Legislature(2009 - 2010)BUTROVICH 205
02/24/2010 01:30 PM Senate HEALTH & SOCIAL SERVICES
| Audio | Topic |
|---|---|
| Start | |
| Best Beginnings/early Childhood | |
| Adjourn |
* first hearing in first committee of referral
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
ALASKA STATE LEGISLATURE
SENATE HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES STANDING COMMITTEE
February 24, 2010
1:31 p.m.
MEMBERS PRESENT
Senator Bettye Davis, Chair
Senator Joe Paskvan, Vice Chair
Senator Fred Dyson
MEMBERS ABSENT
Senator Johnny Ellis
Senator Joe Thomas
COMMITTEE CALENDAR
PRESENTATION: Best Beginnings/Early Childhood
PREVIOUS COMMITTEE ACTION
No previous action to record.
WITNESS REGISTER
ABBE HENSLEY, Executive Director
Best Beginnings
Anchorage, AK
POSITION STATEMENT: Presented the early care and education
organizations' legislative priorities for 2010.
MELISSA PICKLE, Director
RurAL CAP, Parents as Teachers (PAT)
Kodiak, AK
POSITION STATEMENT: Discussed Parents as Teachers early
childhood home visiting programs.
CANDACE WINKLER, CEO
Thread
Anchorage, AK
POSITION STATEMENT: Talked about The Statewide Alaska Child Care
Resource and Referral Network and the Quality Referral and
Information System (QRIS).
JOY LYON
Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children (AEYC)
Juneau, AK
POSITION STATEMENT: Discussed workforce development and the
early education development registry.
ACTION NARRATIVE
1:31:17 PM
CHAIR BETTYE DAVIS called the Senate Health and Social Services
Standing Committee meeting to order at 1:31 p.m. Present at the
call to order were Senators Paskvan, Dyson, and Davis.
^ Best Beginnings/Early Childhood
Best Beginnings/Early Childhood
1:32:32 PM
CHAIR DAVIS announced a presentation on investing in Alaska's
young children.
1:32:55 PM
ABBE HENSLEY, Executive Director of Best Beginnings, Anchorage,
Alaska, said she and her colleagues are here representing five
organizations that have come together and developed the
legislative priorities for 2010, which they will share with the
committee today. These organizations are: Thread, Best
Beginnings, Alaska Association for the Education of Young
Children (AEYC), Alaska Head Start Association (AHSA), and
Alaska Infant Learning Professional Association (AILPA).
She said, according to the 2000 Census, Alaska has only 49,760
children under the age of five. This is a manageable number, yet
20 percent of the state's young children are living below the
federal poverty level.
MS. HENSLEY continued; the list of priorities on slide 4 is
geared toward ensuring that every child in Alaska begins school
ready to be successful. She stressed that they are talking about
a comprehensive early childhood system, not individual programs.
They are building a system with a state-level public/private
partnership that comprises Best Beginnings and a soon-to-be-
established Early Childhood Advisory Council.
With the support of state funding from last session, she said,
Best Beginnings has begun development of nine early childhood
partnerships with local coalitions, locally-based people from
all walks of life who have come together to ensure good outcomes
for Alaska's youngest children. This network of organizations
encompasses about 78 percent of Alaska's children from birth to
age five and was called for by the Early Childhood Comprehensive
Systems Plan adopted by the state several years ago.
She said the nine partnerships were asked to conduct a needs and
assets assessment in their communities to identify their
priorities and develop strategic plans; Best Beginnings brought
representatives of those partnerships together with people from
Imagination Library last week for a training session and to
discuss the results of those needs assessments. Much of the
conversation centered on early care and education programs and
making sure they are high-quality, accessible, and affordable.
They also talked about support for families; one of the
partnership's stated goals was to make sure that families are
"engaged, inspired, and involved in young children's learning,
with the needed support and resources." She mentioned that she
was somewhat surprised that so many partnerships shared the goal
of increasing recreation opportunities for young children.
1:40:14 PM
MS. HENSLEY said their request to the governor and the
legislature for this year is for $1 million to support the
partnerships' activities, to support the network of
partnerships, and to perform an evaluation of the work they do.
She expanded briefly on the data represented on slides 8 through
13. Slide 8 shows the growth in the number of partnerships
during the year since Best Beginnings became involved. She
commented that a public/private partnership is a wise use of
resources; as shown on slide 9, the state's investment of
$50,000 together with $59,000 in corporate funding and local
contributions, totaled $133,000 in 2009.
MS. HENSLEY indicated the graph on slide 10, which reflects the
difference in the Alaska Kindergarten Developmental Profile
results in language development and early literacy from 2003 to
2009; it reveals a steady decline. This demonstrates why they
are concerned and why Best Beginnings has taken on statewide
sponsorship of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in Alaska. The
Imagination Library is available for children from birth to age
five and mails a free, age-appropriate book to each enrolled
child every month. The cost of the program is $30 per child, per
year. Slides 11 through 13 detail the benefits to children and
communities in the state and the sources of program funding
through 2009. Ms. Hensley pointed out that this is not just a
book-distribution program; each of the communities with which
they have a relationship has an obligation to do some kind of
parent engagement activities as well. A recent evaluation shows
that parents of children who were enrolled in the program for at
least a year read to their children more often; the children
were more enthusiastic about books and reading, and there were
more books in their homes. All of these things help to ensure
that children are ready to learn how to read when they begin
school. They are requesting $400,000 to expand the program.
Finally, Ms. Hensley said the Kuskokwim Education Foundation,
which provides scholarships for postsecondary education and
training, has been unable to get qualified students for those
scholarships. In order to ensure a good pool of students in the
future, they are now investing in the infrastructure for
Imagination Library in their ten villages and are paying for the
books.
1:44:40 PM
MELISSA PICKLE, Director, RurAL CAP, Parents as Teachers (PAT),
Kodiak, Alaska, spoke to the committee about early childhood
home visiting programs, also known as personal visiting
programs. Home visiting programs are based on the philosophy
that parents are their children's most influential and powerful
teachers. PAT's role is to support parents and provide them with
activities that will help their children develop optimally
during the crucial first years of life. Slide 14 lists some
demonstrated outcomes specific to the Parents as Teachers
program. Parents enrolled in these programs have increased
knowledge of early childhood; they are more involved and have
more early literacy experiences in their homes; they have
improved parenting practices and fewer documented cases of child
abuse and neglect. Children also benefit by earlier detection of
developmental delays, allowing them to be connected with early
intervention services. They have higher readiness scores in
kindergarten, and many of these gains are maintained at third
grade.
MS. PICKLE said parents who enroll in Parents as Teachers do so
voluntarily. When parents enroll, they fill out a survey about
their parenting styles and knowledge of early childhood, which
helps PAT to individualize the services for those families. On
surveys completed this year by families all over Alaska, 22
indicated that they didn't realize a child who has ear
infections will have trouble learning to talk; 46 families
thought that as long as a child's vision problem is addressed by
age five, it will be OK. That is not true. If a child has
cataracts that aren't addressed by the time the child is nine
months of age, that child's vision will never be normal. Some
families also indicated that they didn't know babies are
interested in books before the age of one.
She said research shows that early childhood home visitation
programs really work. One of the reasons for that, particularly
with Parents as Teachers, is that these programs start at birth.
Slide 15 shows that the neural connections for vision, hearing,
language, and cognitive functions begin forming four months
before a child is born. Neural connections for vision and
hearing peak between four and five months of age; for language
it occurs between nine and ten months, and for higher cognitive
functioning it is right at two years. This means that all of the
foundational connections are being formed before a child is even
two years of age.
1:50:01 PM
MS. PICKLE stepped through a summary of Parents as Teachers in
Alaska between 2008 and 2009. Last year they had 11 programs
funded through federal grants; this year they are down to 8
programs because of reduced funding from the federal government.
Parents as Teachers receives no funding from the state of
Alaska.
Head Start and Early Head Start are two programs that also
incorporate personal visits, she said. Head Start serves
families with children three to five, while Early Head Start
focuses on children prenatal to three years of age. Eligibility
is based on income level, but Alaska also designates some
communities as meeting the "poverty of access" provision.
1:52:09 PM
MS. PICKLE said the 16 Head Start grantees across the state
provided services in over 100 communities last year, serving
over 3500 children. They also employed more than 950 staff. Many
of those jobs are in small communities where jobs are scarce.
1:52:52 PM
Slide 20 provides a 2008-2009 summary report of services by Head
Start and Early Head Start. During that time, 276 children were
identified as needing medical treatment and were connected with
the services they needed; another 515 children needed dental
treatment, 77 needed mental health services, and 379 were
identified as having special needs. Seven hundred and eighty-one
parents were referred for emergency crisis intervention
services, and over 1100 parents requested information about
parenting. She identified the last bullet as the average salary
for a bachelor-degreed Head Start teacher in Alaska; that amount
is only $27,744 annually.
MS. PICKLE indicated the Alaska Head Start Association Critical
Issues document included in the committee members' packets. She
stated that Head Start currently has 711 children on its waiting
list, and this does not take into account the numbers of
families that don't even sign up because the list is so long.
There is a need for increased funding to serve more children.
There is also a need to upgrade facilities; many of their
buildings are 35 years old and desperately in need of repair.
Head Start teachers are going to be required to have bachelor
degrees by 2014, so they will definitely need funds to obtain
those degrees. Another very high priority is to get more
children qualified for Denali Kid Care by raising the
eligibility limit up to 200 percent of the federal poverty
level.
1:55:04 PM
CANDACE WINKLER, CEO, Thread, the Statewide Alaska Child Care
Resource and Referral Network, Anchorage, Alaska, said the
organization has been around for about 24 years, but adopted a
new name and brand in August. Thread works with 7600 families
each year, helping them find quality child care, early care, and
education programs that meet their needs. Operating in
collaboration with the University, they are the largest provider
in Alaska of professional development for people working in the
field and are active throughout the state helping programs to
improve their practice and quality.
MS. WINKLER disclosed that Alaska has about 60,000 children
under the age of six; 40,000 of those children live in
households where all of the parents are working. There are fewer
than 24,000 slots available in licensed or approved child care,
Head Start, and preschool. That figure includes some school-age
slots and some slots that are only part-day, so it may be
slightly inflated. That leaves quite a gap.
1:57:07 PM
She said many families struggle to afford the cost of child
care. In Alaska, 36 percent of households with children under
age six have reported having some work restrictions due to child
care issues; with rates often as high as $1000 per month for
infant and toddler care, it is a challenge for many families. At
the same time, programs are spending from 70 to 80 percent of
their budgets on personnel expenses, even though those employees
earn about $9 per hour.
The graph on slide 25 compares the rate of brain development
with the cumulative public investment in children between birth
and age two. The inverse trajectories make it clear that the
state is not taking advantage of the opportunities to start its
youngest citizens out with the highest possible chance for
success.
MS. WINKLER stated that access to quality child care is often
attained for those lowest-income families through child-care
assistance. She thanked the legislature for raising rates to the
fiftieth percentile a couple of years ago; she added that the
new infant and toddler reimbursement rates released by the
Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) within the past
two weeks show an increase to the seventy-fifth percentile. The
rest of the rates remain in the fiftieth percentile however,
placing a burden on those lowest-income families. The second
part of child care assistance that really needs to be addressed
is the family eligibility income level, which has not changed
since 2002. That level could be as high as eighty-five percent
of the state median income, and that where Thread would like to
see it set.
2:00:07 PM
MS. WINKLER said that, in her mind, a Quality rating and
improvement program (QRIS) is an effective, comprehensive way to
address all aspects of child care, and early care and education:
the affordability, accessibility, and quality. It gives parents
the tools and information to make them drivers of child care
quality and gives providers a guide for program improvement. It
also helps policy-makers evaluate the value of the resources the
state puts into early care and education programs.
2:02:13 PM
She walked through what is needed in a Quality rating and
improvement program, as shown on Slide 28.
- Quality standards, tied to research, have to be agreed upon
for all programs.
- There has to be an assessment process in place to rate the
programs.
- Families must have access to the higher-quality programs,
which is where childcare assistance, Head Start, public
funding of preschools, and other funding programs come in.
- Once the system has identified areas in which programs can
improve, it has to be able to offer resources in the form
of incentive payments and technical assistance to help with
that improvement.
- Professional development is another critical component.
- Finally, there has to be a rating system, a common-sense
way for the public and policy-makers to gauge how programs
are doing.
She ended by saying that the QRIS is a really comprehensive way
to tie quality to access and affordability. It has been
recognized at the federal level as a linchpin issue for states
as they develop their systems.
2:03:43 PM
JOY LYON, Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children
(AEYC), Juneau, Alaska, said the Southeast office provides the
Thread services throughout Southeast Alaska and is the lead
agency for the Best Beginnings partnerships and the Imagination
Library. Referring to the QRIS system, she noted that incentives
are vital; just measuring quality without providing incentives
for change will not result in improved quality. Another factor
that research has shown is vital to improved quality is
professional development. AYEC needs to find a way to decrease
the financial barriers and increase recruitment and retention
for early care and education teachers. Thread currently offers
$500 per year as a tuition scholarship for licensed child care
providers, which will pay for only three or four credits. For
someone coming in at entry level, which most of the people
entering early care and education are, it could take ten years
to get an Associate Degree that way. They would like to increase
the amount, so providers who are interested can really move
forward and increase their education. Currently, less than 10
percent of the child care workforce has a college degree. The
national accreditation standards and the Head Start standards
are moving toward having a bachelor-degreed teacher in every
classroom, so there is a long way to go. They have a good start
however, in that they now have a seed registry, the System for
Early Education Development, and are able to track all of the
licensed programs' teacher qualifications. They can now see that
there are just over 470 teachers in the field who have either a
Child Development Associate credential or a degree. With the
proper incentives in place, they hope to increase teacher
education levels and lower the turnover rate. The 45 percent
turnover rate in Alaska is devastating to children, who are so
reliant on a relationship with their teachers.
MS. LYON said AYEC has a plan in place for a program they call
"Retaining Our Outstanding Teachers" or the ROOTS Award. They
offered a low-level award to draw people into the seed registry
so they could estimate what the cost would be to add a real
incentive to help fill the gap between what a teacher with a BA
can make working with children four years old, and what they can
make working with five-year-olds. At this point they can make
twice as much working with children five years old and older, so
it is very hard to retain those degreed teachers.
2:08:56 PM
ABBE HENSLEY summarized Alaska Early Care and Education's
legislative priorities for 2010, which are listed on slide 31:
- Raise the qualifying income level for Denali Kid Care to
200 percent of the federal poverty level, thus restoring
eligibility to some 1300 children and 225 pregnant women.
- Increase Head Start funding consistent with the two-year
plan Head Start developed in conjunction with the
Department of Education and Early Development (DEED).
- Funding for home visitation programs.
- $1 million in order to enable early childhood partnerships
to begin doing the work they have identified in their
communities, and to bring on new partnerships.
- $400,000 to continue expansion of the Imagination Library
program.
- Increase the child care reimbursement rate for all children
to the seventy-fifth percentile to ensure access to quality
child care.
- The Quality Rating and Improvement System. The Department
of Health and Social Services is working with early
childhood advocates to continue this work.
- $1.5 million for professional development and retention of
early educators.
2:11:03 PM
CHAIR DAVIS asked Ms. Hensley to clarify if what they are asking
for in the governor's budget is $1.2 million for Best
Beginnings.
MS. HENSLEY said they have asked for $1 million for early
childhood partnerships and $400,000 for Imagination Library. The
amount added to the governor's budget was $200,000, allocated to
Best Beginnings, the Imagination Library, and early childhood
partnerships.
CHAIR DAVIS asked if anything has been said about the amount
that was NOT included in the governor's budget.
MS. HENSLEY said, as she understands it, the Department of
Education and Early Development budget is limited, and if money
is added to any one component, it has to come out of another.
2:13:02 PM
CHAIR DAVIS asked if there has been any progress on the quality
rating system.
MS. WINKLER answered that they developed a plan three years ago,
which needs to be revisited; that is what they are working on
with the Department of Education and Early Development. What
they really need now is financial support to implement the first
phase of the plan. At the federal level, there have been
conversations about Early Learning Challenge Fund grants that
will be made available to states, and one of the components the
federal government is looking for is a quality rating system.
Hopefully, the opportunity represented by this federal grant
will help to move the QRIS forward in the state.
She repeated that the QRIS is a comprehensive way to tie quality
to access and affordability. The reality is that, while all of
those components are important, it does no good to have
accessible, affordable care that is not very good. The
trajectory for success that they have been talking about occurs
when kids are in high-quality programs; when kids are in poor-
quality programs, they can actually do worse than they would in
no program at all.
2:15:41 PM
CHAIR DAVIS asked what the time-line is for requiring Head Start
teachers to have an associate's degree.
MELISSA PICKLE answered that they will require teachers to have
a bachelor's degree by 2014, but she isn't sure of the deadline
for an associate's degree.
JOY LYON interjected that they are requiring 100 percent of Head
Start teachers to have an associate's degree in early childhood
education by September 30, 2011. By 2013, 50 percent nationwide
must have a bachelor's degree.
CHAIR DAVIS asked where they are in meeting that time-line.
2:16:51 PM
MELISSA PICKLE said she is not sure, but will get the committee
that information.
2:17:14 PM
CHAIR DAVIS commented that each of the presenter's organizations
has a board, and asked if their boards are active in fund-
raising and helping to market information to the public.
JOY LYON said the board members for Alaska AEYC and their
Southeast office just traveled to Washington DC to meet with
Alaska's Congressional Delegates. All of their boards are made
up of volunteers who have full-time jobs, but they are all
active in reaching out at the community level.
2:18:57 PM
CHAIR DAVIS said she serves on the Labor and Commerce Finance
Sub-Committee, and the Department of Labor and Workforce
Development (DOLWD) got at least $28 million of stimulus money
for workforce development. She asked if the organizations for
early child care and education have applied for or received any
stimulus grants yet, or if any of that money has been ear-marked
for early childhood education.
CANDACE WINKLER responded; some of the stimulus money was an
expansion of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)
that comes to the state of Alaska to support resource and
referral agencies like Thread, as well as child care assistance,
and child care licensing. The funding to move the rate for
infant and toddler care up to the seventy-fifth percentile was
part of that. They have not started to spend the CCDBG dollars
that are earmarked for quality, but there will be an amount in
the area of $300,000 available for that. Over the years, the
people in the early care and education field have made attempts
to collaborate and coordinate with the Department of Labor and
Workforce Development and the Department of Commerce, Community
& Economic Development (DCCED). It seems to be a perfect
alignment, since the field is made up primarily of small
businesses that employ people, and it has the added benefit of
enabling parents to go to work and contribute to the economy.
Unfortunately, they have had no real success in leveraging
resources for their work force. She said she would appreciate
the committee's help and suggestions to open the doors for
meaningful dialogue with those departments.
MS. WINKLER asked committee members to imagine what would happen
tomorrow if the child care workforce across the state went on
strike, and ventured that the state would be brought to its
knees.
2:22:12 PM
CHAIR DAVIS said the committee would like additional information
about how it can help in areas other than funding.
2:22:45 PM
MS. WINKLER said she will be happy to provide that information.
She mentioned that the McDowell Group conducted a study for them
in 2006 that identified the workforce as about 6500 people in
the state of Alaska.
2:23:15 PM
SENATOR DYSON said they have heard from constituents that it
takes a while for providers to receive child care assistance
payments, so parents sometimes have to pay up front. He asked
how big a problem this is for parents and providers.
2:23:53 PM
MS. WINKLER said it is a significant problem. It creates a
challenge, not only for the families, but for providers, most of
which are working on very small margins. She reiterated that 70
to 80 percent of providers' resources go into their workforce,
and they are paying only $9 per hour; they don't have the
capacity or the cash flow to float a lot of the parents they are
trying to serve.
2:24:30 PM
MS. LYON added that self-pay parents generally pay for child
care at the beginning of the month. Programs turn in the
paperwork for Child Care Assistance payments at end of month,
and it is another couple of weeks before they receive payment;
that means that if everything goes smoothly, there is about a
six-week lag before they get paid. Alaska AEYC conducted a
survey in Juneau of all of the licensed family child care
providers that closed over a one-year period, and almost every
one stated that the difficulty of getting paid was the main
reason they stopped doing business. They simply couldn't count
on the income.
2:25:40 PM
SENATOR DYSON asked what Ms. Lyon would do to solve this
problem.
MS LYON responded that the state did a pilot program about ten
years ago, in which the it paid parents up front, allowing them
to pay for care at the first of the month and providing them
some flexibility in deciding where their children would go. She
admitted that it cost a little more to administer the program at
that time; more checks had to be issued. With the current
availability of electronic payment systems however, it might be
an effective solution to the problem.
2:26:56 PM
SENATOR DYSON suggested that the committee write to the
Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) suggesting that
the current system is creating a hardship for the people it is
intended to serve and that there are better ways to handle it.
SENATOR DAVIS concurred, but said she would also be willing to
bring the administration before them to talk about it.
2:27:34 PM
MS. LYON commented that it's like paying rent; if a landlord
couldn't get rent for six weeks, and the rent could be reduced
for days the renter wasn't home, he couldn't afford to operate.
CHAIR DAVIS said they are very busy during the 90-day session,
but will continue to work on this during the interim.
2:28:10 PM
SENATOR DYSON advised the presenters that the Health and Social
Services Committee can't help them much; they need a champion
for their funding on the Finance Committees of both houses. He
assured them that he and Chair Davis care deeply about this
issue, but pointed out that they have little influence over the
budget.
CHAIR DAVIS said she is sorry there is no more money in the
present budget. She suggested they continue to follow the
process. The budget bill is in the House, and she thinks that
the House is doing close-out at the end of the week. Anything
they can get into the budget over there will help when it comes
to the Senate because at least the line item will be in there.
She encouraged them not to give up if they don't make sub-
committee cut off; the full Finance Committee will look at it
and take public testimony. She stressed that it is important for
them to get parents and others affected by this issue to testify
or send in written testimony, and reminded them that "the
squeaky wheel gets the grease."
2:31:06 PM
ABBE HENSLEY said that advocacy is one of the topics that was
covered at the training session they conducted last week for
people from the early childhood partnerships and the Imagination
Library.
CHAIR DAVIS asked if Alaska is gaining or losing early child
care providers.
2:32:34 PM
ABBE HENSLEY said she has heard that the numbers are declining,
but deferred to Ms. Lyon and Ms. Winkler for definite answers to
that question.
JOY LYON said there has been a steep drop off in family child
care programs. At one time, there were 90 Southeast Alaska
providers in the Child Care Food Program, and that number has
dropped to 45. Centers are fairly stable, but it is very
difficult for new centers to start up.
MS. WINKLER added that the family child care homes are the ones
that most often provide infant and toddler care; many of the
centers are deciding it is not cost-effective to do so.
2:34:08 PM
MS. WINKLER said preschools have seen some growth because it is
the most cost-effective care to provide.
2:34:40 PM
KAREN ROBINSON stated that the people involved in early care and
education have really have tried to get into the budget process,
but they do not have the opportunity to present their needs
until the full Finance Committee opens public testimony, by
which time most of the decisions have been made. That's too
late. They have met individually with subcommittee chairs and
some subcommittee members, but need to be able to present their
information before the budgets are completed.
2:36:17 PM
CHAIR DAVIS agreed that it is not ideal, but said it is due in
part to the time constraints imposed by a 90 day session. She
pointed out that if they can't gain access to the legislators
they need to speak to, they can speak to the staff.
2:37:09 PM
MS. ROBINSON said finding a champion in the right position is
really proving to be difficult. No one seems to be willing to
take up their case.
CHAIR DAVIS commented that Denali Kid Care is on their list of
priorities and said there is a Senate bill, SB 13, in the House
Health and Social Services Committee this session, but it will
need to be monitored closely. She said she believes increasing
the qualifying income level has sufficient support among
legislators and the governor that something should be able to
make it out this year, and the Senate bill is in the best
position to make it.
2:38:57 PM
ABBE HENSLEY closed by thanking Senator Davis and Senator Dyson
for all of their help and concern for children and families.
2:39:46 PM
SENATOR DYSON said the committee appreciates the important work
they do every day and is sorry the system does not provide them
with more support. In his view, he said, the process is clumsy,
awkward, and irritating, but better than anything else in the
world. He exhorted them not to give up.
2:41:05 PM
There being no further business to come before the committee,
Chair Davis adjourned the meeting at 2:41 p.m.
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