When Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and distributed Covid relief funds, Boston invested $17.8 million of this money to support children, families, and early educators by making its early education and care system stronger. 

These funds have led to progress, lessons in resilience, a stronger foundation for the future, and more clarity on challenges that have yet to be addressed. 

Planning during a pandemic

The challenge of using one-time relief funds is the looming expiration date. ARPA funds have to be spent by the end of this calendar year. So Boston officials have had to be strategic about how to use the funding, and what should be done when it’s gone. 

“We thought about how to support both family child care and center-based child care providers with this funding, and we took different approaches,” Paula Gaviria Villarreal, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Early Childhood, says of the work she did with her colleagues Kristin McSwain and Tali Robbins. 

Another key part of this process was community engagement, using listening sessions, an online survey, and targeted stakeholder meetings, as a recent City of Boston report explains. 

“We decided to focus on four areas: the needs of essential workers; pandemic stimulus and stability; growing the workforce; and expanding access through Great Starts,” an online platform that lets parents search for early education and care programs. 

It was a mix of investing in ongoing programs, creating new approaches, and asking clear-eyed questions about sustainability. 

Gaviria Villarreal shared updates on this work last week on The 9:30 Call.

Meeting the immediate need: child care for essential workers

In March 2020, as Covid cases were rising, Governor Charlie Baker ordered all child care providers to shut down, and he called for the creation of emergency child care programs to serve especially vulnerable children and essential workers. 

Boston built on this effort by using ARPA funds to help family child care providers earn licenses that would enable them to operate outside of traditional working hours to support parents who work early morning or nighttime shifts. This effort built on an existing nonstandard hours pilot program run by Care That Works, a project of Community Labor United. 

As of late last year, the city’s report says,“Twenty seven additional childcare providers were able to expand their hours.” 

A key lesson, Gaviria Villarreal says, is that demand for this service is not as high as expected.

Stabilizing the workforce

In the early weeks and months of the pandemic, many early educators were quitting, and over time programs shut down. So Boston gave Covid relief funds to center-based providers to increase wages for teachers. 

“The goal was to retain current staff, and also hire staff who had left because of the pandemic. We wanted to open classrooms that had closed because there weren’t enough teachers.”

Among the results: 

• 1,317 early education and care professionals were compensated

• 382 new staff members were hired

• two-thirds of the classrooms that closed were able to reopen, and 

• 5,000 children were served by ARPA-funded providers

Boston also asked programs to plan ahead: determining how they will replace the ARPA funds once they run out. To support this work, Boston offered the centers free, individualized assistance from a consultant to develop sustainability strategies and identify ways to diversify their funding. Twenty-two programs engaged in this process—while sounding a familiar warning: without the kind of public funding that K-to-12 schools receive, early childhood programs will continue to struggle financially. 

Growing the Workforce and investing in educators

ARPA funding was used to seed growth across the field.

Working with the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, city officials identified people who wanted to open family child care businesses and provided them with support so they could get their licenses. They received mentoring and coaching as well as marketing and business support. The program was so successful—82 childcare providers have earned their licenses—that the city now supports it with its own funds, and the program’s eighth and ninth cohorts are underway.

Boston also formed partnerships with UMass Boston, Bunker Hill Community College, Urban College, and Neighborhood Villages to help early educators earn certificates or degrees for free. Courses were offered in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, and the funding also covered the cost of books, parking, and the child care that early educators needed for their own children. 

The outcome: more than 360 educators completed an associates degree, bachelors degree, masters degree, or other certifications, boosting the quality of the programs where they worked. More than 700 educators are expected to earn their certificates and degrees by the time the ARPA funds expire. 

Sustainability for this effort comes from Massachusetts, which is using state funds to support early educator scholarships and loan forgiveness programs. 

Increasing access

“Making child care easy to find was the dream of the mayor,” Gaviria Villarreal says of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. “So we invested this in an online platform called Great Starts, where parents can find all the child care options in the city of Boston. Parents can find family child care, center-based child care, or child care in independent and public schools.”

Great Starts launched in 2024 with listings of more than 800 early childhood programs. (Later that year it was expanded to serve students in grades K through 12.) Since then, Great Starts has been used to register 6,910 3- and 4-year-olds in early childhood programs. 

Lessons learned

One of the most heartwarming lessons of the pandemic response is that partnerships matter. The joint action of government, families, early educators, advocates, community organizations, K-12 education, and higher education makes the system stronger by improving access and increasing quality.

The least heartwarming—and longstanding—lesson is that early childhood programs are woefully underfunded. 

There is plenty of room, Gaviria Villarreal says, for more philanthropic support of educator salaries and program operating costs, neither of which are exciting for funders, but both of which are crucial to providing high-quality programs for young children. 

The bigger need, of course, is for public funding that would provide stability and resources, a fact that has been corroborated by the research of Harvard Professor Jeffrey Liebman. 

Now that ARPA funding has helped Boston stabilize and expand its early childhood programs, the next step is to encourage pretty much everyone to collaborate on keeping this work going and growing.