your right ideas, your concerns with me so I can help provide shape to them and get them back into the table for the committee to
Talk about the process is going well. Thank you. Yeah, so question Rachel. So like with the point that I brought up earlier, if this committee lands on a single strategy for the fund, to what degree do we have like the ability to like make recommendations for the county to then hold, right? Like we're gonna fund this piece of this early childhood ecosystem and we recognize these three other things need to be prioritized and happen in some way.
I think non-monetary recommendations are absolutely on the table. So one kind of those that already been articulated as part of our, our language is public policy that were to make those kinds of recommendations. But the committee can also put forward bigger ideas for staff to work on or commissioners to take up for consideration in terms of voting. So yeah.
And the next meeting? We may make it virtual. The scoring meeting tends to work well and we can all look at the same spreadsheet on the same screen together. So not decided yet, but I just got nod. So maybe it's one step closer to being decided that may work well since it's county spring break
Hi. Thanks. I think I know most of you, but I'm Amy, very detective director at Uncommon Partnership for Children and really appreciated this conversation, the way to go in the future and having this kind of setup for the group. I'm looking at my computer because I'm frantically taking notes to follow up on some points that were making that were made. So the current workforce, you mentioned low, low wages. So in the state of North Carolina the average now is 1425 an hour, which is better than it's been in the past, but as you've recognized with the certified monthly wage and yeah it, that doesn't help that much. And a couple of years ago there was research done in North Carolina that determined that 39% of childcare teachers qualified for public benefits and infant toddler teachers tend to make less than pre-K teachers. You know, miss misinterpretation of what it takes to care for and teach children that infants would need teachers who are less qualified and high turnover just, you know, continues increasing the number of teachers with little to no classroom experience that results in higher turnover because they, they, this is not what I thought it was going to be and I'm not prepared and and they leave.
And then that has the domino effect on children who are experiencing a lack of continuity of care because can you imagine a 2-year-old having three different teachers in the course of the year, that's not a good thing for kids or teachers families. The program lack of access for children with special needs. There was some discussion about early intervention. So changes back in 2010 in the statewide early intervention system that reduced or not increased eligibility. I'm not saying that right, you guys have greater issues in order to be able to qualify for early intervention. That wasn't quite right either, but I think you know what I mean, right? So that means that we had many more children in care and also entering kindergarten without any care that didn't receive early intervention that really could, should have qualified for. And that was a huge burden of schools kids who, you know, a year of remediation would be would've been just fine. So that is an ongoing struggle and children experiencing social emotional behavioral challenges, we've heard that's grown and being seen in childcare programs, both licensed and half day programs. And that is resulting in more kids being suspended and expelled than ever before. It's also resulted in programs saying, yeah, we're not going to take that child, I'm really sorry.
And it's also resulted in in children being bumped. So I would look at half day programs as well, not just licensed childcare, early care and education at Bunum. Partnership for Children means not limited to licensed care because we know that children can thrive and do well outside of childcare and it would be great, we had a way to to do that. So looking at infant toddler care have some ideas to share about that expanding and also looking at family, friend and neighbor care. We have a successful network here, El Lar and the Emma community that we helped launch and we have about 25 half day unlicensed programs that are very high quality and perhaps they could add care to infants and toddlers and expand their classrooms. Thank you.
Was more public comment? Yes, yes. Thank you. Hi, my name's Cory Price. I feel weird kind of. My name's Cory Price and I'm the director at Evolve Early Learning and I just wanna say thank you all for the time and energy you put to this. I was actually part of one of the groups that helped kind of push this fund forward and it's so amazing to see it year after year support our community was the school you were talking about that Asheville, the Buncombe County AB Tech childcare center. Al, was it the AB tech childcare center that you were talking about? The partnership? No, a different one. Yeah, south City School. Okay, great. Yeah. Well I wanna speak a little bit to diversification. I'm an independent school and I talk to a lot of other mentors, leaders and directors that are working at independent schools.
And what I'm hearing from them is a lot of them aren't even applying for this fund anymore because they don't believe that there's any opportunity for them here. And as an independent school I wanna talk to you about some of the benefits of us being in town and thank you Dan. Because I know a big part of your work that you're bringing to the table is how when we are an independent school, we are able to pivot, we're able to read the research and change what's going on in our classrooms that day. We also are looking at opportunities to do things a little bit differently that are gonna help us with the biggest pivot we're ever gonna see in our community, which is that bringing in ai, lots of jobs are gonna change. They're not gonna have need for the full day childcare that we used to need where we do have those needs.
But I think in the next 10 to 15 years we're gonna see more families looking for more cooperative care. And when we look at businesses who are able to say, Hey, I see this niche and I can feel it, especially in Asheville, we have an opportunity to build a really robust childcare community where we can say, Hey, this kid's not a good fit here, but they're gonna do great at this center over here. And hey, we really do well with the infant toddler care. Y'all are more for the pre-K care. We are down the street from each other. How do we work together to link these? I also wanted to bring up that we are an apprentice site, meaning that we work with teachers in an apprentice model and that model where they're getting the in-class support as well as the schooling so that they can graduate and have a job at the same time is really profound and it's working but it's very expensive.
And so we need to find ways to fund those programs. I would like to encourage y'all to really look at higher ed as the place that we put these early childcare centers because when we have higher ed involved, they're looking at the most current research and they're also producing teachers. And so when we look at putting schools and classrooms into elementary school, that's an academic world. They're not really in the social and emotional world that it takes to take care of our children. Truly. I've worked at a lot of K 12 schools, I've worked a lot of daycares and childcare centers. They're very different even from how many hand washing stations you have to have in each classroom. So there's gonna be lots of updates and changes that you'll need, exits, things like that. So especially with the three and under crowd looking at universities who have space and also are having issues with enrollment, they might be a good opportunity that could also give us a BK license, which is what we really need in Nashville. We can't keep sending our teachers all the way to and expecting them to come back and use their BK license with us.
So we had a couple comments left during, over the course of the meeting. One comment was during the, the conversation regarding pre-K versus other types of of ED education options. An anonymous person said many states have put pre-K regulation under the auspices of public schools. It's problematic since the regulations that oversee providers for K through 12 are very different than those for zero to five overseen by D-H-S-E-G providers cannot afford the insurance requirements for a school-based program. And we had another person provide a a link to a data source that they recommended. So I will send that to you. Outreach.
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