As soon as Sandra Parra walks into her pre-K classroom at the Christina Kent Early Childhood Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, three children begin vying for her attention. One boy says he has a toy for her, a girl tells her she plans to bring in a croissant from home. A third child recounts how the mailman came to his house and reenacts the story with a toy car. Parra has a cheerful response for each of them. Then she holds up the books she has brought with her to read. And soon, most of the class is sitting on the rug for story time.
Parra has been teaching at Christina Kent, a child care center that dates back to 1919, for 23 years. Though she works full time, she described when she lived “paycheck to paycheck” as a single mom raising three kids and added that she occasionally had to borrow $20 from a friend, just to get gas.
Left: Sandra Parra reads a story to the students in her pre-K classroom. Right: Parra greets children in her pre-K classroom at Christina Kent Early Childhood Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Parra has seen her income go up, along with her financial stability, thanks to investments in early care and education by the state. (Rebecca Gale)
But the early care and education system in New Mexico has undergone dramatic changes in the past five years, with an influx of investment from the state that has upended the sector’s traditional business model which, in most of the country, relies on thin margins and poverty wages for providers. In 2020, after a sustained effort from local activists, House Bill 83 was signed into law, creating a fund for early childhood education, and a designated early childhood department in the state government.
Then, in 2022, New Mexico became the first state to enshrine a right to early education for children ages 0 to 5 years old, by passing a constitutional amendment that expanded funding from the Land Grant Permanent Fund so that a steady stream of money would be dedicated to early childhood year after year. Among the shifts since 2022: increased pay for teachers, higher reimbursements for providers that accept subsidies, more families qualifying for free or reduced price child care, and more child care slots.
Liliana Vazquez Diaz, who runs the family child care center La Casa de Lily out of her home, shows the binder of paperwork she completed to receive a higher child care rating, which resulted in more money from the state per child. (Rebecca Gale)
Christina Kent Early Childhood Center, for example, has made significant changes including increasing wages and providing health insurance for staff, said Sondra Carpenter, the center’s executive director. Before COVID, Parra made $17 an hour; today she makes more than $22 an hour. With the additional income, she’s paid off her car, purchased her first home, and reports that she no longer feels the unending stress that comes with financial precarity. The center is also in the process of expanding to serve more families: it’s broken ground on a new facility for infants and toddlers, which Carpenter said will open this September.
Across the state, child care providers who accept subsidies have seen their reimbursement rates rise, and the subsidies are now tax-exempt, saving families and providers more money. With the increased investment, more families now qualify for child care subsidies, including those who make up to 400% of the federal poverty line, which for a family of four is an annual household income of $128,600.
Liliana Vazquez Diaz, another child care provider, has also reaped the benefits of these shifts. She now sees higher reimbursement rates for the six kids enrolled in La Casa de Lily, the child care program she runs out of her house in the Alamosa neighborhood of Albuquerque. Diaz was recently approved to provide pre-K services, which will raise her reimbursement rate even more.
There is this shame of having more children in poverty than anywhere else
Hailey Heinz, deputy director and senior research scientist at the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico
And the Explora Science Center and Children’s Museum in Albuquerque, which runs two classrooms out of their museum space for children of students at the local community college, has just broken ground on a new child care facility, which will serve over 100 children, with 16 slots for infants, which are the toughest slots secure in the state. “The state child care subsidies have made that a viable option,” said Kristin Leigh, co-executive director of Explora.
“We have really made a shift in the way we approach early education,” said Javier Martinez, the speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, who ran for the legislature on a platform of early education and immigration rights. “We are rebuilding the village that it takes to raise a child in New Mexico.”
New Mexico Just Became the First State to Make Child Care Free for Nearly All Families
How New Mexico Funded Early Education
New Mexico has consistently been one of the lowest ranked states for school attendance, economic well-being, child poverty, education proficiency, and child well-being. “There is this shame of having more children in poverty than anywhere else,” said Hailey Heinz, deputy director and senior research scientist at the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. The pervasive intergenerational poverty includes New Mexico’s tribal communities which live on sovereign lands but have faced centuries of adverse policies and discrimination. “We have people who have never had a generation that was allowed to thrive,” said Heinz.
Children playing in the preschool classroom at Christina Kent Early Childhood Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Rebecca Gale)
An understanding of New Mexico’s complicated history of child well-being and poverty can be traced back to the Mexican-American War in 1846, when the state ceded to the United States. For more than 60 years, New Mexico was a territory and its people didn’t have full rights as U.S. citizens, but the region’s oil and gas reserves were profitable. When in 1912, New Mexico became a state, a Land Grant Permanent Fund was created, whereby profits from oil and gas would be bound up in the trust, and the proceeds would pay for education and services for its citizens.
“A giant trust fund to secure mineral rights, in which the state constitution determined the beneficiaries,” was how Jacob Vigil, the chief legislative officer for New Mexico Voices for Children described it. “New Mexico is called ‘such a poor state’ but it is not a poor state, it’s a colonized state with historical disinvestment and racism,” he said.
As oil and gas prices continued to boom, the Land Grant Permanent Fund swelled into the billions. Today, it’s worth nearly $32 billion. Yet the state still had high rates of poverty, and more research began to show the profound effects of improving generational poverty outcomes through early education and intervention. So in 2009, grassroots activists, including Martinez and Vigil, targeted the fund as a way to pay for child care.
Sondra Carpenter, the executive director of Christina Kent Early Childhood Center, which dates back to 1919. (Rebecca Gale)
This required legislative action, and the chairman of the Senate budget committee, Democrat John Arthur Smith, denied the opportunity for a committee vote for nearly a decade. But political pressure and grassroots organizing led to a Democratic primary challenge, which Smith lost in July 2020. After that the bill easily passed both the House and Senate, and since it required a constitutional change, it was put to a public vote, which it passed in the November 2022 election by an overwhelming 70%.
Other states may not have the robust external funding source to use for early childhood, but Erica Gallegos, co-director of Child Care for Every Family Network believes New Mexico’s advocacy efforts are replicable elsewhere, especially when combined with political might. “You have to have a C4 strategy,” she said, referring to the 501(c)(4) tax status organizations have when becoming involved in elections, and the willingness of advocacy groups to unseat legislators. “It can’t just be about going after Republicans. It has to be about going after power and holding that power accountable.”
New Mexico is the First State to Guarantee a Right to Early Childhood Education. Universal Child Care Could Come Next
What Success Looks Like
The dollars from the Land Grant Permanent Fund have allowed for substantial investment in early childhood. In addition to higher wages, increased subsidy reimbursement rates and expanded access to affordable child care for families, the state created an agency dedicated to early childhood with a cabinet-level secretary, and added considerable funding for universal home visiting programs, early intervention and pre-K programs. The state also created a higher earned income tax credit and child tax credit that are both fully refundable.
Children gather to return to their classroom after exploring an outdoor exhibit at Explora. (Explora)
Martinez says he is “very satisfied” with the state’s progress in early care and education to date. He predicts that in the next few years, New Mexico will start to see improved reading and math scores, as the children benefiting from early learning programs matriculate to elementary school. He cites studies, including a longitudinal study still underway at the University of New Mexico, that show dramatic improvements in the lives of kids and families who participated in the home visiting program,including increased parent confidence, and fewer emergency room visits and interactions with law enforcement.
But he’s also identified additional areas to target: strengthening the care infrastructure for 0 to 3-year-olds, creating a state paid family and medical leave option, and improving the foster care system, which has kids sleeping in homeless shelters and agency offices.
He is also anticipating interest from private equity groups looking to be involved in child care in the state, and he’s keeping a close eye on that, as such groups tend to be intrigued by sectors with steady government funding, yet historically have not always been careful stewards in implementing them.
Martinez knows that the conversations around early care and education have changed. When he was building support for opening up the Land Grant Permanent Fund, he spoke about child care as “the need to invest in kids, how those years were so critical,” he explained. But now, he says he can speak more openly about what this was about. “We are literally talking about a redistribution of wealth,” he said.
As the value of the Land Grant Permanent Fund ballooned, Martinez said, financial advisors and wealth managers investing those funds were making millions each year in fees for doing so. Yet, children in New Mexico were “dying on the vine,” he added.
Opening up the Land Grant Permanent Fund became a rallying cry. “It wasn’t just about more money in the [early childhood] system,” he said. “It was about the poorest and most vulnerable children being able to make use of it.”
