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Rick Bennett of Oxford represents District 18 in the Maine Senate. He is a former president of the Maine Senate and a former member of the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee. He serves on the Housing and Economic Development Committee and the Committee on Government Oversight.
For the past four years I had the honor of serving as the Senate chair of Maine’s legislative Children’s Caucus. In the course of that service, I’ve met many outstanding early care and education professionals. They have taught me a lot about what’s working well and where there are gaps and problems in the governmental systems created to support our youngest children, their parents/guardians, and their care providers.
Chief among my lessons learned is how essential the childcare sector is to Maine families and our economy, yet how flawed the current childcare system is. The system is cumbersome, inefficient in many ways, overlooked for its essential role by too many policymakers, and lacking the resources to serve the vast majority of children and families it was created to support.
Policies and policymakers often seem to ignore the fact that Maine’s childcare sector is the workforce behind every other workforce in Maine. If parents don’t have childcare, they cannot work. That hurts their families, our businesses and Maine’s economy.
A glaring example of this is Gov. Janet Mills’ proposal to cut $15 million annually from the wage stipends of our childcare educators.
Childcare educators are historically poorly paid. According to the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, child-care educators are paid in the bottom 3 percent of all U.S. occupations. Thus, 97 percent of all other workers in the U.S. earn more. Childcare educators’ wages are so low, in fact, that this Index also shows that Maine childcare educators have a poverty rate of 11.7 percent — more than double the rate for all other occupations.
The proposed childcare budget cuts will hurt some of Maine’s hardest working and lowest paid employees. Currently Maine’s childcare educators earn an average of $16.40 per hour (approximately $34,000 annually). Cutting the monthly stipend program by half, as Mills is proposing, will essentially reduce pay to $15.15 per hour (or $31,500 annually). That’s a 7 percent pay cut to some of Maine’s most poorly paid professionals.
At that rate, childcare educators could make more money in just about any other job. How will our childcare sector hire and retain teachers and staff when they can earn more money by working almost anywhere else?
A 2023 research report by ReadyNation adds perspective to the financial tolls that childcare challenges — including educator workforce challenges — place on Maine’s economy. The report notes that the lack of childcare, just for infants and toddlers, exacts an annual cost of $122 billion nationally in lost earnings, productivity, and tax revenue. The estimated economic loss for Maine is just over $400 million per year.
My major takeaway from this report and all the presentations before the Maine Children’s Caucus is that policymakers have failed this critical sector of Maine’s economy. Many of us, led by Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, former Senate President Troy Jackson, and several of my colleagues on the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee, tried to right this ship in recent years by putting in place a modest monthly wage stipend for every childcare educator in Maine. These investments brought childcare employees closer to, yet still below, the average wages of front-line retail and fast food workers. Yet now the governor is proposing to cut those wage stipends by 50 percent, thus putting in place a wage structure which may well decimate our critical childcare industry.
Mills’ budget proposal is $11.63 billion. It is about 10 percent larger than her last budget. Yet it balances the budget on the backs of some of Maine’s hardest working and lowest paid workers — those in childcare. This should not be the priority of our state. It is not a proposal I can support, and I hope my legislative colleagues will agree with me.
