Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Winter Reading Challenge is back for its fifth year. K-12 students can earn prizes by tracking their reading progress on a game board.  

Quotable & Notable

Fact of the Week

In a survey conducted by the RAPID-EC Project at Stanford University, researchers found that 29% of child care workers nationally reported not being able to consistently afford nutritious food in 2021, up from 23% prior to the pandemic.

Policy Radar

State budget

Gov. DeWine has signaled his intention to allocate more funds to mental health services in Ohio; his budget proposal will be released early in the new year and will kick off a several-months-long process to finalize the next two-year state budget by June 30, 2023. Cleveland.com describes more here, including related efforts to expand Medicaid eligibility for Ohio children and expand publicly funded child care eligibility.  

FYI

Our partners at The Ohio State Early Head Start Partnership Program released their 2021-2022 annual report. Check it out! 

Events and Happenings

Join Children's Funding Project and Funding the Next Generation on December 8th at 3 pm for a webinar exploring the results of public support for kids' issues from this year's election. Register here.  

Beyond the Buckeye State

Five years ago, Illinois overhauled its K-12 funding system and now the Chicago Early Childhood Workforce Partnership Employer Council is pushing for city and state lawmakers to do the same for early education. The Council points to a study it commissioned which found that early educators in Chicago are paid an average of $18,000 less than early elementary teachers, even with the same college degree.

The Detroit Free Press offers a look into the city’s few 24-hour child care providers, a crucial service for Detroit's shift workers.   

What We're Reading

The Children’s Funding Project offers invaluable resources for communities wanting to explore early childhood financing options. This fact sheet describes steps that local policymakers can take during the process, and references Franklin County, Ohio as one example of using federal relief funds for local needs (specifically to create the Franklin County RISE Initiative).  

Cincinnati.com profiles an educator who is emphasizing essential life skills in a class where she teaches her students what she wished she had learned in school, like using credit cards and changing a tire. 

EdSurge explains why designers, architects, and planners can support early learning by creating both indoor and outdoor learning environments that encourage play-based learning, exploration, and socialization.  

Research Round-Up

The Ohio Capital Journal describes research from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which found an association between the expiration of the federal Child Tax Credit (which ended mid-January of 2022) and a serious increase in food insufficiency observed between January and July of 2022. Read the full study here.