Starting right and early

Some of the best work the Legislature will do this session likely happened this week. The bipartisian — or, better, nonpartisan — search to improve the quality and breadth of programs to promote early child development could eventually return benefits to Maine for generations to come.

After a couple of years organizing ideas, lawmakers have presented a sytematic and comprehensive approach that helps new parents, provides for better day-care opportunities and encourages businesses to invest in child care as an employee benefit.

Solutions in the legislation heard this week vary in approach and scope but begin with a single theme. Brain research in the last few years has shown again and again that some of the most important years for learning are the first, yet it is in this pre-school time that quality of learning ranges most widely. Some parents, rich in skills and resources, can furnish their children with an ideal, nurturing setting to stimulate their intellectural and emotional growth. Some cannot. This disparity may seem no business of the state’s until it looks at what too often happens to children denied this important early training.

The most famous study is also the longest: a 24-year examination of impoverished children in Ypsilanti, Mich. Researchers there randomly divided the 123 children into two groups, one received high-quality preschool education and one did not. Decades later, at age 27, the now-grown children were studied in areas such as arrest rates, welfare dependency and high school degree. Even after all those years, the differences between the two groups were telling: the children who attended the preschool program did better on every indicator.

More eye-opening, researchers compared the cost of the preschool program with the avoided cost to state for welfare, additional schooling, lost taxes, the justice system and added to that the avoided cost to crime victims, based on the numbers produced by the group that did not attend the preschool program. The result was that the high-quality preschool saved $7.16 for every $1 invested. Good early care brings opportunity to children and savings to the taxpayer.

Lawmakers will consider nearly a dozen bills that get kids off to a good start under the banner of Start Me. Right: one would dedicate a portion of lottery revenues to child care, another would significantly expand voluntary home visits by nurses to answer questions for new parents, another would increase the number of inspectors for child-care facilities, still another would use cigarette settlement money to start an endowment for subsidizing child care. The total price tag is well over $30 million, and sponsors would be unlikely to get all of that; the more important point is that they have an overall plan that may take several years to implement but is well worth doing.

That amount of organization is rare in Augusta. And it is encouraging: Starting kids right gives them the chance to stay on the right path their entire lives, making Maine a better place to live.