Pete Buttigieg releases early education plan, calls for universal child care

Barbara Rodriguez | The Des Moines Register

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released an early education plan that proposes universal child care and pre-kindergarten.

The South Bend, Indiana, mayor released his policy ahead of a visit Saturday to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

"Too often, access to education is predicted by income or zip code. And success can be

determined before a child even sets foot in a classroom," Buttigieg said in a statement. "Every child in America should have access to high quality education, and we need to support our nation’s teachers for the work they do within and outside the classroom."

Buttigieg's policy proposes what his campaign described as "affordable" child care and pre-K to "all children" from infancy to five years old, in part through "full-day, year-round" early education programming.

In Iowa, the average monthly cost of child care in 2018 ranged from $859 to $1,315 across the state's 99 counties, according to a cost-of-living study from United Ways of Iowa.

Buttigieg's plan, according to the campaign, will give families a choice between federal programs, local public programs, private centers and home-based programs. Families would pay a proportional share of a program's cost based on income. Subsidies and provider incentives would help cover the rest.

States will be expected to help pay for subsidies, which the campaign noted is the current practice.

The Buttigieg campaign claims families earning below median income will pay "between zero and three percent of income" as part of the plan. No family would pay more than 7% of their income, according to the campaign.

Buttigieg is also proposing to "triple" funding for Title 1 schools. Those are schools that receive federal funding to help serve low-income families. All of Iowa's more than 325 school districts receive Title 1 funding, according to the Iowa Department of Education, though not all schools within the districts receive money.

Buttigieg's plan would eliminate what the campaign described as a wage gap for Title I teachers, in part through increasing salaries. The plan calls for doubling the proportion of "new teachers and school leaders of color" in a decade.

The policy also proposes addressing what Buttigieg described as "racial and socioeconomic segregation and bias" in early childhood education. A part of his plan will be to work toward ending preschool suspensions. Research shows young boys of color are suspended and expelled more frequently than other children.

The campaign estimates the plan for universal child care and pre-K, as well as services for before- and after-school and summer programs, would cost $700 billion. Other provisions of the plan would cost more than $425 billion, for a total of about $1.12 trillion in spending.

Buttigieg is in the middle of a three-day swing through eastern Iowa that began on Friday with a town hall in Grinnell. He is scheduled to end the trip with a similar event in Coralville on Sunday.

Barbara Rodriguez covers health care and politics for the Register. She can be reached by email at bcrodriguez@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8011. Follow her on Twitter @bcrodriguez.

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