Dear President Chandler, Speaker DeLeo, Chair Spilka, and Chair Sanchez:

As alumni of Jumpstart’s programs across Massachusetts, we write to ask you to support Jumpstart’s budget amendment for $500,000.

Jumpstart is a nonprofit early education organization headquartered here in Massachusetts that is driven by its vision that every child in America enters kindergarten prepared to succeed. Jumpstart achieves that vision by building the early education workforce and providing language, literacy, and social-emotional programming to thousands of preschool children from under-resourced communities. Each year, Jumpstart recruits over 800 college students and older adults across Massachusetts and trains them to deliver an evidence-based, high-quality program for more than 2,100 preschool children in under-resourced communities statewide. As volunteers, Jumpstart provided us with a transformational experience—one that opened our eyes both to the power of early education on a child’s future and the power to strengthen communities through our own service.

Jumpstart’s program is proven to yield meaningful results for both children and adults. Jumpstart staff recruit and train a “corps” of volunteers from Jumpstart’s 17 higher education partners as well as the Boston Community Corps, a program engaging older adult volunteers. Each corps receives 40-50 hours of training on evidence-based practices and Jumpstart’s data-driven curriculum prior to entering a preschool classroom. Teams of four to eight Jumpstart volunteers serve one preschool classroom for an entire school year or summer. These teams reduce preschool classroom adult-child ratios to 3:1, allowing for critical language-rich interactions that science has shown are essential for literacy and social-emotional skill development. As a result, Jumpstart children make 1.5 times greater gains in key literacy skills as compared to preschoolers who do not receive the program.

Jumpstart volunteers, including many of us, go on to leverage these valuable workforce training opportunities in preschool classrooms to become early educators. About one-quarter of all Jumpstart volunteers nationwide enter the early education field. In Massachusetts alone, this is as many as 200 new early educators each year! Moreover, service in Jumpstart satisfies the Department of Early Education and Care practicum work experience requirement for licensure as a Preschool Teacher in the state. This has allowed many of us to quickly and affordably become the high-quality early educators that Massachusetts children so desperately need.

This proposed budget amendment would allow Jumpstart’s proven program to reach more children and volunteers across Massachusetts, helping the Commonwealth reach the dual goals of eliminating the workforce shortage of well-trained early educators and providing high-quality early learning opportunities for every young child. Through university and community partnerships, Jumpstart currently serves across Boston, Brockton, Lawrence, Lowell, Somerville, and Worcester. A $500,000 investment will allow Jumpstart to both deepen its commitment to these cities, as well as expand to new communities.

Through our service with Jumpstart, we saw the impact to thousands of young children in Massachusetts and prepared class after class with the foundation for kindergarten and lifetime success. With additional resources, Jumpstart can bring those opportunities to additional children and allow even more volunteers to reap the rewards of training, national service, and classroom experience.

We respectfully request that you include this budget amendment in the legislature’s final budget in order to support high-quality early learning and enhance the early educator pipeline in Massachusetts.

Sincerely,

Your Name