MJ Lord, a teaching assistant at an Albuquerque preschool, works three jobs just to make ends meet.
The 25-year-old wants to be an early childhood educator — she’s completing a bachelor’s degree in human development and family sciences and has plans to pursue a master’s degree in early childhood as well — but she said her pay at the preschool is not enough to sustain her goals.
“I would love to stay in this career field because it is my passion,” she said. “I think everybody should deserve to do what they want to do, but I can’t work two to three jobs for my entire life, so all I ask is for a pay raise.”
Lord and early childhood workers like her may soon have a chance at better compensation and career paths under New Mexico’s current budget proposal, which was sent to the state Senate on Wednesday and would set aside $60 million to increase pay as part of a wage and career ladder designed to pay employees based on their experience, education and other credentials.
On Thursday, workers and advocates gathered outside the state Capitol to laud the proposed appropriation and to urged the Senate to keep it in the budget. They emphasized that improving pay for New Mexico’s early childhood workforce could help curb turnover among employees who leave the field because they cannot survive off the wages, which average around $15 per hour.
“Universal child care will only work if the educators are willing and able to remain in this field,” child care provider Magnolia Chavez said in Spanish.
Early Childhood Education and Care Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky lauded the Legislature’s inclusion of funding for the wage and career ladder in the proposed budget, with an appropriation of $10 million per year for three years to implement the initiative.
“Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham remains committed to improving wages — and year after year, her budgets have put real dollars behind that commitment,” she wrote in an email.
Long climb to ladder
The proposed pay ladder has been long in the making.
Last year, Lujan Grisham and her administration recommended setting aside $104.6 million for a pilot program partly aimed at creating such a ladder. However, the ladder, which at the time was expected to cost New Mexico $10 million, was not included in the state’s spending plan.
In July, a task force released a plan for a wage and career ladder that incorporated educators’ and other workers’ experience, education and other credentials into tiered pay raises, marking one of the state’s first tangible steps toward implementation.
The early childhood department did seek to increase pay for early childhood workers through new, enhanced reimbursement rates for providers originally proposed in September, developed as part of Lujan Grisham’s plan to make free child care available to all New Mexicans.
Groginsky said 35% of eligible providers had taken the state up on the enhanced rates, which require providers to pay many employees a higher minimum wage of $18 per hour.
Those reimbursement rates, however, were tied to other requirements calling on providers to operate their facilities for more hours each week, leading to concerns they could not make such raises work with their business models.
Advocates also argued the potential pay raises would not have the same effect as the ladder, which would chart a more comprehensive path for early childhood workers to follow in their career.
“What’s needed now is the department’s willingness to fully implement that scale by paying educators directly based on their credentials and experience,” Partnership for Community Action Executive Director Teresa Madrid wrote in a Thursday statement. “That is very different from simply increasing reimbursement rates to child care centers under Child care assistance rates.”
Groginsky, however, argued the state’s reimbursement rates for child care providers already contribute significantly to allowing business owners to pay their employees more.
“Reimbursement rate increases have created the financial structure that makes the wage scale and career ladder workable in the real world,” she wrote Thursday. “The way the reimbursement rates are calculated and designed, 60% of rate increases go directly to higher salaries of professionals.”