Smoking—or rather, a lack thereof—could kill this early child development program

When Kelsey Irelan moved from Illinois to Arizona with her baby girl in tow, she didn’t know what to do for childcare.

The single mother visited Beautiful Oasis, a top-rated Mesa daycare center, and planned to invest her entire tax return—coupled with public assistance—to secure a spot for her daughter.. That’s when she found out about First Things First (FTF), a voter-created early childhood development agency, and its Quality First scholarship program that helps low-income families cover the costs of childcare.

“The Quality First scholarship has made it so I can consistently go to work and make money and put food on the table,” Irelan said. “I just am forever grateful that these programs exist for people like me to kind of give me that head start [in] creating and cultivating a better life for me and my daughter.”

Irelan now pays roughly $400 a month instead of $400 per week, and has progressed so much in her job that she is up for promotion. But families like Irelan’s may lose this option in the years to come; FTF is projected to lose $70 million of its funding in less than a decade.

But unlike funding for a number of services for children with disabilities, FTF’s budget reduction isn’t a result of Republican legislators’ urge to cut costs at any cost, it’s because people are smoking less. The agency is funded by a luxury tax on nicotine products first approved as a ballot initiative by Arizona voters in 2006, and the past two decades have seen a steep decline in cigarette consumption.

This trend could spell disaster for the state’s only agency that uses tobacco revenue to support development and early education for young children, according to Joe Barba, the senior director of government affairs at FTF. Barba said the agency has already sustained a nearly 40% cut in annual revenue..

“I don’t know any agency, any organization, nonprofit, anything that can operate on $70 million less and deliver as needs are consistently growing,” Barba said.

That’s why several Arizona lawmakers backed House Bill 2778 this session, which would expand the luxury tax on cigarettes to include vaping and other nicotine products—an update to the law Barba believes would help it adhere to “the voters’ intent to have all derivatives of these products included in contributing to the early childhood system.”

However, the Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives didn’t assign the bill to committee, the “most common and quietest way that bills get killed”, according to the bill’s co-sponsor Democratic Rep. Kevin Volk.

“It’s unfortunate, because at a time when childcare is increasingly important to Arizona families and holding more and more people back from entering the work workforce, we should be doing everything we can,” Volk said.  “There have been almost no bills heard that address the critical child care shortage that Arizona is experiencing, and that is adding a significant cost burden to Arizona families.”

FTF’s investments in early childhood education and services also contribute roughly $324M to the Arizona economy per year, supporting almost 2,800 jobs and generating $18.2M in state and local tax revenue, according to a Rounds Consulting Group report.

The accessibility of quality childcare’s outsized economic impact on businesses is also why the Chandler Chamber of Commerce threw support behind the bill and FTF, according to President and CEO Terri Kimble.

“When you take a look at Arizona’s childcare crisis, the state loses about $4.7 billion annually in lost earnings, productivity,  and revenue because of child care shortages from children from birth to age five. That is a huge economic issue for businesses,” Kimble said. “Early childhood education and child care overall in general, are critical for Arizona’s workforce.”

Irelan’s daughter Amaya has now spent two years in childcare at Beautiful Oasis supported by FTF’s Quality First scholarship. The days of starting from scratch in Arizona and racking her brain about how to keep up with daycare payments are far behind her, and Irelan said she likes that her daughter’s “got somewhere to learn and grow.”

“Research doesn’t lie: The earlier we invest in our kids, our youth, the better the outcomes are,” Kimble said.