Leaders sign early-childhood support plan

Gov. David Ige and directors from several state departments signed a five-­year plan Wednesday that outlined a broad framework to coordinate and boost education, health care and child care for children up to age 8.

The state intends to use a $1 million federal grant secured last month from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Education to assist with the plan’s implementation.

“The early-learning community for decades now has been fractured. So the plan is an attempt to frame the work together because we have been working in silos,” said Lauren Moriguchi, director of Executive Office on Early Learning, which spearheaded the plan. “In order to better improve the lives of our young children and families we need to look at how we can better come together and improve our programs and services, to better coordinate them, to leverage funding and really look at how we can reduce the number of silos.”

The Hawaii Early Childhood State Plan identifies some of the major challenges affecting young children in Hawaii. For example, about 1 in 5 children are growing up in households struggling to cover basic needs, such as food and housing. The majority of families in Hawaii, especially on the neighbor islands, don’t have access to licensed care centers for their infants and toddlers. And about 4 in 10 children don’t have access to preschool.

Moriguchi said the next steps include conducting a needs assessment and developing a strategic plan.

Some of the plan’s areas of focus include expanding child care and public preschool; creating a better coordinated statewide system for supportive serv­ices; and looking at strategies to boost pay for the early childhood workforce.

In addition to Ige and Moriguchi, the plan was signed by Christina Kishimoto, superintendent of the Department of Education; Bruce Anderson, director of the Department of Health; Pankaj Bhanot, director of the Department of Human Services; and David Lassner, president of the University of Hawaii.