ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Like many families, Jessica and Adrian Garcia, who live in the resort town of Ruidoso, had to cobble together different child care options for their son when they returned to work after his birth in 2023.
In August 2021, New Mexico expanded free and subsidized child care to households earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level – at the time, $87,840 for a family of three. The Garcias won too much to qualify.
Jessica, who works at the local branch of Eastern New Mexico University, and Adrian, a police officer, settled for a two-day-a-week part-time daycare schedule that cost $300 a month for their son to attend daycare two days a week because they couldn’t afford full-time hours. Jessica’s mother also came to help. At the time, Adrian had to constantly negotiate with his boss to juggle graveyard shifts and childcare, and if his schedule changed, his wife and mother-in-law both had to rearrange their own jobs on short notice to accommodate his.
Soon after, Jessica received an ultimatum from her job: If she couldn’t work regularly full-time, she would be demoted to a part-time position and lose the family’s health insurance benefits.
Their luck changed last November when New Mexico became the first state of the country Launch free, universal child care for children from birth to age 13, regardless of household income. The expansion to a truly universal program “has been a big blessing for us,” said Jessica, who was able to enroll her son in full-time day care. “It was a big help.”
New Mexico attracted a wave of attention when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in September that all families in the state would be eligible for child care assistance. “Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” she said. said at the time.
In March 2026, program requirements changed. Families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty level are now eligible for free child care with no co-pay, the equivalent of a family of four earning $198,000 a year. Copays above this threshold also depend on the decline in the price of oil. Participating families can choose from a wide range of options, including center-based care, in-home providers, before and after school care, and faith-based centers. On average, the universal program is expected to save participating families $12,000 per year. (Private providers always have the option of not serving families receiving child care assistance and continuing to charge tuition.)
What has gotten less attention outside New Mexico, however, is the state’s attempt to fairly compensate the early childhood workforce, long undervalued and underpaid.
Because the state is now responsible for preschool education through the universal program, it also assumes the role of being responsible for child care wages. He had to decide questions such as how to balance experience and education in child care wages, how to financially incentivize child care centers to adopt rigorous quality measures, and a whole host of issues that have generally been left to the market.
But the child care “market” as it currently exists in other states has primarily produced poverty wages for workers and exorbitant costs for families. It is hoped that if New Mexico can resolve these issues, it can pave the way for other places that might want to implement a universal program, such as New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced earlier this year that the city would create 2,000 free daycare spaces for 2-year-olds the city is in the process of expanding a free, universal program for all young children, but the city would need 30,000 new daycare educators for it to work.
New Mexico currently has $60 million set aside to increase salaries for the state’s child care workers. A working group is currently refining a “salary scale and career lattice framework” intended to support experience, education and quality.
“It’s so exciting to see New Mexico grappling with these questions,” said Lena Bilik, senior program director at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank that advocates for universal child care. “Other countries have realized that this is an area where government needs to step in. If you want to expand your system, you can’t do it without raising wages. That’s starting to be a bigger discussion.”
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks issues.
Child care providers and advocates in the state have different opinions on the efforts so far.
Farmington daycare owner Barbara Luna Tedrow opened her business, A Gold Star Academy, more than 25 years ago with 60 children and 10 staff members. Farmington is oil and gas country surrounded by badlands and gray sands. It is also just outside the Navajo Nation, making it a frontier town with a large Native American population.
Around 2012, Tedrow was approached by an oil worker — New Mexico is the nation’s second-largest oil producer — who offered to fund the construction of a second day care center. Over the next decade, grants and strong relationships with city officials helped it expand to five branches. Today, his team cares for 700 children, with 400 places opened in the last three years alone. Part of her success, she said, is because she pushed for child care as a way to supplement jobs in the oil and gas sector.
“If you want cities to thrive, they need high-quality child care,” she said. “All these new employees want to go to work, but they can’t live without it.”
Tedrow employees receive medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) retirement program, which together cost $15,000 per employee on top of their salary. As a result, Tedrow said she worries about what might happen if state reimbursement rates decrease in the future or if the state increases the minimum wage for employees without increasing state reimbursement at the same time.
“We depend on the state for salaries, benefits and everything else to run a high-quality child care center,” she said.
Mirna Polendo, director of Imagination Station, a Christian preschool in the resort town of Ruidoso, made some changes to her curriculum when the state moved to a universal system. New Mexico pays premium rates to centers open at least 10 hours a day and pays higher salaries to teachers. Polendo extended its work hours from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and increased its employees’ pay to $17 an hour to qualify for greater reimbursement from the state.
In exchange, Polendo receives $1,400 per month from the state to care for an 18-month-old infant, $1,075 for a toddler and $890 for children ages 3 to 5. Overall, the state reimburses more for care than private tutoring ever did.
If its center meets certain quality measures, state reimbursements could be even higher. But one of those quality measures would require him to raise staff wages up to $18 an hour. That’s exactly at the limit of what Polendo can afford to pay its staff while remaining in the black, she said: “I can’t do more than that.”
Olga Grays, a home daycare provider in Las Cruces, has worked as an early childhood educator for 20 years and is licensed to care for a maximum of 12 children at a time in her home. In her garden and garden, vibrant streams of papel picado – colorful paper with intricate perforated designs – are pasted onto the shaded patio. Colorful play structures and swings are just steps away. The setup feels so personal, which Grays attributes to the nature of the business.
“Home daycare has that connection with parents that a lot of daycares don’t have,” she said. Some days, Grays opens at 4 a.m. to accommodate a family and closes until 11 p.m.
Grays must pay his employees $16 an hour to accept state subsidies and has chosen for now not to make changes to his business that would allow him to get a larger reimbursement from the state.
“I prefer to spend my time in daycare with children who provide them with the services they need,” she said. “I don’t think taking the time to do this paperwork will help them.”
But that means any of her employees could leave for another, better-paying center, she said. She supports tying salaries to years of experience and education level instead of focusing solely on a center’s quality metrics.
While the work that remains to be done is complex, that shouldn’t overshadow the years of effort and advocacy it took to get the state to this point, said Jacob Vigil, legislative director of New Mexico Voices for Children, a state advocacy group.
“It took us over a decade to get to this point,” Vigil said. “This was a large-scale campaign bringing together a diverse base of people who really understood and united around the message of why early childhood matters. »
Contact editor Christina Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org
This story on universal child care was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register at Hechinger Newsletter.
The article Lessons Learned from the Nation’s First State to Offer Universal Child Care appears first in the Hechinger Report.
