Every Child Aspen to Parachute, the region’s childcare tax district, has selected its first executive director.
The tax district is meant to help fill in gaps in childcare availability and funding in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys.
Samantha Markovitz will start in the role on July 27, after previously leading childcare initiatives in Eagle County.
Aspen Public Radio’s Hannah Weaver sat down with Markovitz to hear about her background and priorities for the position and the program it’ll oversee.
The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
Hannah Weaver: I want to know why you wanted to work in this space of early childhood to begin with.
Samantha Markovitz: Yeah, so I actually don't come from an early childhood background. I come from a nonprofit and social work background. I got my master's in social work at DU, focused in organizational leadership and policy practice.
I had an experience when I was a school social worker, and I had a five-year-old, he was experiencing a lot of social-emotional dysregulation, and as much as I wanted to help him and loved helping him individually, I realized that our system to support early childhood programming was insufficient. And so I really wanted to get into that space to influence policy to support our youngest population of kids.
Weaver: What is unique about early childhood and childcare in this valley [and in] these rural parts of Colorado?
Markovitz: I think it's really important that we recognize that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to quote-unquote “fixing” the early childcare issues. We've got families who can't afford it, teachers who can't stay to live here because it's too expensive to live. Our workforce specifically up and down Aspen to Parachute in particular is really obviously geographically very vast. At the same time, no one really works, plays, takes their kid to childcare, or lives in the same place that they do all of those things. So I think the transient nature of our valley really lends to a specific need that I think this early childhood special taxing district can fill.
Weaver: I know some of this is still up in the air, but what could this look like for families or providers in terms of how and when the funds could land in their pocket?
Markovitz: I think before we even jump into that, we really need to look at community voice and how community voice should come first prior to any initiative being deployed in our community.
So we're going to be meeting with families, providers and partners where they are right where they feel comfortable engaging in our valley through surveys, focus groups, one-on-one meetings, community partnerships prior to making investment decisions.
But my top priority when I get in is to be really working with the board to develop a targeted interim initiative focused on rapid equitable impact. We really want these interim funds to make an immediate impact, specifically probably to providers at first, just to make sure that while we do that, we're also spending time on thoughtfully and intentionally creating those longer-term sustainable programings.
Weaver: Can you tell me more about your priorities early on, and for example, why you want those funds to go to providers first in this interim period?
Markovitz: I think we have a unique opportunity to quickly get money out the door to providers because they're established. There are ways to be able to get money to them specifically, rather than to families, let's say.
By providing resources to our local licensed established providers, we might be able to quickly help increase our quality, increase capacity, help with health and safety enhancements, things like that. That can really help our families who already have kids in that established quality care setting before we kind of think about how we support families with tuition assistance.
Weaver: Broadening out a bit, can you tell me your goals for the first year or for once you actually get the program fully up and running after that interim period?
Markovitz: Sure. So I think there will be multiple phases to how we release funding, but like I said, equitable community engagement is going to be at the heart of this district and everything that we do. Our region, like we mentioned, is very vast. We really want to meet people where they're at. We want to stay mobile. We want to stay flexible.
I think developing a multilingual bicultural communication strategy is also really important. Maybe within those first 30 to 90 days to make sure that we can engage people from all the way from Parachute all the way to Aspen. I really want to make sure that before we jump in to building a long-term potential family affordability strategy, we need to do those first, you know, quicker win initiatives for our providers as well.
I think also supporting partners on the ground who are already doing this work. We've got a lot of local champions for early childhood and organizations on the ground already doing this work, and so supporting them as well to bolster what they're already doing on the ground will be an important step for us.
Weaver: Well thank you, Sam Markovitz, for joining me.
Markovitz: Of course, thanks for having me.
