Tots linked to economy at summit

ROCKPORT – What do children under age 5 have to do with the state’s economy? A lot, according to state and national experts.

Gov. John Baldacci’s first Economic Summit on Early Childhood took place at the Samoset Resort on Thursday. Child care providers, police officers, legislators, municipal leaders and child welfare advocates from around the state gathered to review data that indicate young children who receive the medical care, stimulation and support they need grow up to become highly functional adults. They are more likely to excel academically, attend college, earn higher salaries as adults, own their own homes and contribute to the tax base.

“This is just a totally different way of looking at early childhood development,” said Sheryl Peavey, one of the summit organizers and a member of the governor’s Task Force on Early Childhood. Peavey is the director of the Maine Early Childhood Initiative, which has received a federal grant to expand the state’s early childhood service offerings.

First lady Karen Baldacci, chairwoman of the task force, said the state was able to obtain the grant by emphasizing the economic benefits of high-quality care for very young children.

“We’re focusing on brain research, economics and bringing in philanthropy to improve the quality of early care,” along with education and mental health initiatives for parents, Baldacci said.

The purpose of the summit was to come up with ways to better serve the state’s 68,000 children under age 5, 43 percent of whom, according to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, live in poverty.

One of the greatest indicators of a child’s academic success is the education of the mother, and 38 percent of Maine’s young children have mothers with a high school diploma or less, according to state research. Underdeveloped literacy skills can create enormous difficulties for mothers and their families, limiting educational achievement, employment, and access to health care and nutrition because of the parent’s inability to decipher information.

Day care providers and educators fill an important role, according to keynote speaker Hiro Yoshikawa, a developmental and community psychologist at Harvard University. Child care workers should be paid more, as they are necessary to create environments where literacy skills are introduced positively through books, song, discussion and art, he said.

The child care industry itself is a critical component of Maine’s economy. Licensed child care facilities in Maine represent a total annual contribution of $253 million and 12,000 jobs to the Maine economy, Yoshikawa said.

He pointed out that the U.S. invests a large amount in education and job training programs for high school and college students and relatively little in preschool or other child care initiatives.

“There is a real mismatch here between what we know and what we do,” Yoshikawa said.

A second featured speaker, George Kaiser, billionaire owner of Kaiser-Francis Oil Co., discussed his Educare community center in Tulsa, Okla., which serves low-income families with children from birth to age 5.

“Sensory stimulation and warm human interactive contact at the earliest possible point in life are the most important things we can do to provide equal opportunity in our society,” Kaiser said.