A partnership of cross-sector community groups aligned to create more integrated and equitable investment in children’s success from birth through careers, the Cradle to Career Network will seek to strengthen the education continuum for all students by advocating for the following priorities in the 2021 Legislative Session:
Invest in thriving communities by supporting family childcare needs.
Making childcare more affordable, available, accessible, and culturally appropriate provides greater economic opportunity for working parents and promotes resiliency in children as they transition from home to new social, cultural, and educational settings outside their homes.
Supporting working parents and the resiliency of their children – both of which are key to building vibrant, flourishing communities – means creating more options that are available, accessible, appropriate, and affordable for their families.
- Before the COVID-19 pandemic, half of Washington parents faced difficulty finding quality childcare, and more than a quarter of parents quit their jobs or left school because of lack of available and affordable childcare.
- This has cost Washington’s economy $6.5 billion each year, while inhibiting children’s readiness to navigate settings outside their homes in hard-to-quantify ways.
- The pandemic has only increased economic pressures and stresses facing working households and has rendered settings outside of a children’s home increasingly more confusing and difficult to navigate.
- The impact of a lack of affordable, available, accessible, culturally appropriate childcare to our economy and the health of families and communities has only grown during COVID.
Safeguard funding for holistic programs that support children outside their K-12 experience.
Ensuring that all neighborhoods have safe and healthy places for children and families to thrive and grow is especially critical to children’s social and emotional development through the disruptions, disconnection, and trauma brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ensuring that no kids fall through the cracks during the pandemic and beyond means supporting and growing programs that provide these holistic, whole-child support for some of our state’s most vulnerable students.
- Children’s social, emotional, and behavior development doesn’t begin and end with the school day, and the school day in the current virtual setting has proved increasing difficult to foster connection and growth.
- Gaps or barriers to transitioning between systems and settings – both throughout the day and across a student’s educational experience from birth to career – create opportunity gaps that disproportionately impact foster youth, homeless youth, youth involved in the justice system, low-income youth, and children of color, and that can persist over a lifetime.
- The COVID-19 pandemic has made these existing gaps and barriers even more apparent than they already were and has demonstrated how vital holistic support of children’s growth through mentoring, social emotional learning, play-based learning, experiential learning, and creative expression truly is.