This is the season when governments from The White House to local school boards start working on their new budgets. The federal budget is unfathomably huge at $4 trillion whereas some local school budgets are the size of a medium business. California’s budget is $209 billion and the County of Sonoma’s is about $1.7 billion.
More than just numbers, government budgets represent priorities and changing needs. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for next year favors increased military spending while cutting $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and another $800 billion from Medicare. He is also proposing deep cuts to science and research programs.
For a look at priorities, 15 percent of the federal budget goes to military spending while only 3 percent goes to education.
Budgets are rarely met with enthusiasm and are often the subject of angry testimony. This is true right now as many local teachers are mobilizing in favor of pay increases.
Amidst all these various budgets, we’d like to offer our own proposal. We’ll call it our “Baby Budget.”
In all our trillions, billions or more local and smaller budget numbers, we propose the first priority and biggest spending amounts go to our children, our babies.
Our budget would include subsidized universal preschool and child care programs. We would boost funding for schools at every level from kindergarten to college.
Learning patterns, cognitive thinking and social skills are all learned at a young age. By the time a child is entering kindergarten or grade school, many of his or her traits, habits and self-esteem are set for life by a high, high percentage. Any investment in a young child’s life will pay dividends back to all of us over a lifetime.
Educational spending would be devoted to career programs and other youth empowerment initiatives. We’d give money to nonprofits and others to encourage all kinds of public-private partnerships aimed at improving health, social and economic outcomes for all children.
We don’t care what all this would cost because we know how much we will be saving from less crime, drug addiction and avoidable chronic health issues.
In Sonoma County, we would expand Head Start programs to all communities and do more to support local 4-H clubs and other teen programs.
Recently the Healthcare Foundation of Northern Sonoma County announced a new initiative to improve school readiness among our youngest children. The foundation already has enlisted such partners as AAUW, Children’s Museum of Sonoma County, First 5, Health Action, Rotary and local schools. The goal is to make all north county children “kinder ready” by 2025.
As we tirelessly mention, Sonoma County is both a prosperous group of communities and one marked with stubborn pockets of poverty and lack of opportunities.
It is estimated that almost 40 percent of families lack affordable access to child care to support working parents. The lack of affordable child care can mean lost career opportunities for a parent, or an unaffordable burden on a household budget. Worse, children go unmonitored, or left in the care of an older sibling.
We need more afterschool programs and we need more multi-generational programs. Let’s spend that money now.
One of the biggest expenditures at all government levels is on courts and jails, especially in California, which has the largest prisoner population on the planet. A common characteristic among our jail inmates is their low level of school completion. We wonder by how much universal preschool would lower our jail population.
In the anti-war days of the 1960s, there was a popular poster that read, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
Put that in our Baby Budget, too.
— Rollie Atkinson
