Read Together, Grow Together — a partnership with Read Ohio to promote literacy tips for families — has published several videos sharing best practices for reading with young children.

Quotable & Notable

“Within the first five years of their child’s life, parents are being forced into a financial hole that is nearly impossible to climb out of.... A healthy economy depends upon the ability for people to save and spend, but given the crushing weight of child care costs, those pillars are crumbling.”

Who:

Brad Wilson, CEO of Care.com

Where: “Childcare now costs more than college as parents fork over $36,000 a year,” published in Newsweek

Fact of the Week

Nearly half of parents (47%) surveyed by Care.com report spending up to $18,000 a year on child care expenses. One in five report spending more than $36,000 annually. Newsweek and Fast Company discuss these figures and the financial hardships facing American families.

Beyond the Buckeye State

Indiana lawmakers are looking to expand property tax exemptions for child care providers. Currently, programs operating out of schools, churches, and nonprofits are tax exempt. A proposed bill would extend this exemption to for-profit providers as well as provide a partial property-tax exemption for businesses with on-site employee child care.

Hechinger Report describes advocacy efforts made in two states to improve early childhood teacher wages and working conditions. In California, improvements were achieved through unionizing. In New Mexico, a highly organized public awareness campaign helped secure a constitutional amendment that resulted in new — and permanent — early childhood funds. On the topic of early childhood teacher pay, Early Learning Nation published approaches taken in three locales: Colorado, Louisiana, and the District of Columbia.

What We’re Reading

The new mayor of Akron, Ohio, is calling on the city’s school district to make universal pre-K a reality. Shammas Malik, who took office last month, asked Akron Public Schools’ board leaders at a retreat last weekend to consider once again plans for a pre-K program that had been discussed before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dayton Daily News discusses the progress made by Preschool Promise, a nonprofit helping to connect families to high-quality early childhood learning opportunities for their children so that they are ready for kindergarten.

This edition was written by Jamie O'Leary.

If you like this newsletter, forward to a friend! Subscribe here.

crane.osu.edu