The Early Learning Advisory Committee members pose for a group photo Tuesday at Ivy Tech in Warsaw. Tuesday morning, they visited Pleasant View Early Learning, North Webster Elementary School and IMD Early Learning. Photo by David Slone.

By David Slone
Times Union

KOSCIUSKO COUNTY — Members of Indiana’s Early Learning Advisory Committee visited Kosciusko County Tuesday to learn about child care in the community, including its strengths and barriers.

Courtney Hott, Early Learning Advisory Committee director, explained the ELAC has been around for quite a while, but during the 2022 legislative session Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb updated the appointments to the committee. Not only did he switch who was on the board, but also their priorities.

“The intent really was to bring awareness to early learning and to work on policy changes at a macro level at the state level to help support communities to grow their child care and expand it throughout,” she said.

ELAC has four priorities that it focuses on. They are to improve learning and readiness for kindergarten, to increase supply and sustainability of high-quality providers, to increase affordability particularly for vulnerable families and to improve and increase system capacity.

ELAC has 13 board members, made up of people from all different sectors and Hott said they all bring different expertise to the table. “Which is a great way to break down the silos of these different fields when, in reality, if you look at workforce, it’s really a three-peg stool, right? So we’re growing the workforce by educating our children. We’re adding to the workforce by providing child care for people to return to the workforce. And then we have jobs to be early childhood educators,” she said.

When they look at how to change policies, Hott said they want to be more inclusive and be more creative in figuring out how to expand everything while still maintaining quality.

“That’s the biggest part. We want to ensure that we’re not just expanding, but when we are expanding we are expanding to quality centers, we’re having quality seats for our children and we’re putting them in the best position to grow up and be successful adults,” Hott said.

As to why they were in Kosciusko County, she said the committee recently started traveling around the state. “My thought is, if we’re going to be creating a structure and policies to help early childhood grow, we need to be in the communities that needs to grow it. We need to talk to the people that are doing the work every day, we need to talk to the organizations that are supporting this work, we need to talk to the businesses that are struggling to find employees because they don’t have child care, we need to talk to all of these people and figure out how we as a state can support and to truly make it a more sustainable effort,” Hott said.

LaunchPad Director Sherry Searles, who is also a member of ELAC, said she took the board to three different types of programs Tuesday morning. The first one they visited was Pleasant View Early Learning, which is one of the county’s newer program and is a registered ministry that operates in a church. The second one was North Webster Elementary School for Wawasee’s early learning program there. They have a pre-kindergarten program, as well as an infant-toddler program, and are considered an LLEP (legally licensed exempt program) and are school-based. The third visit was at Instrumental Machine & Development Early Learning, which is a licensed early childcare home operated for the employees of IMD.

“It was a good showcase for our group to see the new programs that are operating now in Kosciusko County,” Searles said.

The leadership of all three organizations met the ELAC at the door, talked about why they were offering the early learning and discussed some of the challenges and barriers they have run into.

“Because this group is responsible for looking at some of those barriers that are being experienced around the state to see what can we do to make sure that children are still safe, that quality is still there, that maybe relieve some of those cumbersome burdens that keep early learning childcare from growing,” Searles said.

Searles said this is the first year that ELAC has actually left its base in Indianapolis to travel the state.

“We’re just thrilled that LaunchPad was able to host this group here and be able to show off some of the work that we’re doing, and I hope that some of the things that they saw and heard here will affect some change moving forward,” Searles said.

Hott said during ELAC’s site visits Tuesday they saw a lot of good ideas for child care.

She said, “What was beautiful is we got to see all the different ways that this can be accomplished, and the places we went were so open and honest about the barriers they had starting up and what helps them and what we could do to help sustain them. And then also just the creativity and out-of-the-box thinking as far as getting the employers involved was really just something we were excited to see and hope that we can model across the state.”

Maureen Weber, chair of the ELAC, said Indiana has a mixed-delivery system when it comes to child care. The state has lots of different provider types that help to make the whole system work. They saw three of the different types Tuesday, but they are all working toward the same goal.

“So it was really just amazing to see how you’ve brought those three things together. You’ve brought different kinds of community partners – the faith-based community, the corporate community, the school community all together – to wrap around the youngest learners,” Weber said.

One of the consistent things they heard as far as barriers to early learning and child care, she said, is that it’s “really hard to accomplish the things that you’ve done here, and probably harder than it needs to be. I call it a complexity tax, like we make it so hard to enter the early learning business that we keep too many people out. So, we want to have high standards for health and safety, but we’ve got to get some of the work to get there streamlined so that more folks can offer the services, and we’ve heard that from pretty much every site today.”

Weber said there’s a lot of momentum in improving the early learning system in Indiana currently. The Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb administration had a nice legislative agenda, she said, and the Indiana General Assembly made a number of important changes.

“Probably the most important one is raising the income eligibility for our pre-K program to 150% of the federal poverty level. So, these were things that we weren’t talking about a few years ago, and now passed by wide margins, so I think we’re seeing a lot of progress,” she said.

Hott said the biggest barrier they heard was workforce.

“Also, we’re working on updating our regulations as a state, our licensing regulations and our QRIS, the quality rating system. So we have a lot of barriers from the federal government, but we are working on how to be, as a state, make it a more streamlined process. So we want to remove the barriers,” Hott said.

ELAC is mandated to provide an annual report to the governor every November, Hott said. Within that report, they have to make policy recommendations. They also have a strategic plan that they’re working through, to then not only make the recommendations but also to follow up to make sure those policy recommendations are being implemented.

In the recent Indiana General Assembly, ELAC was tasked with providing two more reports. “We will be seeking out a third-party evaluation for all of the regulatory structure and looking at where we can reduce regulatory burdens. So that is one (report) and that is due next year. And then we have another report due at the end of this year for us to make recommendations on … our quality rating system in Indiana,” she said.

Hott concluded by stating that ELAC is just really focused on access and quality and they want to see the child care system in Indiana thrive.

“Because it really, truly is the basis for everything moving forward. It’s something that we should invest in for later,” Hott said.

Webster said, “I think the most important thing I would say is, just the level of commitment and investment you have around the table in this community is really unprecedented and if we could replicate this in 91 other counties, we’d have a much higher score.”