In the lower level of a Harvard Square church last year, I followed a teacher past a row of red tricycles and small wooden wheelbarrows into a preschool classroom. It was warmly lit, with twinkly lights strung around children’s art. On a table, tiny metallic houses and ceramic trees were spread out across a paper map, along with a cup of colored pencils, inviting children to take part.
I took a deep breath and tried not to cry — this is where my child will go to school. “It’s the school we envisioned,” I texted my friend Shilpa back in Michigan. “I wish you could see it.”
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I was emotional because, after four years of searching, waiting, and advocating for high-quality child care, I had finally found it. All I had needed to do was move more than 1,100 miles to Cambridge.
Starting with the 2024-2025 academic year, all Cambridge 4-year-olds, and some 3-year-olds, will have access to free preschool through a program that partners with institutions such as the Newtowne School, where my child is now enrolled. At a time when large swaths of the country are considered child-care deserts — places with few or no child-care providers — it’s a model that more places should explore if they truly want to recruit and retain workers and invest in future generations.
By now, most people know America is in the midst of a child-care crisis. According to a 2018 report from the Center for American Progress, some 51 percent of Americans live in child-care deserts. Most are in rural areas, though urban and suburban neighborhoods suffer, too. Even when care is available, cost is a barrier to many families. A disproportionate percentage of Hispanic/Latino families — nearly 60 percent — live in areas with fewer licensed care options, the study found. And areas with higher concentrations of foreign-born parents are significantly more likely to be child-care deserts.
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Before I became a mother in 2018, while living in Marquette, Michigan, in the state’s remote Upper Peninsula, I thought I’d planned everything, including asking friends where they sent their kids for day care and calling to inquire about enrollment. But six months before my infant needed to start, I was told by my center of choice that the wait list was a year long. I panicked. A year?
So I called another center. And another. And another. The answer was the same; most wait lists ranged from 18 months to two years.
As I endured the wait lists, I juggled motherhood with work, hiring a nanny on the days I taught at Northern Michigan University, costing far more than I’d planned for. Sometimes I took my child to work.
After the pandemic made the child-care shortage in our region even more urgent, my friend Shilpa and I started a task force to bring a university-sponsored early childhood education center to town. One survey found only 31 percent of the need for child care was being met across the state.
We organized rallies on campus where parents shared their struggles and children marched with balloons. We heard about parents who had to leave college, military spouses at home without care while their partners served abroad, children left with reluctant grandparents and friends, or with workers with insufficient training. We also learned about the structural issues facing centers: staffing shortages, high overhead costs, typically low wages.
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As the months rolled on, I realized my own child would age out before our dream of starting a center was ever realized. So when I had the chance to come to Boston for research last year, I took it. The first thing I did was research schools.
It’s not like finding a child-care center in this area is easy (it’s not) or cheap (it’s certainly not). In 2019, the Center for American Progress found that cost was a major barrier for families in Massachusetts, with the average annual cost of child care for two children amounting to over $35,000, even as child-care workers were underpaid for their labor. I was extremely lucky to be offered a scholarship at Newtowne, which enabled me to enroll my child.
Cambridge is trying to take luck out of the equation by offering access to early education, funded by the city, at over 40 partner locations. (The application period for the 2024-25 school year closed on January 15.) Similar programs have been launched in Boston and Springfield, and in other states, such as Florida and Vermont.
For children, we know what’s at stake. The Department of Health and Human Services calls high-quality early childhood programs “a critical outlet for fostering the mental and physical development of young children,” helping prepare them for kindergarten and beyond. According to an MIT study published last year, Boston children who attend public preschool are more likely to go to college.
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At Newtowne School, a co-op where parents join in the classroom, I watch my child and classmates gather on the rug and sing while a teacher plays the ukulele. The school encourages kids to ask questions, wonder, and learn alongside experienced, dedicated teachers. My child knows that this is a space where they belong.
There’s good news back in Marquette, too. Northern Michigan University announced that it will partner with a local child-care provider for a new center across from campus, opening this spring, a few months before my child turns 6. Too late for us, but not for so many others.
Here in the Boston area, I feel lucky. Every morning, my child races into the classroom, full of new confidence, barely remembering to wave goodbye to me. I couldn’t be more delighted. Every family deserves this peace of mind.
Rachel May is a writer in Somerville. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.