 Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming here today. I'm Becca McHale. I'm one of the co-founders of One Arts. We are so deeply grateful and moved to be here today celebrating the opening of this our amazing new Neighborhood Early Learning Center. We started One Arts eight years ago and have loved all the different things we've been able to do. Art shows, fair housing projects annually, after-school art classes and camps, working with IIA and SA, our neighborhood schools and getting to know the children and families in our neighborhood. We are deeply honored and touched by the support from the city to allow us to expand to be able to serve young children and their families. The City of Burlington made it possible for this school to open. So thank you to Mayor Miro Weinberger and our city counselors. We have Max Tracey here and Jean here today. Thank you so much for their commitment to supporting access to child care. Thank you to Rebecca Rees and Kara Al-Nasrawi from the Early Learning Initiative. We would not be here without your efforts. Thank you as well to Let's Grow Kids who has been with us every step of the way. This is an organization passionate about advocating for families and for child care. They have helped us on this journey being willing to take phone calls, help with any roadblocks, help with questions about regulations, about licensing and helping us to ensure that families get the financial support that they need to be able to attend. A big thank you to Dee Dee Harris, Paula Bonnie, Allie Richards for her leadership and everyone at Let's Grow Kids. Then we want to thank our amazing teachers and early childhood educators. This school would not have been possible without the passion of Sarah McClellan, who also lives in the neighborhood and worked endless hours to make this space happen. Her compassion and dedication to quality care and personal relationships and her vision for what this place can be is a driving force in our organization. Thank you to Sam Lyons as well for her tireless work with regulations, licensing and attention to all the very important details. Sam is covering a classroom today and couldn't make it. Thank you to Margaret Coleman, the other one arts co-founder for always dreaming big and knowing it can be done. Yeah and a huge and deep thank you to all of our teachers. We are so lucky to have found phenomenal teachers who bring an ethos of care and community to our children and families. Thank you also to Jacob Hinsdale for offering us this wonderful space. Thank you to Jake Durell for answering all of our legal questions. Thank you to Sabah Abbas for this beautiful mural and also there's another mural she did inside. Thank you to Steve Guild and his team at G4 Design Studios for helping us with the creative redesign of the space. There are very, very few right angles on this floor plan. Thank you to Rob Golden and his construction company Rise Above Construction. Rob worked many long days and volunteered his time to keep us on track and within budget for opening a truly herculean effort. Thank you to our neighbor Aimee Hool for the loving creations she makes for our children. She is the artist's seamstress extraordinaire who made sensory bean bags for every room. She also made us the ribbon-cutting sculpture that we'll use today which was a design collaboration with one of our artist teachers here, Mikayla Jones. Thank you to local authors and artists Aimee Huntington and Sarah Dillard for sharing their art and stories with us today. Please take a moment to look at their artwork inside. Aimee's work is also featured in a story walk that starts at Pathways and then you head down, there's a map on our door. You can see pages from her story and storefront windows and then you'll come back up and the last page is here. So I hope you can check that out. That'll be up for the month of May. And lastly I want to thank you all for coming here today so we can appreciate together what we all built together. Thank you. And now I'd like to invite the mayor to share our declaration and say a few words. Good morning everyone. Rebecca thank you for that. And I gotta say when we decided really about a decade ago that the city of Burlington would try to play a positive role, expanding the number of high quality child care opportunities in the city, we hoped and imagined that we would have days like today where you can walk in and see a new space with that is incredibly well designed and well outfitted for this critical task of taking proper care of our youngest Burlingtonians and you see community members and teachers that clearly love and know these children so well providing that care. We hope through tea days like this they've been that they don't happen every day it's a really happy day to be here with you and congratulations to everyone who's been involved in making today possible. I really you did a wonderful job properly thanking everyone that these days don't happen obviously without just an enormous community effort. I'm not going to repeat all that all of that. I do want to say a special thank you to the city team that has worked on this. Rebecca and Cara are here today and they've kind of picked up the torch or Rebecca's been here working on it since the start. Brian Lowe was very involved in this effort for many years and we are so thankful for the two of you the CEDO team that led to this. I also this has really always been something that had broad support within city government and it's awesome to see current city councilor reward to Gene Bergman here and former city council president Max Tracy. This is something Max and I very much agreed on and worked on together for years and the council played a big role in keeping this program moving forward correcting at times when we weren't making as much progress as we wanted to be. It's really been a great collaboration and I appreciate you being here. It's good to see you and now that we're not seeing you every other Monday night it's good to see you here. Since you know I was raised by a kindergarten teacher my mom was a kindergarten teacher I married a kindergarten teacher. I've always been very conscious of what an important critical role early care how critical that is what that does for children. I've always felt strongly that we are failing as a community and as a country if we are not ensuring that all of our children have have the proper care and we simply don't have such a system today. Far too many of our children don't get the kind of high quality care they need the people that work in the system are not properly compensated. Parents despite that pay way more than they can afford to to find care solutions for their children. There are all sorts of negative impacts of this and the best person in the country to speak to this systematically you're going to hear from in a moment so I will get out of the way for her to speak to it. I just want to say the city is committed to playing a positive impact on this we have since 2017 been making capacity grants to organizations like the old North End Arts Community School. There are now a growing list of high quality childcare institutions in Burlington that have gotten these grants. That list includes the Pine Forest Children's Center, the Robbins Nest Children's Center, the Burlington Children's Space just down the street. It's our Holbrook Community Center on the other side of the old North End. The YMCA got a substantial grant for their expansion. All told at this point the city has helped to create and I do want to stress the help. We're very aware that there are other key partners, key financial organizations that played a role. We'd like to say I am I do believe that the city's money is new money coming into the space has helped leverage other investment and played a critical role for the expansion that we've seen over the last five years. We've helped to create 120 new high quality spots in the city 92 of which serve infants and toddlers a 46 increase in the high quality infant and toddler spot in the city. This is something that drives me a little nuts about about our system. There's no doubt that government investment in for infants and toddlers for our youngest residents has more impact than government spending later. There is no doubt that we can do more good in people's lives in those first three years of life and yet America spends less money in these first three years than in later years. It's just it's the reverse of what it should be and Burlington is proud to play a role in shifting that balance and making sure there is at least a step towards the investment that we should be making in these years. A related effort that is separate from the the capacity grant program is what we call the first step scholarship program. This is a program where we make city money available to leverage and supplement the funding that is available through the state through the federal government and through private people's own pockets and this effort is picking up steam with every year. We are now funding 47 first step scholarships seven of which my understanding is are here at the Old North End Arts Center and our goal is to continue to grow that perhaps as much I think we've started in basically another 50% in the year ahead. It's still incomplete it's still not the comprehensive program that we ultimately need but it is a lot more than we had just a few years ago and it's it's headed in the right direction and now I'll turn the podium over to the woman that's going to make sure we finish the job not just here in Burlington but statewide and truly create the system that we need to properly care for our our infants and toddlers for our youngest Burlingtonians and that's Allie Richards and Let's Grow Kids. The city is so proud to have been a partner with Let's Grow Kids for years now and we're so excited about where everything that Let's Grow Kids is doing and to partner with you to get us over the finish line and create the system we need. Thank you Allie. Hi everyone thank you so much this is a joyous day this is a major celebration congratulations to One Arts Community School Burlington Becca your whole team and mayor you and your whole team the city of Burlington this is a community it's an honor for me to be here among your community of all these folks that came together for this for our youngest kids and isn't that something a city a state an organization a school coming together to give our kids what they need yes yes and did you see what was happening in there a local author was reading her book to these kids the muralist is here celebrating with us you know the teachers are doing sign language with the babies are you seeing this this is high quality affordable child care this is what we're talking about this is what all of our kids need thank you so much the mayor you've been an extraordinary leader early leader in this fight to make sure that every kid has this experience thank you to the city for our collaboration in first steps in ELI you know and thank you to Burlington for coming together around this this is a celebration so I offer this context as a motivation as an inspiration for us all right 8700 kids in Vermont today under six don't have a one arts school do not have access to the child care they need 8700 kids do not have this okay and families who find it feel lucky but they're paying 30 to 40 percent of their household income on that care at the same time early educators these early educators who are caring for the next generation they're getting $14 an hour on average without benefits okay none of that is okay none of that is all right and it makes no sense because when we figure this out together like you're figuring out here we make it sustainable we make it long-term we make it available for everyone it pays for itself immediately immediately and three times over over and over a lifetime over lifetime of our kids so you know we actually recently did a calculus on that $755 million is how much we get that immediately and annually when we take care of our kids like this so thank you for being an example for being a shiny light for us all to look at this is what we want for all of our kids Becca and team one arts thank you thank you to the mayor um we need a publicly funded child care system with a sustainable stable investment so that every kid can walk through a beautiful mural like this into a wonderful environment with early educators that are respected and compensated for the incredible work that they do thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of the celebration today for everything you all do and we're going to get this done together for the state thank you so much such a special day that we wanted to commemorate it with a an official mayoral proclamation I won't read the whole thing to you but um there's one stat here that I hadn't seen before that I think is a really striking stat you guys probably helped flush this out an estimated 73 percent of Vermont children under the age of six are likely to need some form of non parental care on a weekly basis 73 percent so um you know the huge majority of children need a better system than we have today today's the step in the right direction and we are going to declare I'm going to declare as mayor of Burlington that May 6 2022 is child care provider appreciation day here in the city of Burlington and further resolved that the city celebrates and thanks all child care providers in our community thank you