The initiative begins on November 1, right? Could you walk me through the rollout a little bit?
Everyone’s included, starting on November 1, but New Mexico already provides more support than any other state in the nation. There’s a notion that I snapped my fingers and we created universal childcare, but we’ve been very methodical so that it stays and this building block can be here forever. I’ve put every governor and legislator in a position to have it funded, supported, built, available, and ready. Right now, if you’re at 400% of poverty or lower, childcare is free; other folks pay for the cost of childcare, but no other copays or fees can be attached. We’re covering the costs and incentivizing quality, and we also pay our providers to [ensure] we’re going to have a workforce for a long time. We’ve seen a 64% increase in providers because we license, train, and certify you, and we also have childcare training programs in community colleges and universities and a Center of Excellence for that at Western New Mexico University that’s fully free and fully paid for.
We have a really robust infrastructure, and on November 1, anyone who’s currently paying for childcare stops paying for it and it becomes universally free. That means that 12,000 additional New Mexico families and kiddos will be eligible for free childcare. That’s ages zero to 12, so we’re going to pay for before-school drop-offs and after-school programs. We’re going to pay for infant and toddler programs. Three- and four-year-olds are already covered in our universal pre-K program, which is one of the best in the nation, and UCLA has just done a study showing that 75% of our kindergartners are ready for kindergarten or exceeding readiness levels, which is a game changer for a state that has long struggled with poverty and hasn’t been able to move the needle. The last thing we are incentivizing and paying for is keeping childcare centers open for 10 hours. This allows parents to have stability in the workplace and go back to college and think about different careers. I’m very excited about what this does for families.
Do you have short- and long-term hopes for this initiative?
If you get kids ready for kindergarten and elementary school, it is always a game changer in your proficiency outcomes. I learned as a governor, and it’s appalling to me, that here in New Mexico we don’t teach the science of reading, or we didn’t; we do now. I tutor with a program that worked with 17,000 kids last summer, and all those kids had double-digit increases in their literacy outcomes. We require that you teach the science of reading in K through 12, we’ve reinvested in retraining our K through eighth-grade educators, and we’re building a state-of-the-art literacy institute in Albuquerque. We’ll be giving kids full scholarships for tutoring and mentoring. We’re going to build a math institute to tutor kids in math. We’re going to do the bricks and mortar of what a school system is always rooted in, so that it’s more developmental in New Mexico.
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