Laura Glesby photos
Marilyn DeJesus and John Antoni protest for higher pay, lower childcare costs.
Marilyn DeJesus was making $12 an hour as an early childhood educator — and paying $1,700 a month for childcare as a single parent.
Having since left that job to teach toddlers at a center with better compensation, DeJesus joined hundreds of other early educators on the Green to call for higher wages and lower childcare costs.
The educators gathered among parents, principals, and allies for the second annual “Morning Without Childcare” — a rally from 8 to 9 a.m. demonstrating that without childcare workers, kids, parents, and employers are left stranded.
Parallel rallies occurred throughout the state in six cities, including Waterbury, Hartford, Stamford, and Bridgeport.
The participating childcare centers stuck to just an hour-long disruption of the day — and many left some staff behind to care for the kids who had no other options — so that parents wouldn’t have to take the entire day off of work.
Over the course of the rally, early educators eschewed traditional protest chants for some of the songs they sing on a daily basis, like “If You’re Happy And You Know It” and “You Are My Sunshine.”
“You make me happy when skies are gray,” they sang. They seemed to be addressing not only the kids in their care, but one another. “Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
Speaker after speaker attested to the importance of early childhood education not only for parents but for the young minds rapidly absorbing their environments.
Since leaving her $12/hour job at another childcare center, DeJesus told the Independent, she found employment in 2019 with the Friends Center for Children on Blake Street. There, she was able to participate in a new teacher housing program and receive free childcare for her son, three-year-old John Antoni.
DeJesus knows that most early educators don’t have access to benefits like these. At Wednesday’s rally, she thought back to a time when the math of her salary and bills made no sense. And she imagined a future where childcare is affordable and early educators are paid according to the essential nature of their “brain-building” work.
“We want people to understand that early childhood education is not just glorified babysitting,” said DeJesus. “It’s just as essential as any other school.”
The rally illustrated a growing frustration among childcare providers and families about the industry’s chronic lack of funding. That frustration boiled when the Covid-19 pandemic required childcare workers to risk their health and safety caring for young children who could not always wear face masks, but it long predated the public health crisis.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of childcare for just one infant in Connecticut is $15,501 annually, more than the average annual cost of housing and nearly three-quarters of a minimum-wage earner’s paycheck.
Meanwhile, as of May 2021, the median hourly wages for Connecticut preschool teachers and childcare workers were $14.65 and $14.04, respectively, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Speakers highlighted at the rally that these low wages contribute to a gender and racial wage gap. According to Census data, women make up 93 percent of childcare workers across the country, and childcare centers disproportionately employ Black women.
At the first Morning Without Childcare protest last year, childcare advocate and Hope Center for Children founder Georgia Goldburn said, “We inspired a national movement.”
Since then, Gov. Ned Lamont has committed to increasing funding for the state’s childcare subsidy, Care 4 Kids, by $14.2 million in 2024 and $53.3 million in 2025.
While the early educators present on Wednesday celebrated this success, they stressed that this funding isn’t enough.
“We are shaping the future and we are at the bottom of the pay scale,” said All Our Kin’s Debra Kelly.
“The entire Connecticut economy rests on the shoulders of our early education system, and our system is broken,” said Friends Center For Children founder Allyx Schiavone.
Mayor Justin Elicker spoke with a special guest in tow — his four-year-old daughter April, who attends preschool at Leila Day.
“They teach her how to fine tune her motor skills, her ABCs, values, and most importantly, they give her so much love,” Elicker said of the Leila Day teachers.
He referred to $3.5 million in American Rescue Plan funding that the city has committed to allocating toward childcare. “We need to do more, and we need the state’s help,” he said.
April and Justin Elicker.
Lottie Brown.
The rally convened childcare centers with dozens of staff members alongside providers operating right out of educators’ homes.
Lottie Brown, who runs a childcare center called Krayola Park in her East Shore kitchen and living room, decided to start her own business after a few years of working as a Head Start preschool teacher in a public school.
Brown described that by the age of three or four years old, some of her students had experienced a lack of sufficient enrichment — or even trauma — that she knew would affect them for decades. “Their little minds were already products of their environment.”
Krayola Park serves about a dozen kids with a wide age range, including the occasional tween whom she cares for after school. Brown said she regularly works 16-hour workdays.
One of Brown’s beloved teachers recently resigned, leaving the childcare industry entirely for a better-paying job.
“We are just as important as the pilot of the plane,” Brown said to the crowd. “You would not want the pilot to be paid less than minimum wage.”