St. Paul City Council to convene advisory committee around early education, child care grants

The St. Paul City Council voted 6-0 on Wednesday to convene a legislative advisory committee that will take a deep dive on the question of how to craft and fund an early education and child care initiative aimed at the city’s lowest-income families.

The work group will be expected to report back to the council in the first few months of 2023, with the general expectation that voters would get to weigh in on the proposal through the November 2023 ballot.

To fund grants to child care and pre-k providers, the seven-member city council had been poised Wednesday to vote on whether to put a special property tax assessment on the Nov. 8 ballot this year. But the St. Paul All Ready for Kindergarten coalition, led in part by Council Member Rebecca Noecker, recognized they had not lined up the five requisite council votes. Noecker withdrew the ballot proposal during the council meeting, replacing it instead with a request to assemble a council advisory group by Sept. 28.

Noecker said she will present a follow-up resolution in the weeks to come naming members, likely including Council Members Mitra Jalali and Nelsie Yang, child care providers, educators, parents and other members “representative of our full community.” The city council would make the appointments and report back by March. Yang, who is on maternity leave, was absent Wednesday.

“Right now we are failing too many of our kids right when they need us most,” said Noecker, addressing the city council. “Most brain development happens right when they turn 5… Child care in Minnesota is more expensive than almost anywhere else in the nation.”

She added that two things were clear: “First, this is an idea whose time has come,” she said. “And second, people want the details. … I’m really excited we are taking this step forward. It really takes the conversations we’re having out in the community and formalizes them, puts them into a process where we can get to actual legislation.”

Following the council vote, SPARK released a statement calling the decision “a huge step forward.” They noted that the first few months of the initiative would have been dedicated to organizing the administrative infrastructure, anyway, so delaying a final decision on funding to November 2023 would not necessarily delay implementation by a full year.

Quoted in the statement, St. Paul School Board Member Halla Henderson, a SPARK organizer, said that “every family deserves access to an early learning program that will prepare their kids to succeed in kindergarten. It’s heartening to know that our city is designing a program that will get us to that goal next year.”

Critics had noted, however, that the SPARK initiative, while seemingly geared toward preparing kids for kindergarten, could fund child care programs that offer no educational curriculum at all.

Organizers had tossed out a previous idea, floated in 2018, to use a “Parent Aware” curriculum rating system to determine which providers would qualify for grants. Instead, SPARK has favored eliminating ratings in order to more inclusive of a wider variety of child care programs, including those reflective of different cultures.

In an email to the city council, attorney Peter Hendricks noted that “early care and education” was not defined under the proposed ballot language. “Would all licensed daycare programs qualify, including in-home day care? Should property taxpayers subsidize in-home day care?” he wrote. Hendricks also pointed out that the “low-income” population in question was not defined in the ballot language, though organizers have said children living at 185 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify, as might others as funding allows.

The proposed Nov. 8 ballot language, now scrapped, would have asked taxpayers to fund grants to providers, with the goal of offering free care for 5,000 low-income kids ages 3 and 4 by the fourth or fifth year of implementation.

A 10-year property tax assessment was projected to grow by $2.6 million annually, totaling $2.6 million in the first year, $5.2 million in the second year, $7.8 million in the third year, and so on.

For a median-value St. Paul home, that would add roughly $20 to property taxes in the first year, $40 in the second year, $60 in the third, and so forth.

Hendricks and others have urged the city to look to alternate funding sources, such as state and federal funding, rather than the city’s property tax, which could financially overburden the same families the proposal aims to help. A similar proposal to fund early childhood education was floated in 2018 using the city sales tax.

Jalali said future conversations are warranted, but “we do want to address what’s ultimately a gap in our community in an area of tremendous need” and her constituents believe “this is something we could lead on as a community.”

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