NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
When Cia Whitlow, an early education teacher at St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, was preparing to go out on maternity leave with her second child earlier this year, she did not know how she would be able to afford childcare costs for a another kid, even at the discounted rate she got at her employer.
She estimated that she would have been spending more than a third of her after-taxes income on childcare.
"That's a nice amount of the check gone, and you still got bills, you still got to buy diapers, you still got to buy food, and you still got to put gas in the car," Whitlow told the Banner.
Shortly before she had her second baby, Whitlow learned about a new pilot program aimed at helping childcare workers pay for care for their own kids. She was chosen as one of 23 early education workers at eight nonprofit childcare centers around the city to receive the scholarships.
"It's a huge deal," she said. "It took a huge load off when I found that out. I feel better now. I don't have to stress too much about my bills."
The scholarship program was announced Wednesday by the Nashville Early Education Coalition. The Retaining Early Educators as Professionals Scholarship has a $400,000 budget for the initial year, with plans to accept additional applications in the future. The program is funded by The Frist Foundation, the Joe C. Davis Foundation, The Women’s Fund and the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
On average, according to NEEC, childcare workers receiving the scholarship will pay $6,300 less annually for their own childcare. The grants go to the childcare provider, with the requirement that the provider charge their employees significantly less than market rate.
“We know early educators do such hard but needed work, and oftentimes that means it is at the expense of their own families,” Melanie Shinbaum, executive director at NEEC, told the Banner. “This is truly acknowledging that the workforce of early education are also oftentimes women and parents and have children of their own that they have to care for.”
NEEC was founded in 2024 in large part to chip away at an economic situation that remains fundamentally destabilizing to the childcare ecosystem. The cost of childcare is too high for the typical Nashvillian to afford and there aren’t enough spots for every child, while on the other side of the equation operators are struggling to break even and workers in the industry are often paid too little to get by. That math leaves parents struggling to afford childcare and contemplating leaving the workforce as the childcare workforce itself constantly churns.
The Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill this year establishing a similar scholarship, but its funding stream is currently being litigated and it has not yet been established. Shinbaum said she hopes the state can take lessons from NEEC’s pilot, and ongoing programs in states like Kentucky, if and when the statewide scholarship is put into practice.
Despite the newly enacted law, Tennessee lags behind much of the rest of the country in terms of supporting families.
Lia White reads to her child at St. Luke's Child Development Center. The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University has identified four strategies that states can implement to support families with young children: expanded Medicaid coverage, paid family and medical leave for families with a new child, a state minimum wage floor of at least $10 and a refundable state earned income tax credit of at least 10 percent. Tennessee has none. (The state does not have an income tax, which the policy center notes is the typical mechanism states use to offer tax incentives to families.) Tennessee has also reduced what supports it does offer, in part in response to federal funding cuts.
“The evidence tells us if you can meet those marks, that will make a big difference for families with young children,” said Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center and a professor of early childhood education and policy at Vanderbilt.
Osborne said she has been tracking the other states allocating funding for childcare workers’ own childcare costs.
“Childcare teachers are among the lowest-paid folks across the country,” Osborne said. “The research tells us that 90 percent of jobs pay higher than a childcare teacher. But the work is so important, and so states have been trying to figure out ways to better support the industry so that we can attract and retain the type of workers that we need to care for our kids. What Nashville is doing is really an important step to trying to make it so that people will want to go into the industry, and it makes it affordable to actually have that job that’s not paid at the level it should.”
Whitlow's St. Luke’s colleague Lia White is also among the two dozen recipients of the first round of scholarships. Whitlow has a 2-month-old and a 2-year-old enrolled at St. Luke’s, while White’s 4-year-old son is in Whitlow’s class.
The colleagues share prior bad experiences with a large, private-equity-owned for-profit chain of childcare centers — Whitlow as both a worker and parent and White as a parent.
“It was a rotating door more so than here,” White told the Banner. “We have people stay a lot longer because they're happier with how things are run and that vibe of doing things for the people as opposed to just trying to make money. It really makes a difference. As soon as I could move my child over, I did.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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