The budget passed by the legislature this year contained much, though not all, of what the Early Childhood Education and Care Department requested.

The ECECD asked for $800 million in funding and expects to receive nearly $785 million for Fiscal Year 2025. ECECD Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said the key areas where their requests were unfulfilled  were in access to pre-K and to increasing quality.

“We had hoped to increase access [to pre-K] to 2,700 more children. It will be about half of that, 1,300 additional children,” Groginsky said.

She said that that means that more families will rely on early childcare for their toddlers to allow the parents to work but early childcare requires eligibility requirements for cost waivers.

Groginsky said another way for the agency to try to meet the goal of enrolling more three year old children in New Mexico into pre-K is through Head Start, which is a federal program. She called it a “mixed delivery system.”

She said Head Start and ECECD use very similar standards using a researched-based curriculum. Teachers must have a bachelor’s degree in early childcare and assistants must have associate degrees. She said Head Start serves families that make up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level.

“It’s limited who it can reach,” she said. 

In terms of increasing quality, Groginsky said the focus is on trying to improve pay for teachers for infants and toddler. She said the legislature provided $5 million a year for three years. The agency requested $10 million per year.

She said another area was in providing funds for low interest loans. The department asked for $3 million but were allocated $1.75 million for that.

The low interest loans are important because the state still needs to build out the early childhood education center supply. 

Bill Jordan, interim director and governmental relations officer for New Mexico Voices for Children, told NM Political Report that ECECD “needed significant money and they got it.”

“We’re pleased with the continued investment in early childhood programs,” Jordan said.

He said the state needs increased availability to pre-K and early childcare but that work is challenging because the pay for those workers tends to be low. 

“Building out that system has required an increase in reimbursement and wages so we have a sufficient workforce. Most of the effort in expanding early childhood scope of services has been in trying to improve quality by improving wages,” Jordan said.

Jordan said that while the state can’t dictate wages, it can tie additional funding to quality incentives “that will play out in a way that providers will be able to pay more to attract more qualified staff and improve the quality of pre-K and childcare.”

Groginsky said the “big takeaway” about the FY2025 budget, which begins July 1, is that “the gains the state made during the COVID-19 pandemic of building a high quality universal early care education system to support families and children to enter kindergarten and take up the K through 12 experience will be maintained.”

“We wanted to go a little further but we have the vision and it will still become a reality for New Mexico,” Groginsky said.

Groginsky said one of the interesting things about the ECECD budget is that it will use funding from the Early Childhood Trust Fund to cover doulas and lactation specialists through Medicaid funds. Groginsky said the ECECD will transfer the funds necessary to the new Health Care Authority, which is the new name for the New Mexico Human Services Department.

Groginsky said providing these funds to help support doulas and lactation specialists is important to ECECD because of the department’s focus on prenatal to age three.

“We know those services are very connected to positive outcomes for children and mothers. Many home visiting programs hire lactation consultants or doulas to connect moms. Building a prenatal to five [years old] system that is comprehensive using the Childhood Trust Fund makes sense to be comprehensive in approach,” Groginsky said.

Groginsky said another area where the agency would have liked to have received more money in the FY 2025 budget was for providing more home visiting incentives. She said the legislature gave the department some money to support incentives through the Medicaid home visiting program. 

She said receiving less money than the department asked for won’t hurt because there is still home visiting which can be utilized under Medicaid.

“We’ve put together a step-by-step manual and learned a lot about the process to become a Medicaid provider. We’re building the work intentionally around referrals and members who are eligible and private sector funding,” she said.

Groginsky said the department is hitting its target of 1,500 Medicaid home visiting and relying on Medicaid makes the state’s dollars go further.

An interim legislative committee hearing last year led to a discussion of the problems with the ECECD’s home visiting program. A report found that when families take advantage of the service, they often fail to continue it for the entire length of time required. Groginsky said the department wants to work on workforce issues so the home visitors don’t leave the field. She said the problem is that when a home visitor leaves the profession, the family that established a rapport with the home visitor doesn’t want to start over again with someone new.

Related: Home visiting program struggles to grow participation as funding increases

Groginsky said the legislature gave the agency $2 million in nonrecurring funds to build out that system. She said that when Medicaid is the payer, the state only has to pay the state match.