Build a Stronger Community by Investing in Early Learning

Every morning in downtown Allentown, two long-time staff members stand at the driveway door to The Children’s Center on Union Street, waiting for children and their grownups to arrive.

Temperatures are taken, symptoms observed, health and travel discussed with families, and then the children enter into our care. Families must miss the long walk up the stairs and seeing their child’s classrooms but know this is best for now.

At The Children’s Center, we’ve learned and followed all of the new ways to keep our children, families and teachers as safe as possible. Now we are asking people in our community to stop and think about the early care and education system as part of a bigger economic picture.

The Children’s Center, usually just known as “VOA”, for our parent agency Volunteers of America of Pennsylvania, has been caring for children and families on Union Street in downtown Allentown for generations. One of the things about our program that makes us proud is having people who grew up with us return with their own children.

When I first came to The Children’s Center in 1978, the families of the children we cared for were working in garment factories or textile mills, with a lucky few employed at the Mack Truck factory or Bethlehem Steel. I’d drive home on Tenth Street in Allentown, passing a small sewing business that had industrial machines visible through the windows, and small children playing outside on the sidewalk while their mothers assembled pieces of clothing inside. Some of our families at The Center would come to pick up their children at the end of the day, and we’d see bundles of fabric in the back seats of their cars; piece-rate work meant that sometimes they would sew at night at home.

Now our families are working in the many health-related fields available in the Valley, in warehouses or front-line service jobs. Some are community college students working for degrees that will provide a better life for their children. As their needs have changed, what we do has changed; as of September, more than two dozen children arrive at The Children’s Center every morning with their computers or tablets, headphones, whiteboards and workbooks tucked into their backpacks to have virtual school in our Center. It has been a huge but important challenge to meet.

As the United States and the Lehigh Valley both move closer to a consequential election, perhaps this may be a rare opportunity to put children’s and families’ needs in the front and center of community discussion.

Do we want to return to exactly the way everything was before, or have we been given an opportunity to reflect, reconsider, and rebuild in ways that support children and families, and help to heal the damage of poverty and social injustice? And how will our providers of early education and care survive so that we can be there when families continue to return to their work?

We know that in Pennsylvania, almost 70% of families include two working parents. With a lack of high-quality, affordable childcare, they have to choose between earning income and their children's wellbeing.