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Essay On Early Infant And Toddlers

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Costs The costs of this expansion will mostly go toward labor, as labor is the single largest component of costs for early infant and toddler care centers (Marshall et al., 2004). For teachers to stay invested in the children they teach and care for, they must be fairly compensated to maintain the high quality of care. According to a study in Massachusetts, 72 percent of typical full-time, full-year center expenditures go toward labor (Marshall, et al., 2004). In dollar amounts, “average expenditures per child care hour were $4.42 for centers serving infants and $4.28 for centers serving toddlers. These correspond to full-time care expenditures of $10,343 and $10,015 for the two groups of centers [infants and toddlers, respectively]” …show more content…

That adds to about $35,000 each year to fund an average-sized and average-quality year-round program. The Massachusetts study estimates a possible cost difference of 13 percent when increasing center quality (Marshall et al., 2004). This brings us to almost $40,000 per year. To scale up the number of children served, more teachers would need to be hired to keep class sizes small and quality maintained. If we want services to be equally available to the 2,800 children under the age of five in North Lawndale from low-income families, we should prepare to cover the costs of as many of these children as possible. The Massachusetts study noted a total enrollment over 40 to be large enough to impact quality if not enough teachers are hired; there are 70 times as many children in North Lawndale as this 40-children standard center size, which brings our $40,000 estimate to $2.8 million. This still leaves plenty of room for adjustment within our $5 million per year budget to increase the building’s capacity or purchase additional buildings, along with funding an outreach campaign to inform the North Lawndale community of the free services offered through our partnership with GELA. However, even these building expansion costs may be mitigated by reaching out to local elementary, middle, and high schools to outsource free classrooms for our ECE program. When public schools have vacant classrooms, they can be donated to our program for use. This public

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