Yesterday, State Senator Jason Lewis announced that he will be retiring from the Massachusetts Legislature, and we want to share our gratitude for his years of leadership on early education and care policy.
Lewis will serve until the end of his current term, and he will not seek reelection in the fall.
Responding to news of Lewis’ retirement, Strategies for Children’s Executive Director Amy O’Leary said, “We thank Senator Lewis for his consistent leadership in the Senate and as co-chair of the Joint Committee on Education.
“Senator Lewis has been a champion for young children and early educators, delivering critical funding and policy supports for more than a decade. We will miss his partnership, and we wish him well in his next chapter.”
Lewis has a long legislative and personal history with early childhood issues.
“I was first exposed to the importance of high-quality, accessible early education because of my own children. And that was long before I ran for the State Legislature,” Lewis said when we checked in with him yesterday.
“I saw how meaningful high-quality care was for my children’s cognitive development. I also saw how expensive it was, and that was 20 years ago, so it was a lot less than it is today.”
Lewis’ legislative focus on early childhood began when he became chair of the Joint Committee on Education serving with co-chair Representative Alice Peisch.
In 2022, Lewis and Peisch released the “Special Legislative Early Education and Care Economic Review Commission” report, which called for stabilizing programs, increasing affordability and access, strengthening the workforce, and enhancing the state’s early childhood infrastructure.
“Once the report came out,” Lewis says, “we worked on implementation. I was proud to be one of the lead sponsors of the Common Start bill, which aligns with a lot of the recommendations in that report.
“Since then, I’ve been really gratified by the progress we’ve made in so many areas, including increased funding for early education, providing bedrock funding through the C3 Grants, investments in the workforce, and improvements to the subsidy voucher program.”
“We need to have a vision of what high-quality early education and care is and why it’s so
important: that first and foremost it supports the development of young children, and it pays
dividends for the rest of their lives. And there’s the benefit to working families and the benefit
to employees and to the economy. For all these reasons, early education and care needs
to be accessible and affordable for every family in the Commonwealth.”
— State Senator Jason Lewis
In his retirement statement, Lewis shares his concern about the challenging federal policies. Despite this, he draws “strength and hope for our future from the many amazing people that I have had the great fortune to work with.”
Here at Strategies, we also know Lewis as a legislator who is always eager to listen, and when we asked about his advice for future advocates he said:
“Don’t be shy and definitely don’t be intimidated. Elected officials, whether they’re in local government, state government, or federal government, are just people like everyone else. And the vast majority of elected officials want to hear from constituents, first and foremost. They want to hear from advocates and experts because they recognize that those relationships are important and that they’re going to learn from these folks.”
Lewis praised Strategies and our Executive Director Amy O’Leary, for keeping him informed on early childhood issues.
What should the future be for early education and care in Massachusetts?
“First we have to sustain the progress we’ve made,” Lewis says. “We’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars of additional funding into early education and care, and we have the Fair Share program to thank for that, and we have to sustain that.”
“We have to continue to support the workforce. We’ve made progress in increasing pay and benefits, but we still have a long way to go.”
“The other area I hope to see us make more progress in is expanding access to child care subsidy support for more families. We’ve raised the eligibility from 50 percent of the state median income to 85 percent, which means more middle income families are eligible for assistance. But we haven’t had the funding to actually increase the number of vouchers. That’s an area I’m disappointed in.”
Moving forward, Lewis said, “We should be thinking about early education and care the same way we think about public K-through-12 education. No one questions whether we should strive to have high-quality public schools available to every student in every part of the Commonwealth, and I think we should think about early education the same way.”