A new wage and career advancement system for New Mexico’s early childhood care workforce is on the horizon.
But it’s not what everyone envisioned.
The New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department late last month presented an early look at a plan to roll out a wage and career lattice long in the making that would provide a way for early childhood workers to earn fairer pay based on experience and education credentials.
However the plan, which would leverage $10 million per year for three years in pilot program funding from the state Legislature and initially implement the system for only two specific types of workers, has drawn criticism from some advocates. They say it fails to incorporate funding set aside for a wage and career lattice, and represents a slow rollout of a necessary initiative.
“Our concern as advocates is that it is certainly too slow,” said Teresa Madrid, executive director of advocacy organization Partnership for Community Action. “[The] wage and career lattice is something that has been part of ECECD’s strategic plan for the last several years, and we are now in 2026 with no implementation, no action and no dollars committed to that wage and career lattice.”
Julia Sclafani, spokesperson for the early childhood department, wrote in an email the proposal is to roll the lattice out as a pilot program with heavy consultation from early childhood stakeholders. She noted the funds for this program only became available July 1, but said the department started work earlier on developing an approach to implementing the program.
“This plan starts with a manageable pilot and prioritizes the home visiting and early intervention professionals who have not historically received any supplemental compensation,” she wrote. “In sum, the core strengths of this plan are that it is practical, it was developed in deep partnership with providers across the early childhood ecosystem with strong consensus on the department’s approach to provide compensation support to providers not previously supported by compensation programs.”
Months of development
A plan for a wage and career lattice was already unveiled last year, after months of development by a task force that included the state and advocates. The plan laid out ways for workers across the early childhood field to earn more based on their experience and education.
Then, a second task force met for months this year to figure out a strategy to implement the system. Early Childhood Education and Care Department Cabinet Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said in March that the state aimed to have the wage and career lattice implemented by August.
On Aug. 26, the early childhood department presented to a subcommittee of the Early Childhood Education and Care Advisory Council a plan to roll out a limited, pilot version of the wage and career lattice that would initially apply to early interventionists and home visitors.
According to the presentation, the pilot will prioritize the “lead early childhood professional role,” which under the draft wage scale released last year could receive between $62,122 and $77,000 per year. The pilot program will also prioritize workers with at least three years of experience.
Timeline, numbers
The exact timeline for implementing the pilot wage and career lattice is not yet clear, though Sclafani said it will go into effect before the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
She noted the early childhood department’s new five-year strategic plan includes an objective that by June 30, 2031, 75% of the state’s early childhood workers will be receiving pay aligned with the system.
“This could include direct payments through wage support programs, as well as wages supported through reimbursement rates and accountability measures such as the enhanced reimbursement rate for child care assistance,” Sclafani added.
It is also not yet clear how many people the pilot version of the program will apply to, though Sclafani said 59 providers supply home visiting and early intervention services. She said the state is “refining its estimates of how many professionals can be supported with the initial $10 million appropriation.”
“These estimates depend on the specific credentials and experience of the eligible workforce, and the degree to which home visiting and early intervention programs opt into the pilot,” Sclafani wrote.
The state is also collecting workforce data by the end of this fiscal year for implementing later stages of the program, she said.
Dollars debates
Advocates like Madrid have long questioned the state’s planned usage of dollars set aside by the state Legislature for implementing the wage and career lattice. Advocates have argued a $60 million pot of money set aside this year should go directly to the system’s implementation, but have expressed concerns that the state has a different interpretation for how those dollars should be used.
“What they’re saying is that they’re not going to do a wage and career lattice for early educators, and that $60 million is money that they see as, like, already departmental dollars to basically pay educators through the cost reimbursement model,” she said. “Which is the same old, same old model that we’ve been using for years.”
Sclafani said the $60 million is part of the department’s budget for its childcare assistance program and said the state has long used increased reimbursement rates and eligibility expansions as the “core compensation strategy for the child care workforce — and one we know works.”
“As the department has infused additional dollars into the child care sector through rate increases, New Mexico has seen the steepest child care wage increases in the nation,” she wrote.
Jessa Cowdrey, a member of the implementation task force who represented home visitors, also defended the decision to prioritize early intervention workers and home visitors, arguing that implementing the wage and career lattice for them first would help them to catch up to other sectors of the state’s early childhood workforce.
She argued that while childcare workers do not yet have the compensation they need, they have benefitted from New Mexico’s large-scale push to make the service universally accessible, and have seen supplements to their wage in recent years that other types of workers have not.
Cowdry said because the state had limited funds to use this year directly on implementing the wage and career lattice, the task force ultimately chose to prioritize home visitors and early interventionists, which generally make up a smaller share of the state’s total early childhood workforce and represent a more manageable lift for an initial rollout of the program.
“The current wage supplement programs they have for childcare workers — it’s not enough. It’s not comprehensive, it’s not,” she said. “But they have something, whereas these other two industries don’t have any other type of mechanism for wage supplementation.”
