Vermont Early Childhood Workforce Wage and Fringe Benefit Comparability Study
By Kristina Rodriguez, Laura Hawkinson, Sallie Strueby
Overview
The state of Vermont has demonstrated a strong commitment to strengthening its early childhood education (ECE) system, including significant investments in supporting the well-being of the workforce. In order to better understand the landscape of the ECE workforce, the state’s Child Development Division (CDD) and the Vermont Head Start Collaboration Office (VHSCO) contracted School Readiness Consulting (SRC) to conduct the Vermont Early Childhood Wage and Fringe Benefit Study. The intent of the study was to define key positions in Vermont’s early childhood workforce and examine wages and fringe benefits of the workforce across program types and funding streams, including center-based (Head Start, universal pre-K, and private), home-based (universal pre-K), after-school, and Children’s Integrated Services (CIS) programs.
Our Process
For this effort, CDD and VHSCO expressed interest in a survey that collected valuable information while not creating a heavy burden on the workforce. In partnership, SRC facilitated each step of the survey research process for this study, including instrument development, sampling, survey administration and monitoring, delivering incentives, data cleaning, and analysis.
A web-based program survey was designed to collect data on wages and benefits in Vermont’s early childhood workforce across different program types and funding streams. The purpose of the survey was to learn about the compensation of ECE workforce members and identify disparities in compensation, with the goal of informing state policies related to workforce pay and benefits. SRC collected and reviewed multiple resources (including existing job descriptions, regulatory standards, and so on) to generate descriptions for each position and to determine which positions were applicable to each program type.
Descriptive analyses of the survey data included counts, percentages, medians, quartiles, and ranges. Statistical comparisons were made between key position types by funding stream using an equality-of-medians test, and subgroup analyses were conducted for program size, program quality, and race/ethnicity.
The Outcome
This work culminated in a report describing the current state of ECE workforce compensation and outlining recommendations for maintaining workforce data and considerations for developing meaningful compensation packages across the early childhood workforce.
Related Work
SRC Contributors
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