Early Childcare Educator Meetings

Facilitated by the Smart Beginnings Network
Join us for virtual meetings designed to connect professionals in the early childhood education field across Kenosha County. These meetings offer valuable resources and foster collaboration to help advance early childhood education in our community.
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Meeting Details:

• Date of Next Meetings: April 15 and May 13, 2025
• Time: 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM (Virtual)

Interested in attending? Reach out to Maggie Campbell, Director of Strategic Initiatives, to join our next meeting!
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Contact Maggie:
Email: [email protected]

The Need

• To ensure optimal child development, access to quality, affordable early care and education is vital to our community. It allows parents to participate in the workforce and employers to attract a sufficient workforce. Yet for far too long, families in Kenosha County and statewide have struggled to access quality, affordable care. The data shows:
  • Kenosha County is home to over 7,600 children under age 6 with all available parents in the workforce but only roughly 5,300 licensed child care slots. 
  • The average Kenosha County family has to pay 15% of their annual income to afford care for one infant, compared to the national recommendation of 7%. 
• ​​The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated these challenges for families, the child care sector, and the workforce. 

Bright Spots

WEESSN EXPANSION
Due to work that BOF convened in late 2021 around the child care workforce, the Wisconsin Early Education Shared Services Network (WEESSN) expanded to Kenosha, Racine, and Walworth Counties in 2022. A program of Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), WEESSN connects family child care providers and center-based child care programs together to benefit from shared resources, staff, and expertise. WEESSN offers a tiered level of services from simple information sharing in Tier 1 to deep collaboration in Tier 3. Any child care provider in Wisconsin is eligible to join Tiers 1 and 2, and Tier 3 services will soon be available to 40 child care programs in the Kenosha, Racine, and Walworth County region.

"I joined WEESSN tier 3 and have been non-stop already getting support for my situation. I've been in an ocean drowning  . . . and I feel that I've moved onto an island with the support I'm already receiving." 
- Family Child Care Provider

The Parents Advocating for Child Care Fellowship challenges and engages the Kenosha community to be active, educated, and passionate about our child care system. It provides are community with resources, support, and a network of parents and professionals who want to make impactful changes in our child care system's availability, cost, and quality of care." 
​- Patrick Langston, Kenosha dad & PACC Fellow

WISCONSIN PARTNERSHIP
Through the Wisconsin Partnership, BOF joined with other local collective impact partnerships across the state—including Achieve Brown County, Higher Expectations for Racine County, and Milwaukee Succeeds—to identify and advocate for policy changes that will increase access to quality, affordable early childhood education for all children. Through the paid, 8-month Parents Advocating for Child Care (PACC) Fellowship, four Kenosha parents used their lived experience with the child care system to identify changes they would like to see and learned how to advocate for those changes. Fellows learned key advocacy skills, met with local and state-level legislators, and advocated for more equitable policies. This advocacy contributed to meaningful investment in child care affordability in the 2021-23 state budget by way of a $29 million increase in funding for the Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy for low-income working families. Prior to this increase, the maximum Shares rate was enough to cover the full cost of just 35% of child care slots statewide. With this increase, the maximum Shares rate now covers the full cost of 80% of child care slots statewide.  ​

Curious to learn more? Hear directly from our PACC Fellows--in our podcast episode.

Parents Advocating for Child Care