Early childhood educators raise awareness to mission

GAUTAM AORA | UNSPLASH

Family Child Care & Center Enrichment Foundation, which supports early childhood educators, is sponsoring its inaugural fundraising luncheon March 20 at Foundation For The Carolinas.

Early childhood education isn’t for babysitters. 

Advocates for early educators are moving past the childcare description to embrace what they consider a more accurate description of licensed professionals who work with children. The Charlotte-based Family Child Care & Center Enrichment Foundation is hosting its inaugural fundraising luncheon March 20 at Foundation For The Carolinas, 220 N Troyon St. The luncheon is designed to introduce the broader community to the Foundation’s work in early learning and family support. 

FCCEF will host its annual conference April 30-May 2, which centers on supporting early childhood educators mentally, physically and spiritually. The conference usually brings more than 100 teachers and childcare professionals from across the region.

“The importance of fundraising for these early learning teachers is critical, because they are, in my endearing term, first responders,” said Wanda Pendergrass, FCCEF’s community outreach coordinator. “If you think about when you dial 911, they ask you medic or police. And if you say medic, you know those folks are the experienced one in the field of first alert, triage, et cetera, and so that’s how these early learning teachers are. They are the ones who are experienced in child development, all of it – communication, social, gross motor, et cetera.

“They know also the markers for concern, so they’re the ones who are saying, ‘this child doesn't seem like he’s hearing very well,’ or ‘this child isn’t speaking as you would expect at this time,’ understanding every child is different, but we do have developmental windows.”

Part of the foundation’s mission is to raise awareness of the value of child educators to families and lawmakers. As business owners who often rely on government funds to hire and retain staff, expenditures aren’t keeping pace with the cost of sustainability.

In North Carolina, 59% of low-income families who qualify for NC Pre-K, the state-supported early education initiative, are enrolled, leaving thousands of children without its benefit when they enroll in kindergarten. Even when children qualify NC Pre-K, they aren’t guaranteed a spot.

“Childcare for infants and toddlers is one of the most difficult services in the economy to provide,” state Sen. Caleb Theodros (D-Mecklenburg) said in an email. “Young children require very low teacher-to-child ratios. That means staffing costs are high. At the same time, most families cannot afford the true cost of care.

So, the system operates in an impossible middle ground: Parents can’t afford it. Providers struggle to stay open. Teachers are paid very little.”

“All of these teachers don’t take private pay,” Pendergrass said. “Many of them, if not a majority of them, are paid through our state and through federal funds for subsidies for food, et cetera. And when we have legislators who are looking at budgets from a numbers posture versus a human posture, they do not realize that these ladies are entrepreneurs. They're businesswomen. These home environments, learning environments, are also their business, and so to respect them as businesses when they are being paid to help the community and to help the government, the legislators, to see these businesswomen from a more professional lens.

“They're not babysitters.”

On the Net:
fccef.org

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