Advocacy at York Day Early Learning

Fulfilling our mission to provide high-quality early learning to working families is only possible because of the public and private support we get from our community.

While this support allows us to maintain our current operations, we know that we cannot expand to reach more of the 300 children who sit for years on our waiting list without an increased investment of public dollars.

For this reason, we regularly engage in advocacy efforts to increase awareness for the need of sustained investment in high-quality affordable care. Over the past few weeks we’ve had some notable advocacy opportunities that we’re excited to share with you.

On February 21st, our very own TaTyana Abreu was asked to speak at the State Capitol about her experience having a child enrolled in high-quality preschool. The event was organized to highlight recent polling data that revealed that 98% of Pennsylvania voters believe that high-quality early childhood education is important and 78% believe in the need for increased investment in preschool programs.

During the Public Policy Forum hosted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), Sabrina Walters, our VP of Operations, engaged federal legislators including Representative Scott Perry and Senator Bob Casey to illustrate the importance of increased investments in high-quality early learning.

On March 7th, Brian Grimm, our President & CEO, and Cynthia Thomas, a teacher in our Pre-K 3 classroom, were invited to attend Governor Shapiro’s inaugural budget address. Governor Shapiro mentioned the work of York Day Early Learning and Miss Cynthia by name as he discussed the importance of investing in programs like ours. Check out the video here. We are mentioned at the 33:20 mark.

The very next day, York Day was contacted by WGAL anchor Susan Shapiro with interest in interviewing Miss Cynthia to discuss her forty year career in early childhood education and to highlight the importance of her work.

Our advocacy efforts don’t stop here. We engage regularly with the Pre-K for PA campaign, and ask our supporters to sign-on to assist in their work.

We know that when we use all of our voices to champion the cause of early learning, and advocate for the early childhood educators who are so critical to our economy, we all win.