By Jodie Buffo
I’ve spent 42 years, first as a teacher, now as the director, at the same early education and child care school. Long enough that I’ve had former students come back and tell me they’re a Denver Broncos cheerleader, an aerospace engineer, a doctor or nurse, and that it all started here.
My own daughters grew up in this school, and both went on to work in early childhood education themselves.
So, when Learning Care, the company that operates our school, asked a group of school directors and teachers to travel to Washington, D.C., and sit down with our congressional delegation, I said yes without hesitating. I’d spent years hearing that people in Washington were working on issues that affect my school. I wanted to see it for myself and have them hear from someone who’s actually doing the job.
Our group met with various legislators and their staff. One legislator brought up AI, thinking it might eventually help with parts of our work. The fact that AI came up at all told me something. Even a lawmaker who is clearly paying attention to child care and the needs of families can still miss what early childhood education actually requires.
Here’s what I wish more people in Washington understood: The first five years of a child’s life are a critical window of opportunity because the brain develops more rapidly during this period than at any other stage. Quality early education doesn’t just prepare children academically; it shapes social skills, creativity, self-esteem and confidence as they head into K-12. Research from Harvard found that kindergarten readiness and test scores are strongly correlated with later-in-life outcomes, such as the quality of colleges attended and even economic mobility.
I see it on the other end, too. When children who didn’t have quality early education arrive in kindergarten classrooms, they’re already behind, and it’s not a gap that closes easily. The work we do between birth and age five isn’t child care in the way people often picture it. It’s foundational education, delivered by professionals, during the years that matter most.
That foundation costs money to sustain, and I’ve watched what happens when funding doesn’t keep up. As in much of Colorado, low-income families in Boulder County have been unable to access the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program much of this year because the need for this assistance far outpaced available dollars. This left families scrambling to afford the care they need so they can go to work, and their children can thrive.
Underneath all of it is the hardest problem: keeping good teachers. Although teacher pay has increased in recent years, it remains too low to retain the people who are good at it, and every time a school loses an experienced teacher, it starts over from scratch. That instability is worse for children than almost anything else. If the country wants quality early childhood education, it has to invest in the people doing the work because parents alone can’t carry that cost and schools can’t manufacture money that isn’t there.
I didn’t go to Washington as a policy expert. I went as someone who has been in the same school, in the same community, for four decades — through a pandemic, through the Marshall Fire, through policy and funding changes that impact my students and their families. I know what changes when the money changes, because I’ve watched it happen.
I also went to Washington as a mother. My daughters are 30 and 34 now, both still relatively early in their careers. They’ll spend the next several decades doing this work, in whatever version of this industry we leave them. I wanted to have a hand in making sure that version is a stronger one: better funded, better staffed, better able to support the families who need it. Not just for the children in my classroom today, but for the ones my daughters will still be showing up for long after I’ve retired.
If lawmakers want to know whether early childhood investment matters, they need to talk to the people doing the work. I was proud to be one of them.
Jodie Buffo is the director at La Petite Academy in Louisville, part of Learning Care.
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After years of political division, war, economic uncertainty and anger, we are hearing calls for unity. I want unity, too. But American history warns us what can happen when political peace becomes more important than justice. The end of conflict is not necessarily the beginning of justice. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)