A new initiative in Arkansas is working to solve some of the biggest challenges in early childhood through greater coordination and unification. The Center for Early Learning Solutions is a byproduct of Forward Arkansas, a project established by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Jamie Rayford is executive director for the Center for Early Learning Solutions. She says one skill that translated from that world to the world of early childhood is being a resource to help decision makers make better decisions.
Jamie Rayford: Like I can remember just less than a year ago, I was doing like finding housing study information and putting that in front of decision makers and putting that in front of folks that could help with affordable housing is really not that different in this space. Using real data, highlighting what's working, and then offering practical solutions that have an opportunity to be scaled is really something I've transferred into this space as well. Maybe the learning curve has been the early childhood industry as a whole is very, very unique. It's made up of public and private providers. It has a really unique business model that is really, really hard to navigate. I can remember the first time I ever looked at a pro forma of how an early childhood education program actually runs with revenue and expenses, and it's really just kind of mind blowing. What they do with so little and it's really hard to have margin and make profit in a private business. The way that it's just set up now, we don't have any more public investment coming in and families can't afford to pay anymore. And so it's just a really unique challenge. So that part has been a learning curve for me and thinking about how do we get creative fiscally to understand and build better strategy.
Matthew Moore: Are you someone who has children?
Rayford: I do, I have a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old.
Moore: So before this world that you're in now, what was your experience personally with early childhood education and daycare and preschool and these sorts of things?
Rayford: So funny you should ask this question. I actually started the work before I ever had the plan to have a child. And so I actually dove in and thought that the problems and the challenges were so interesting in my work, sort of translating between education and business in the local community that I worked in long before my children were thought about. But then, fascinatingly enough, I learned so much about the demand and the supply of childcare and how hard it was to find spots for other families. So literally the childcare centers in our community knew that I was pregnant before my in-laws knew that I was pregnant. I went immediately to a childcare center the day I found out and put my child on a list, because I knew it would likely take that long before I would actually be able to get an infant spot. My oldest started school at 4 months in a high-quality licensed program here in the state. And my youngest began his program at 6 weeks. And so I have really had a lived experience as a parent as well, which I do think has given me a really intense perspective to bring to the state systems and to other leaders in the work as well.
Moore: You make that joke about how they knew that you were pregnant before your in-laws, but that's not the first time I've heard that experience in doing these sorts of interviews, talking to people in this world. That feels problematic.
Rayford: It is. And so it's a big focus of what we're trying to think about at the Center for Early Learning Solutions — around how can we help families find care, especially for infants during non-traditional hours? How do we help providers who are under a lot of strain be able to stay open and deliver quality services for all of these families that are trying to find it? But even more so, how do we unify the system so that it's not so fragmented for families to navigate? How do we think about assistance programs, school readiness assistance and other subsidy programs in a really unique and creative way? How do we blend and braid funding to make it more affordable for families that need to access? How do we get the students that are furthest away from opportunity closer to early learning, high-quality early learning settings? I mean, that's a huge part of some of the early portfolio projects for us are around fiscal strategy. And it's for that very reason. It all boils down to access.
Moore: I think to that point, I have heard people say that childcare — and especially where I am here in Northwest Arkansas — it doesn't matter if you need financial assistance or not, regardless of your financial status, it is hard to find a place to put your kid in childcare right now.
Rayford: Yeah. And so thanks for bringing that up. It's so interesting the different challenges amongst the geography in Arkansas too. So for example, if you go to Northwest Arkansas, you may hear a lot about supply issues and how there's not enough supply. There's a ton of demand. It's pent-up demand. Parents are even willing to pay massive amounts of money just to get their child into a program because the demand is so high and supply so low. But if you were to go to the provider that I was at in Little Rock last week and talk with her, she has three available vacancies. She's in a neighborhood program. She's been there for years. She has about 25 kids in her program. But she is in a lower-income neighborhood and the families cannot afford to access those slots. And the subsidy waitlist as of that day, when I looked at it, was about 2,100 kids on the list for assistance. And so she is a provider who needed those three spots filled because the business model is occupancy vacancy, very similar to a hotel. If you have open spots, you're losing revenue, because you have all of these other expenses that you have to pay for. So it's provider strain, but it's also that the family isn't able to access the spots, even though they're right there and ready for them. They just can't get to them.
Moore: There are more or less two sides to what's going on here. There's the parent with a kid side and there's the provider side. Let's first start by talking about the family side. You mentioned a number just a moment ago. How many kids in Arkansas right now are on a list waiting to have a spot and have this financial support that they're looking for?
Rayford: So when I looked at the list last week, there were about 2,100 children on the wait list for SRE, which is school readiness assistance. That's money that's federally brought down into the state and the state administers those programs. The Office of Early Childhood is responsible for administering those programs. And then the website, if I remember correctly, maybe had another like 3,000 or so applications in flux. So more families. And I do think that there's been a really great amount of momentum around helping families understand there is this assistance and trying to help them navigate it, especially with the new early childhood local leads, the structure and organization that's been set up. I think a lot more families are getting help in navigating that system. But that also means more families are applying, which means there are more families that are going into that pipeline and that waitlist. And so there's a lot of work to be done in terms of fiscal strategy. And what opportunities do we have to maximize all public investment across different funding streams for early childhood — which we are really excited about — we're launching what we call the Early Childhood Governance and Finance Project as part of our initial launch portfolio. And that work aims to bring together a lot of thought leadership between different agencies that have funding streams to fund early childhood, to think more creatively about fiscal strategy and to analyze where money is going, how much things cost, and what is the gap between that?
Moore: So let's say I run a daycare in Huntsville right here in Northwest Arkansas. What does my paperwork situation look like? Who am I reporting to? What do I need to do? It doesn't feel like that's probably terribly streamlined right now either.
Rayford: There's been a lot of learning for us in this space, especially as we underwent a stakeholder engagement process last fall. We heard from about a thousand families. We did in-depth interviews with about 70 providers across the state. And we really learned from the providers that the systems are very fragmented for them in terms of compliance regulation, in terms of administering their subsidy payments and their ABC funding that comes down. It's hard to navigate. There's a lot of duplication from their perspective that could be streamlined. But I want to point out that our providers are resilient and they weren't all just talking about the problems. They were giving really great ideas about how to solve those problems and the opportunities around modernizing our data systems, using child care management system more effectively, doing some work with our integrations of all of our different systems that could help reduce a lot of that administrative burden. And we're really excited to also have projects in our launch portfolio around that as well.
Moore: So we've talked about families, we've talked about providers. Another area where I see your work being very productive and helpful is in the policymaking world too, talking to legislators who play a role in helping to streamline some of the bureaucracy that is necessary, but also could be simpler. How do you see your work improving things on the legislative side of all of this?
Rayford: Speaking back to just being a resource to help build capacity, understanding, knowledge around the field as a whole. And moving from, we all have these good intentions and we all want the same things, to how do we actually act to make that happen. What is doable through just will — like people just want to change and do better — and what needs to be legislated. What are the things that we can do to put real data and insights in front of people so they have a better understanding? I think that's been a big block for additional momentum in early childhood — we might get a lot of folks interested and then they ask a question. And because we don't have the specific answers to those questions, we don't have the data to back up the responses, we just have some anecdotal things. We lose a lot of momentum when it comes to policy. And so I'm really excited to hopefully be able to bring a lot of different stakeholders together, really sort through, dig deep, get the data in place, analyze a lot of that information and be able to provide the insights from that that are needed to move us forward.
Moore: The funding for this center is a two-year funding. What do you hope two years from now to be able to point back to concretely and say, these are some things that we've helped to make simpler, make easier, and hopefully make lives better for families in Arkansas?
Rayford: So we really hope that we have driven innovation to a place that the outcomes for children and specifically for families are undeniable. We hope that access has improved as a result of the work that we're doing. We hope for providers that we've solved some operational challenges with solutions that are shared amongst the entire state — that things like administrative burden and efficiencies that they're seeing, that we're reducing, that we're increasing the amount of time they're able to spend in the classroom. We hope that we have a lot more information and understanding of the fiscal systems. And we have some really great opportunities to strengthen strategy and make us more resilient as a state in this area.
Jamie Rayford is executive director for the Center for Early Learning Solutions with Forward Arkansas. We spoke last week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
