Skookum Endorses Proposition 5—Yes for Whatcom Kids!
Whatcom County residents will see Proposition 5 on their ballots in November, which if passed, will set aside an estimated $8.2 million each year to fund two important priorities—increasing the availability & affordability of childcare, and preventing family homelessness and child maltreatment. Our founder & CEO, Ray Deck III, was involved in the drafting of this initiative the Skookum Kids Board of Directors recently voted unanimously to endorse it, and Ray also serves as co-chair of the Yes for Whatcom Kids! Campaign working to help it pass.
So let's take a minute to walk through what Proposition 5 is, why we need it, how it works, why Skookum chose to endorse it, and tell you where you can learn more about it and even get involved yourself!
Why we need a Healthy Children's fund in Whatcom County
There is not enough childcare in our community for all the families who want and need it, not by half. In fact, Western Washington University conducted a demand analysis and found that for children under the age of five we will need to triple the number of licensed childcare slots by 2025 in order to meet the anticipated need—that's 5,768 new childcare slots.
And in the two and-a-half years since that report was completed, we have seen ten licensed providers close their doors permanently, and eight new providers open for the first time, resulting in a net gain of three new licensed slots. So, we needed 5,768 new slots in six years, and in the first three years we managed to add three individual slots. This is not going to cut it.
Guy Ochiogrosso, President & CEO of the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, put it like this, "Childcare is a problem everywhere, but we have it worse than most. So even if something major changes at the state or federal level to improve the situation, we need to do something specific in our community just to catch up."
Showing how stifling the lack of available childcare is on our local economy, the Chamber was one of the first organizations to endorse the fund citing the fact that eighty-eight percent of employers have had trouble hiring because their preferred candidates cannot find childcare.
And while childcare expansion accounts for the majority of the fund, since we know that the very best childcare in the world cannot make up for an unsafe or unstable home, there is a smaller portion directed toward some low-cost, high-impact measures intending to prevent both child maltreatment and family homelessness.
Early elementary education is critical to overall community health for many reasons, but the largest are:
1.) Kindergarten readiness is a powerful predictor of success in adulthood, and Whatcom's performance is not good.
If a child is not ready to learn on the first day of K-5 odds are poor that they will hit the goals for reading proficiency in third grade. And if they cannot read in third grade, odds they will graduate high school are similarly bad. And if they do not graduate high schools, odds that they will be incarcerated as an adult are frightening. It all starts with K-5 readiness. And unfortunately, only about half of Whatcom kids arrive ready to learn on their first day of kindergarten. And among Black, Latino, and Native American children, K-5 readiness is only about 20% in our community. We need to do better.
2.) Parenting is harder than it used to be.
The cost of raising a family has risen consistently over the last 20 years despite the cost of other ways of life declining over the same period. In response, most families are resorting to a norm that used to be the exception—both adults in the household work full time and children from the earliest days are enrolled in childcare of some form. Families simply can no longer afford for one parent to stay home and raise the children because of the cost of *gestures broadly at everything and emphatically points twice at housing*. So in order to live here and raise a family, most families need childcare. And there just simply isn't any childcare available to buy at any price much less one that most people can afford.
What it is & how it works
Specifically, this ballot measure would raise the property tax rate in Whatcom County by 0.19 per thousand dollars of assessed value, raising an estimated 8.2 million annually that would be restricted to these two purposes—expanding childcare & preventing harm to children. A couple things to note:
This is assessed value, not market value. The value of your property is likely to be quite a bit higher than the number assigned to it by the Whatcom County Assessor. For the median homeowner in Whatcom County, this would cost $7.62 /month or $91.44 /year.
There are exemptions for those with low income, the elderly & disabled. As required by Washington State law, those on fixed income or in other situations that would be unreasonably burdened, are exempted.
The money would be administered by the Whatcom County Health Department (unless/until a different administrator is chosen) and distributed to organizations with projects aimed at the goals of the fund (increasing the amount of available childcare and reducing the amount of child maltreatment & family homelessness) in accordance with the county's existing procurement rules. So the great organizations leading the charge on this already—Lydia Place, The Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, and Skookum Kids—would be the ultimate recipients of these funds. And it's perfect timing, the Center for Expansion and Retention of Childcare reports that right now there are twenty separated childcare expansion projects across our community planned and permitted, lacking only the funding to make them happen. So a yes vote on the Healthy Children's Fund would greenlight these twenty and the twenty after that, and so on.
The ordinance borrows from some of the most successful local funds like the behavioral health fund and home fund while learning from and improving on them as well. The result is a robust combination of three accountability measures, none unique on its own, but in combination producing a powerful system of oversight that ensures the fund performance will reap the benefit of continuous improvement. They are:
The fund administrator is required to publish performance data publicly on things like K-5 readiness, availability/affordability of childcare, child maltreatment, and family homelessness. This is important because of course, what gets measured gets done.
The Child & Family Well-Being Task Force, a citizen advisory body established in 2019, is called on to report about the fund's performance to the County Council and the Executive every year.
The fund administrator is required to contract with a qualified, external evaluator to report on the performance of the fund once every two years.
This structure of accountability will produce multiple strong signals about what parts of the fund are working well, and which could be improved. And it will all happen out in public, with full transparency, a quality essential to high quality modern policy making.
Why Skookum chose to endorse
This was new for us. In the past we have limited our advocacy efforts to the expense side of the ledger, on what activities should be funded and why. We have avoided the fraught questions of how and how much money the government at each level has to work with. But last year we came to realize that the kind of community we all hope for, one in which it is safe and sweet to be a child, where it is easy to put down roots and raise a family is out of reach unless there is a strong local investment in the health and well-being of children & families. So we started exploring, alongside some of our closest partners, what such a fund might look like and how it could be designed strategically. The ordinance on your ballot is our best work, the culmination of years of effort by the smartest minds and most experienced social service professionals in our community. We believe this fund, with its robust structure of accountability, is our best opportunity to invest in the long-term health of our community and we urge you to vote yes.
How to learn more:
Visit https://www.yeswhatcomkids.com/ to learn more about the campaign and get involved yourself!