Seattle’s downtown is booming.
There are now 328,000 jobs located downtown, a 52% increase since 2010. Nearly 90,000 people now live downtown, including almost 5,000 children. In the decade ending in 2019, 286 new buildings were constructed, 4,050 new hotel rooms were added, 17.5 million new square feet of office space was built, and 27,209 new residential units opened for occupancy.
Since 2010, the number of restaurant jobs downtown increased by 47% and restaurant sales nearly doubled. Each year, 15 million people visit the Pike Place Market; four million enter museums; three million attend sporting events.
These statistics are included in the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual State of Downtown Economic Report presented last week to a cheering crowd of city leaders.
Clearly, downtown Seattle is thriving and driving the overall vitality of the city. And citywide there is reason to cheer, too. Just think about what we have going for us—the nation’s cleanest water, a carbon free electric grid that produces some of the lowest cost electricity in the country, the largest public transportation expansion underway anywhere in the nation, a quilt of wonderful neighborhoods, and a physical environment that offers sea and fresh water on our doorstep and mountain vistas less than an hour away.
All good news, for sure.
Now, here’s the bad news.
Many Seattleites are being left behind and may never participate in a meaningful way in our booming economy. There are many reasons for this stark reality, including families trying to raise young children and having to pay exorbitant childcare costs on top of steep housing prices. One of the most significant contributors, however, is our failure for decades to provide all of our children with the strong and fair start they need and certainly deserve in the first five years of life. This failure perhaps more than anything else has blocked their ability to thrive and achieve their full potential.
Consider this fact. At the beginning of each new school year, kindergarten teachers assess the readiness of their students to learn. It’s called the Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (WaKIDS); it measures a child’s age specific social-emotional, physical, language, cognitive, literacy, and math capabilities. This assessment is key to understanding where kids are in their development and helps guide teachers in their work with individual students.
Tragically, In Seattle, the WaKIDS assessment shows that one third of our children enter kindergarten without the skills and abilities they should have; they are already behind. And it’s worse for children of color, one half of whom are behind just as they are starting their K-12 journey. Children who start behind, often remain behind.
The inequity in access to high-quality early learning opportunities experienced by so many of our neighbors has been building for decades. For many working parents, high-quality early learning options are simply not accessible, and even for those who are doing well, the costs are significant, often prohibitive. While the rest of us enjoy the economic good times, we are ignoring an injustice that shatters a child’s confidence which predictably for some leads to huge negative consequences—dropping out of school, criminal behavior, inability to find meaningful employment, social disconnection—consequences which ultimately affect us all.
We can change this by making sure every child regardless of their neighborhood, the color of their skin, or their family’s economic status has a strong and fair start.
Nearly 50 years of academic research shows that kids who have a high-quality early learning experience in the first five years of life will achieve higher educational attainment, have better health, higher earning power as adults, and less involvement in the criminal justice system. The most recent studies also show that these kids can successfully break the bonds of intergenerational poverty.
A child’s brain is ninety percent formed by the time they reach five. Important social skills—playing well with others, following directions, verbally processing feelings—and cognitive abilities stimulated by exposure to a broad vocabulary and group project play increase dramatically in these early years. These crucial skills are much harder to acquire later without this early foundation.
And yet, not all children in Seattle, or across our state for that matter, are receiving the opportunity for a strong start. Our systems of childcare and preschool are fragmented, too expensive for many working parents, and not designed to achieve the best outcomes. As a result, as the evidence shows, many of our children fall behind before they even get started.
We can fix this decades-long failure if we apply the science of early learning. The return on investing in high quality early learning programs is strong, certainly worth every dollar. It’s the best investment we could possibly make for our children’s sake, and for the rest of us, too.
So, let’s create a universal yet voluntary early learning system that spans the all-important prenatal to kindergarten years with high-quality child care services for infants and toddlers, high-quality preschool for our three- and four-year old kids, and tailored supports for families facing challenges.
We need a high-quality child care system that helps working families afford care if they earn 85 percent or less of the statewide median household income (about $63,000), so they don’t pay more than seven percent of their income for childcare. Families making more should pay on a sliding scale tied to their income. And, as other cities and states do, we need free, high-quality universal preschool for our three- and four-year olds so they are ready for kindergarten. This will bring our communities together, level the playing field for all of our children, allow parents to work and pursue additional education, further strengthening our workforce today as well as the pipeline of talent for tomorrow.
Successfully implementing an effective early learning system is the most effective strategy we can employ to erase the inequity so many are still experiencing despite these economic boom times.