Joy Farina Foskett testifies on CBO stability and trust

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Gutierrez and distinguished council members.

Thank you for the opportunity for speaking today.

I am here on behalf of PEC, People's Early Childhood Coalition, and we're an

advocacy group composed of teachers, instructional coordinators, academia, social workers, and policymakers working across boundaries to really confront the inequitable policies and help transform local early childhood system.

My name is Joy Farina Foskett.

I have been an educator for over 20 years.

I am currently an advisor for CBO.

So I work with CBOs.

There's 14 of them.

I'm also a professor for secondary education.

And I want to just say thank you for the opportunity.

And I really just want to highlight five key points that PEC would love to bring to your attention and reiterate the urgency of getting your support on it.

We believe in expanding the access to high-quality early childhood education, as it seems like everyone here does.

We believe families having greater access and the need.

Our point here is expansion has to include the stability of the CBOs, which I have also heard quite a bit today, and the educators who are already doing that work.

CBOs are not a small part of this system.

And when CBOs are financially unstable, this isn't simply a provider problem, it's a system problem.

That kind of goes to the first point of contracting and payments, which, again, we have heard quite a bit today.

And we asked the city council to really look beyond solving just maybe this year's crisis and to put in a or fix the structure that creates this crisis in the first place.

We're asking providers to open the doors, hire qualified teachers, meet payroll, maintain classrooms, comply with health and safety regulations, purchase supplies.

I can go on and on without the funds to do so.

So.

Ensuring that they have the funds before we continue to expand, and having a system in place is critical.

The second point was pay parity or wage equity, as we've all discussed.

That is critical, and I would ask, as we expand that or embrace that, not to lose the quality with the workers'workforce as well.

And then enrollment creates another vulnerability, that the enrollment numbers is what the CBOs are paid on.

So there can be half-full classroom, so they're not getting their full funding.

So that creates another problem.

So stabilizing contracts and payment, establishing true pay parity, creating a sustainable enrollment model.

Where we used to have in the past, and then building the next RFP around a sustainability from the beginning.

And that is another consistent theme I've heard today was from the beginning.

And all of this can only be done with trust.

and transparency.

So I am going to end on the importance of trust and transparency because there has been, because of the way it was rolled out, and understandably so, it was quick, it was robust, and was needed.

We need to rebuild trust and transparency together so we can unify.

So sometimes we have to slow down to speed up, and I'll leave it on that.

So thank you.