What to know about St. Paul's 2024 early childhood education ballot question

The recent legislative session was a landmark year for advocates of early childhood education and child care in Minnesota.

Between a nation-leading child tax credit and paid family medical leave, the state has pledged to invest at least $300 million into programs that would support child care providers and families’ efforts to find quality early care and learning for their children.

But it’s not just state legislators that are taking a special interest in Minnesota’s early care and learning outcomes. Next year, St. Paul’s local election ballot will have a special question asking voters whether the city should levy taxes to fund early learning subsidies.

On July 19, the St. Paul City Council voted 5-2 to put the proposal on the St. Paul ballot in Nov. 2024. As it’s written now, the measure orders a special election that will ask voters to authorize the city to raise the property tax levy incrementally by $2 million a year for 10 years. The total amount would be $20 million by the end of the decade with the cost being a compounding $16 a year to the average household.

Who it will help

The money from the increased tax levy would completely cover the cost of care for newborns to 5-year-olds from low-income families who fall 185 percent below the poverty line. That’s 58 percent of children in St. Paul.

Ward 2 Council member Rebecca Noecker was one of the resolution’s main sponsors and served on the council’s Early Learning Advisory Committee convened last year to address concerns about access to child care and education in St. Paul. She said this proposal would be a necessary investment in the future of the city.

“We’re talking to people about raising money and taxes are a burden,” Noecker said. “The way I look at it is, is it an investment or is it just spending money and again, knowing that there is no better return on investment than investing in early childhood.”

Noecker argues the city is spending money on a lot of education programs that don’t necessarily get to the root of the problem: a lack of early intervention. 90 percent of brain development occurs within the first five years of a child’s life and supporters of the resolution argue that early intervention for vulnerable children is critical for their future success in school. They said, in the long run, early intervention would result in reductions in special education placement and higher rates of high school graduation.

“So I’ve just become convinced beyond a doubt that this is where we have the greatest return on investment if we want to build a prosperous, equitable city,” Noecker said.

How it would work

Even though it’s been announced this year, this proposal has come out of years working with local early care and learning advocates. Noecker said it’s taken this long for the council to create a resolution because they want to make sure the model works for St. Paul.

“This is a really big idea. It’s the first of its kind in the state of Minnesota. You know, St. Paul is really leading the way here. And I think it takes time for big ideas to be socialized to be adapted,” Noecker said.

St. Paul’s proposal is unique because it would fully fund the cost of care, as opposed to a fixed amount scholarship — making child care completely free for eligible families. Parents can also choose any program they want, whether that's a state funded Head Start program or a privately licensed family child care center in their neighborhood.

“We can’t just assume that one size fits all,” Noecker said. “So our program is really casting a broad open net to say to all providers in St. Paul that meet you know, licensing and safety qualifications that they can be part of the program.”

Now that there is a set election date for this resolution, Noecker said advocates have more time to inform stakeholders and fine tune the details of the proposal.

Possible concerns

Before the special election on Nov. 5, 2024, the council still needs to figure out the maximum cost of care the city would provide for a family. Noecker said they also want to allocate some of the funds from the tax levy to child care providers but have yet to work out exactly how that would look.

The uncertainty over these details is why Ward 4 Council member Mitra Jalali voted against adding this measure to the 2024 ballot.

Jalali served on the Early Learning Legislative Advisory Committee and believes that the council should support the goal of helping families have access to child care in the city.

“The issue I have is that it is entirely inappropriate for the council to initiate a special election on a 10-year fixed, increasing property tax levy, as a way to fund that goal without clear information on how that’s going to work, how this new program will get created, more flexibility in the amount of property taxes we're raising, that locks us in for a decade without any kind of guarantee of evaluation,” she said.

If voters say “yes” to the increased property tax levy, the resolution states the program would go into effect during the 2025-26 school year and after the original 10 years are up, the question would go back to voters on whether to continue the program. Still, Jalali said the council passes an annual budget to decide how to fund new programs, and locking in voters to a 10-year plan is unprecedented and according to Jalali “not responsible.”

“We already have programs that need more funding, more review to make sure we can reach more families to expand capacity in the system and to just help make more spots available to kids and families. And we have the ability and the power to improve those right now,” Jalali said.

Current programs to improve access to early care and learning are Head Start and Early Head Start, St. Paul Public Schools pre-K, Early Learning Scholarships which give families money for four-star Parent Aware child care providers and the Child Care Assistance Program. Still, many available low-cost child care and education programs have long waitlists, leaving some families without other options.

Jalali argues that blanket subsidies, like the St. Paul proposal, need to have lots of oversight to prevent possible inequities.

“It also is directing a significant portion of taxpayer funds to go toward vouchers essentially, like scholarships, I think can create inequities that we need to be very careful and thoughtful about and I don’t think we're well positioned to make sure that doesn’t happen with the route that the special election provides,” Jalali said.

In the community

Even with those concerns, many local child care providers, early educators and nonprofit advocates are supporters of this measure. That includes Tiffany Knox, the director of St. Paul Promise Neighborhood, a nonprofit that works to support families by closing the educational opportunity gap.

“We have so many families that reached out to us saying that they can’t keep up with the rising cost of child care and just education in general,” Knox said. “And so they seek help to shoulder those costs. And I think this is an opportunity for us to alleviate some of that and take the burden off the family.”

More public comment can be read in the attachments on the resolution.

Below is the proposed language for the 2024 ballot:

Should the city levy taxes to provide early learning subsidies?

In order to create a dedicated fund for children’s early care and education to be administered by a City department or office that provides subsidies to families and providers so that early care and education is no cost to low-income families and available on a sliding scale to other families, and so as to increase the number of child care slots and support the child care workforce, shall the City of St. Paul be authorized to levy property taxes in the amount of $2,000,000 in the first year, to increase by the same amount each year following for the next nine years ($4,000,000 of property taxes levied in year two, $6,000,000 in year three, $8,000,000 in year four and so on until $20,000,000 of property taxes are levied in year ten)?

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