Joint Roundtable/Working Meeting with the City Council and School Committee

Good afternoon, everyone. It's 4.04, so we'll get started. A quorum being present, I wanted to call this afternoon is June 29th. 2026 Joint Roundtable Working Meeting with the School Committee to order. The call of the meeting is to discuss the Cambridge Preschool Program, including means testing and program expansion. As outlined in City Matters of Agenda Item 2026-92, originally referred to the Human Services and Veterans Committee. The first order of business is a roll call of all the members present, please.

Councilor Al-Zubi. present, Vice Mayor Azeem, present, Councilor Flaherty, present, Councilor McGovern, present, Councilor Nolan, present, Councilor Simmons, present, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, present, Zusy, present. Mayor Siddiqui, present. Vice Chair Zubi, present. Member DiPaolo-Santos, present.

Present.

Present. Member Harding? Absent. Member Hudson? Absent. Member Jaykumar?

Present.

Present. Member Siddiqui?

I think that was Hudson?

Yes, sorry.

That was Elizabeth Hudson, clerk.

Okay. Member Hudson is present. Member Jay Kumar? I think he's trying to get back in the Zoom. Okay. Member Siddiqui? Present. Chair Weinstein? Absent.

So, Chair Weinstein is... Just going to be joining late. He had a prior commitment, but he'll be joining when he can. And then I know that Member Jay Kumar was online, and we'll try. Member Jay Kumar is on now. Okay. Okay. Member Jay Kumar. I'll go to the clerk.

Member Jay Kumar. Present. Present. And you have five members recorded as present and two recorded as absent.

Per Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025 adopted by Massachusetts General Court and approved by the Governor, the City is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge City Council. You can also view the meeting via the city's open meeting portal or on the city's cable channel 22. Please note that the City of Cambridge audio and video records this meeting and makes it available to the public for future viewing. in addition third parties may also be audio and video recording this meeting so as far as the agenda we will have a discussion in your materials in front of you. We have a communication received from Cheryl Olson, Executive Director, Cambridge from the Cambridge Office of Early Childhood transmitting a presentation about the Cambridge Preschool Program. So she will be presenting. We'll do really quick opening and introductions just so that we're all City Council knows who each other is but the folks here just as a

reminder. We can have your introductions. As I said, then we'll have a presentation and then we'll open it up. for discussion and I'll just say that as the call says this was originally referred to the Human Services Committee but we're having a joint roundtable with the school committee to involve them. And we've done these joint roundtables in the past. And as we all know, this has been a long, worked on priority for the city and implementing the CPP program was a huge initiative that took multiple multiple years and we just finished year two of the program and the Council continues to have a huge interest in evaluating this program and playing a role in its future as shown in the Council's recent priority setting process in the Finance Committee. With that, I'll toss it to Superintendent.

You can introduce yourself. Yes, go ahead, Councilor Simmons.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Point of information. Are we going to be exercising the rules that we use during our own meetings, which each person... from the elected side has five minutes to hold the floor because if that's the case, the school committee may not know that and you may want to just tell them if that's how we're going to proceed.

I wasn't planning to, but I think we're going to do a two, we'll still do two questions. Okay, very good. Yeah. Thank you. So with that, I'll pass it to the team over here to introduce themselves.

Ian Huang, City Manager David Murphy, Superintendent of Schools Cheryl Olson, Office for Early Childhood

Good afternoon, Joseph Corzini, Assistant City Manager, Human Services.

Great. And just a reminder, there's no votes in the roundtable. This is solely a discussion. We'll be over. We started at 4.04. We'll end by 6.04. Then we'll continue the fun. So with that, we can continue and show the presentation.

All right, good afternoon. We'll go ahead and jump right in. Before we do so, as we're pulling up the slides, I just want to acknowledge a couple of my colleagues. Nicole Johnson-Negron. In the back, she is our CPP program manager. She is instrumental in keeping this... Nicole, can you stand? She keeps our CPP trains running and keeps the program high quality. We also have Liz Barlock. She is our program quality. Director, Liz is responsible for the coaching, mentoring, all that type of work to support educators, not only within the CPP program, but educators across the city as well. And two additional colleagues, Matt and Leo, I want to call out as well. If you could just wave from Ian's strategy team, they were really incredibly helpful in terms of putting these slides together tonight. Okay, we can go ahead. Please do.

I would just add, Mayor, that Dr. Heather Francis, our chief academic officer, is joining us remotely. I think perhaps needs a promotion to panelists.

We're working on that right now.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

OK. I think we can go to slide three. We'll stop right there for now. So this just gives an overview of how we'll spend our time together this afternoon. I am going to spend a few minutes talking about the background and the history and evolution of CPP. Many of you are aware of that, but for those of you who are not, We'll spend a moment with that and then we'll talk about the status of CPP now. So I'll give you an overview of how CPP is doing now that we have just finished our second year of implementation. We'll also talk about some of the remaining needs in the early childhood landscape across the city. And per the council's request, we'll spend some time talking about possible policy decisions in the future, including possibly means testing and also some considerations regarding expansion. We can go to the next slide. Okay, so before we jump into the main content of the evening, there were a few things that came up in our last CPP Roundtable just a little over a year ago.

that I just wanted to address before we jump in. There was a question raised about the inclusion in CPP of faith-affiliated preschools, and as many of you have probably seen, the city's law department looked at that and issued a memo and determined that they are not violating any laws by including faith-affiliated preschools in CPP and the courts would support that. Questions also came up about support for local community-based preschool providers and specifically about the city's partnership with larger corporate Preschool Organizations as well. And in response to that feedback, we've taken a number of steps over the last year and a half or so to minimize the for-profit footprint. So we still do have some for-profit providers in the city. But the number of classrooms that are in for-profit providers has been reduced significantly in alignment with our wanting to support the local nonprofit community in the city.

Similarly, early after the launch of CPP, questions were raised about empty seats, and so there were a number of empty seats in CPP classrooms across the city, and as you can imagine, that has a financial impact on providers. So we did quite a bit of work in that first year, again, working with the strategy team as well, to come up with a formula to help us better predict how many seats we're going to need from year to year. And then based on that formula, that's the number of seats we put in the system. Quick question.

Could you say what CPP is, just for people that are not familiar with the jargon?

So, Councilor Simmons was asking about CPP, Cambridge Preschool Program.

Thank you very much. Yes, Cambridge Preschool Program, CPP. And you might also hear me say OEC, that's the Office of Early Childhood. Okay. Okay, so minimizing the empty seats. So using this formula, we have been able to, for the past two years in a row now, have it so that we have just enough and many more. Question was also raised about quality. We're going to talk about that in a future slide. So I'm going to skip that one for now. We can go ahead to the next slide. All right, so this slide just provides an overview of our current work. In a moment, we'll talk again about the history and the evolution of CPP, but this gives you a sense of the work of our office currently. Office of Early Childhood was created to strengthen the early childhood ecosystem. It is quite new as an office. I believe we are going into our fifth year.

And CPP also, like I said, we just finished our second year of implementation, so that also is quite new. And so you'll see our vision and mission both to ensure access to high quality preschool for children across the city regardless of income, but then also on the mission side to connect their ecosystem to advocate and advance the needs of children and families across the system. And so you'll see in the little box below there, CPP is a big part of the work of our office, but it is not the only thing that our office does. Our office also supports Program Quality, as I mentioned, that is a lot of the work that Liz's team and also my colleague Emily Callejas, who leads our workforce development team, They do coaching for early childhood educators across the city, mentoring for program directors, which is really unique. I'm not familiar with any other city that has that type of resource.

and also professional development trainings and sessions that happen throughout the year and those are available to any early childhood professional across the city. It is not limited to just CPP. and then our family engagement work which as you might imagine focuses on making sure that all children in the city and their families experience high quality family engagement services. They also work very closely with our partners at Center for Families so when there are families who might benefit from case management and additional level of support. They make sure that those families are connected to the resources that might be helpful. On the right, going to CPP specifically, you'll see the goals there. expanding access to preschool to make sure that a family's income does not determine their access to high-quality preschool. And then, of course, to enhance preschool quality within CPP.

So in the eligibility box, the little green stars are the stars that reference children who are guaranteed a CPPC. So all four-year-olds in the city are guaranteed a CPPC. All three-year-olds that have priority status, which is income-based, are also guaranteed a seat. We do not turn away any three-year-old that has priority status. Three-year-olds with non-priority status, we also refer to them sometimes as general three-year-olds. Those are three-year-olds whose families are above 65% of AMI. They have access to CPP, but those seats are limited. So there is not a guarantee that general three-year-olds will have a CPP seat. And then in that middle box, you'll see the priority status. Most of our families qualify for priority status based on AMI income. So if they're at 65% of AMI or below, AMI stands for area median. Income, which many of you I'm sure are familiar with.

They qualify for priority status or for students in Cambridge public schools if they're eligible for free and reduced price lunch. Some families also qualify if they're experiencing homelessness or have a child in foster care. and then seat matching. I think you all are probably familiar with that system. There's a single application. So families apply through the single one-stop shop where they have the opportunity to learn about all of the different preschool options across the system. They can rank programs, and so they can select a minimum of six, a maximum of 10, and then they rank them in order of preference. and then we partner with a company called BridgeCare. They operate an algorithm that is designed to match families based on their choices and now BridgeCare specializes in early childhood systems. They do this work for other cities across the country as well. We can move on to the next one. All right, so Mayor Siddiqui touched on this a moment ago.

I also want to spend just a moment talking about the history. As you all know, the city has a longstanding and deep commitment to Early Childhood Education, with a Blue Ribbon Committee convening, I believe, more than a decade ago. I believe Councilor McGovern was instrumental in that work, followed by an Early Childhood Task Force in 2015, and the Early Childhood Task Force issued recommendations, including a universal pre-K system. The Birth to Three Partnership was created after that to pursue these recommendations. and in 2019, the Birth of Three Partnership presented various UPK model options to the city council and the school committee and the city council and school committee voted to pursue a universal model based on a mixed delivery system. And we'll talk about more in just a minute about what a mixed delivery system means.

And then in 2022, the B3 partnership was converted to our office, the Office of Early Childhood, and then CPP launched in 2024. We can go ahead to the next one.

Just one quick question. This is terrific, but there was also a whole task force in 2021 that was comprised of some school committee and city council, so it would be really good for the future to ensure that's listed because It was out of that I know that...

It was a director grant.

Yeah. And school committee member Wilson was instrumental in that as well. So just let's make sure we include that as well.

Will do. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and on this slide you'll see just another way of presenting the city's commitment. This looks at the financial commitments of the city to early childhood. And as you can see here, the city's significant financial commitment to young children in the city started long before CPP was created. There were preschool classrooms available in Cambridge public schools through the JK program. and our DHSP preschools as well and those of course preceded the Cambridge Preschool Program. Center for Families has for many, many years been offering programming for very young children and their families as has the Agenda for Children's Literacy. And then you'll see some significant jumps here with the expansion of JK for one, then also the expansion of DHSP. Preschools, and then in 2024, the launch of the CPP program of this budget.

The amount of funding that goes to our community-based preschool providers, which are also sometimes called private preschool providers, is about $12 million per year. And then the rest of the money is accounted for in the DHSP preschools, the Cambridge Public Schools preschools. some of our office and then some of these other initiatives as well. Next slide. All right, so we'll take a moment just to talk about universal pre-K in general. I was not here when this decision was made, but I do know that this was part of the equation and this is part of the consideration that other cities look at also when they're debating various preschool models. So one of the things that we know about universal models is that children do better academically in terms of their developmental outcomes and their learning outcomes

Thank you very much. We also know, of course, this is not a surprise, that families do better when they are in a universal model, particularly families that have incomes that would probably be just above the threshold. for a means-tested model, a universal model, particularly when it gives them access to extended day care. And summer care has tremendous benefits in terms of economic mobility, workforce participation, and that type of thing. And then in terms of the long-term cost benefit, There have been numerous studies going back more than 50 years, really, on the impact of pre-K. And what we know is that high-quality pre-K has a significant impact on children's learning outcomes.

Some studies that look at the cost-benefit analysis, the benefit ranges from a low of maybe $2 for every dollar invested to as many as $16 for every Every dollar invested. So we know that it pays off in a number of outcomes. Next slide. And I want to take a moment to talk about quality as well because I know that this was also a really big push for the council and the school committee many years ago that the priority was not just access to pre-K seats but access to high quality. and making sure that the city's investment is supporting quality across our preschool providers as well. When we look at national data, we know that quality matters. And when we're talking about the learning benefits and the academic and developmental benefits of preschool, we only see those benefits when we're talking about high-quality programs.

So children that are in programs that do not meet high quality standards do not show the same type of learning outcomes. There have been some studies, there was one a couple years ago that Thank you. Thank you. that our dollars are going towards making sure that children benefit in the long run. The focus on quality is really important. Because of this, we just this year launched a new quality monitoring system as part of CPP. My colleagues behind me played a huge role in this launch and so this is designed to make sure that on an ongoing basis once programs become part of the CPP system we are monitoring them annually to make sure that they continue to meet our high quality standards

and many more. of Early Childhood Classrooms. It's considered the gold standard in early childhood classroom quality assessment. We also do our own classroom observations by our own OEC staff. We gather feedback in a number of different ways, including surveys, transfer requests, the Family Advisory Board, which I'll mention in just a moment. And then we collect documents from the programs on an annual basis. So we put all these things together as the year goes on to really paint a picture of the quality If programs start to fall short on any of the metrics that we're using, we do have a process where they would be put on a quality improvement plan, and our office partners really closely with them. Through that plan, we established really clear goals.

and metrics for how we're going to track their growth. And there's a period at which we expect them to have met those goals. So we track that as well. and then finally last year we launched, I think it was at CPP's first year, we launched the CPP Program Advisory Board and that's comprised of program directors From across the city, the goal of that board really is to make sure that we are hearing from our partners across the community on an ongoing basis. They meet monthly and they give us feedback on how we're doing. and they help us think through policy decisions, programmatic decisions, that type of thing and so all of the decisions we make are really very much influenced by the feedback that we get from the program advisory board. Similarly, this year we launched the Family Advisory Board, which is comprised of families across the CPP system, and they serve a very similar function. They meet monthly. They give us feedback. They tell us how we're doing.

They point out some things that we might be missing and might not have considered, and they also weigh in on our policy and programming decisions. Next slide. All right, so we'll spend the next couple of minutes just giving you an overview of how CPP is doing right now and the families we're serving. We can go ahead. All right, so as you'll see here, this shows you statistics from our most recent match. So just to give you a sense of the timeline, most families apply in the fall. The application period runs from October 1st till November 15th. And then in the winter we do a match based on those applications. So as you'll see here, very similar to what these statistics look like last year, the vast majority of families are matched with one of their top three choices. So 92% of all applicants were matched with one of their top three choices.

And then when we isolate the priority applicants and look at that group alone, an impressive 97% are matched with one of their top three choices. So the vast majority of families get one of their top ranked choices. On the right, probably not a surprise, you'll see the factors that families are considering when they're choosing location. Proximity to home or work is a big one. Availability of after-school care, summer care is another big one. and then curriculum and language use. Some families are looking for immersion, language immersion models and that type of thing. We can go to the next slide. And this gives you a picture of the demographics and how this looks across the system. I want to mention here that when I talked a few minutes ago about the mixed delivery system, That simply means that we have preschool seats across a variety of sectors.

And in Cambridge, those three sectors are the Cambridge public school system, the DHSP programs, and also our community-based organizations. And as you'll see on this slide, our CPP students are roughly distributed evenly across those three sectors. So I think this reflects a really healthy mixed delivery system. You'll see some growth in the DHSP enrollment from year one to year two. That was due to the expansion of classrooms. A number of classrooms opened in this past school year and that accounts for that growth. Modest growth in the community-based sector from year one to year two and then that has held relatively steady since then. And then on the right you'll see the priority and the general applicants. Again, I want to clarify that all priority students are served.

So when you see the 44% here, that does not mean that 44% of priority applicants are served. We serve all priority applicants. What it means is that when you look at the whole universe of CPP students, last year 44% were comprised of priority kids and families. 56 of general. You'll see that number went down slightly in this last application cycle to 40%. That will probably increase again. A number of families continue to enroll through the spring. and Summer as we get ready to launch the new school year. So that percentage may go up a little bit, but there was a slight decline in this last cycle.

Go ahead. Can you speak into the mic?

The general applicants, that percentage, 56%, does that equate to, that's a percentage of applicants who were accepted overall? So 56% of the people being served, general applicants,

Yes, through you, Madam Mayor. That is correct. So to give you an example, when we just closed out this school year, we had 858 CPP students. 56% of those were general students. from general income families, 44% of those were priority.

And if you had to estimate through you, Madam Mayor, what's the number of general applicants who were turned away?

Yes, through you, Madam Mayor. So the only general applicants who were turned away are those general three-year-olds. All four-year-olds are served, regardless of income. This year, at the close of the school year, which again, I think was... Two weeks ago now, looking at the CPP year, it was 67. So there were 67 general three-year-olds who did not receive a seat. A number of those may receive a seat as the summer, some families move away and things like that. So there's a little bit of movement continued as we approach the school year. But it's probably not a tremendous amount of movement, but currently it is 67 students.

Thank you.

All right, we'll go to the next slide. This slide shows the demographics of the students that we're serving. And as you will see here, the demographics of CPP largely resemble the demographics of the city. We compare this with CPS data, and it's pretty close. There is also a question on the CPP application that is not reflected here that asks parents to indicate whether or not they are also from Hispanic or Latino ethnic origin. The percentage of families that indicated as such were 11. We can go to the next slide. And this slide just gives you a sense of trends over the last three years of CPP enrollment. The first year is a little bit of an anomaly. So I would take that one with a grain of salt.

It was the first year. There were a lot of families who still weren't aware of the program, weren't quite sure how it was working. The timeline was also a little bit different. So that application and match period happened quite a bit later than what we've been doing for the last few years. So you'll see that at match that year there were 649 children. Those numbers did increase. significantly after that as more children and families continue to trickle in over the spring and the summer months. The middle column is the school year that just ended again. The 789, that was at match. So at the winter match last year, There were 789 children who were matched and then enrolled. When we ended the school year, that was 858 again. So you'll see that even after match, we do have more families. that continue to enroll over the spring, summer, and even course of the school year, those families do tend to be slightly disproportionately priority families.

So priority families are more likely than general families to apply after the match. And so another thing you'll see here, again, is just the CBO sector has remained pretty stable. Over the last two years, DHSP, after that initial boost, has remained pretty stable as well.

And I just want to welcome Chair Weinstein and then Vice Chair Zubi had a question. Vice Chair?

Thank you. I just had a quick clarifying question about the 858. How many are three-year-olds and how many are four-year-olds?

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, that is a good question. I'm going to have to get back to you on the exact number. I believe the number of threes is in the 300 range. But I can produce that exact number. And I believe it's in the memo as well.

OK, thank you.

Yes, Councilor Zusy.

Just a quick question about the slide. So through you, Chair Siddiqui, so fewer families or fewer students have matched in In the winter. So why do you think it went down by about 20 students and are you anticipating that it'll bounce back up to 858 or so?

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor. That's a good question. So we're really not sure why that number went down a little bit. We know that, generally speaking, birth rates have declined, the number of young children has declined. We're also not sure of the impact of some of the federal administration's policies on university Some of our families are grad students who are here to attend university, so that may be a factor as well. We're really not sure what accounts for that decline. We do anticipate as the summer goes on we'll see an increase, but I'm not sure if it'll get us back to where we were at the same time last year. Thank you. Thank you. We can go to the next slide. So as I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we do to collect feedback and sort of evaluate how our system is doing is family survey. And so we do this family survey.

Thank you for joining us. or satisfied with their child's CPP preschool experience in general. When they're asked about the extent to which they think that their preschool supports their child's social emotional and cognitive development, very similar percentages above 90%. respond that it is excellent or good in response to that question. So very positive feedback going into our third year of implementation. The next slide. And we won't read these to you but I hope that you will go ahead and take the time to read them. It gives a pretty good snapshot of much of the feedback that we've been receiving from families regarding CPP. And then the next slide.

We also look really closely at the family feedback to identify areas for growth. and some of the feedback that you'll see here reflects some of the growth areas that have become clear. In the first two years of implementation, particularly from year one to year two, we realized there was Work to be done in terms of helping families understand what is inherently a very complex system. So one of the wonderful things about CPP is parents can make choices from among a large variety of preschool options. but with that means it's challenging to make sure that families understand all the options that they have available to them. From year one to year two, one of the things, just to give you an example, was some families didn't realize that their program might not have offered extended day. Or it offered extended day, but they weren't aware of the costs. There was some feedback from families who had applied to a program in one of our co-located programs. So as you know, we have some schools that have

A DHSP preschool classroom and a CPS preschool classroom in the same building. And some families said they didn't realize that. And it wasn't that they thought they might have been getting into one program, and then they realized it was another one. So our CPP team did a lot of work over the last year to really clarify in the application process to make it much harder for families to not miss these key pieces of information one of the things that we've noticed in this last The number of transfer requests after the match went down significantly, so we had many fewer families saying, I didn't understand, I didn't realize, and therefore requesting a transfer. So we're making progress on that, still work to be done, but certainly making progress and making sure that families have the information that they need to make their decisions. and some of this also is the intersection of CPP policy and CPS policy.

I think families, one of the things that comes up here also is the matriculation policy and making sure that families understand the implications of that when they are choosing choosing a program. We can go ahead. All right, so we'll shift gear now and talk about the birth to five landscape more broadly and some of the supports that we're providing and also some of the remaining areas of need. We can go to the next slide. Okay, so on this one, the goal here with this slide is to give a sense of how comprehensive our coverage is and for which groups in the city. And as you'll see in the green here, In some ways, CPP is already, in a way, a means-tested program and that family income is taken into consideration in the extent of supports that are provided to families. What I mean by that is all families that are in CPP have access

to free preschool, 6.5-hour school day. So it's a school day, school year program. Priority families are guaranteed access also to extended day and to summer care. So families can make those choices as they're completing their application. and families that have that priority status have access to a much more really full comprehensive system of not just preschool but childcare supports as well. So you'll see that in the green for four year olds and for three year olds. who have priority status, that is a guaranteed seat and it is guaranteed access to extended day and summer care if the family needs that support. For general families, if we're looking at the four-year-old year, four-year-olds, as I mentioned earlier, have guaranteed access to a preschool seat. No four-year-old is turned away from CPP. But families who need extended day or summer care, They do bear the cost of that on their own.

For three-year-olds, three-year-olds have access to CPP, but the seats are limited, so they are not guaranteed a seat. And as I mentioned a moment ago, this year we had so far 67 three-year-olds who applied. General Threes who applied and were not matched with a seat. And then if you look at the infant toddler sector, birth to two years old, children who are not yet eligible for CPP, there's no free access to child care. So at this point, there's very limited Childcare supports for families and particularly low-income families in this age range. The city does invest in supports for these families through the Center for Families Programming, Agenda for Children Programming, and those include programs like Baby University, Let's Talk Cambridge Dads, and some other really amazing opportunities for families of very young children. We can go to the next slide. So we'll dig a little deeper into the infant toddler sector.

As I mentioned on the left, these are supports that the city already provides to these families, including child care resource and referral. So we have a staff member within our office that does child care resource and referral work. She partners really closely with our colleagues in Find It, who also help families who are looking for care. One of the challenges that they frequently bump up against is particularly for families who are below that income threshold. There's limited access to affordable child care, but they do support families in accessing both child care and any other resources. And then some of the other resources that I mentioned as well. Some of the work that our office has been doing to take a really close look at the infant-toddler sector in particular, we partnered with interns from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government over the last year and they spent almost a full year really analyzing the landscape of infant toddler care here in Cambridge.

And they were looking at access to affordable childcare in particular. and they issued a report, a really comprehensive report, which we'd be happy to make available to you if you would like to see that. So that's a very helpful resource. And then there is a working group that has been convening for the last year as well. And that is led by one of my colleagues in Office of Early Childhood, also Michelle Godfrey, Center for Families, and Jen Bailey at the Agenda for Children's Literacy, and a number of other stakeholders across the city. and they have been looking not just at childcare access but also just family needs within this infant toddler sector in general. And so through this summer they will be issuing A set of general focus areas or recommendations just based on their findings. They closed a survey in May, and we expect to be getting the findings from that survey very soon, I think early next month. Next slide.

So some of what you will see in the Harvard Kennedy School report is that in Cambridge, like in much of the country, access to affordable High quality child care is a tremendous need. Massachusetts, one study found, is the most expensive state. For infant toddler care in the country, straining many young families. And in Cambridge, infant toddler care is about three times more expensive than what the Department of Health and Human Services identifies as The amount that families should not have to pay more, and that's 7%. So according to HHS, Families should not have to pay more than 7% of their annual income on childcare. And in Cambridge, for working families, that accounts for about 20% of the income, so it's far higher than the recommended amount.

What we also see here in Cambridge is that many families that are in the workforce or that want to be in the workforce prefer childcare to provide full-time parental care or extended family care, neighbor care, something like that. Only 13% of Cambridge residents view their current childcare arrangement as ideal, and 30% report providing full-time care, which is much higher than what the general population would like to see. As you'll see in that lower right quadrant, 33% of lower income families in particular report wanting a lot more childcare so that they can access The workforce or higher education compared with just 4% of higher income families that report wanting more care. So that gives you just a picture of the discrepancies and the needs for additional child care support in the community. Next slide. All right.

Do a couple more slides on some possible options for moving forward. We can go ahead. So this is one way to look at when we're talking about the future of CPP or the city support for families in the birth to five sector more broadly. There's a few different ways that we can look at it. We can look at it by age, which is what I think of as sort of a horizontal approach going left to right on this slide. And that would be focusing on the children and families that we already serve through CPP. So as we look at the children and families we already serve, we know that families that are in the 65 to maybe 85 to 100% AMI range may still be squeezed when it comes to being able to afford extended daycare and summer care. So these are families for whom CPP does not cover those additional expenses. And so for families in the workforce or who want to be in the workforce,

That can be a significant expense, upwards of $15,000 just for the extended day. So for families in that 65%, AMI to 85% or even 100% AMI, we know that there are additional needs there as well. or we can take a more vertical approach and think about the birth to five sector by creating a much more comprehensive vision of how we're supporting this sector. So this could look like Thank you very much. At this point in time, it's not clear that there are even enough centers and enough infant toddler seats in the city to absorb infants and toddlers, even if money was not an option in terms of paying that tuition.

There's other ways in terms of supporting the workforce infant-toddler, providing stabilization funds, that type of thing. So we could look really comprehensively at some different policy options to support that sector. Next slide. This gives you a sense of what some other cities and states are doing. Some cities and states recently, as you may have heard, are making some really bold moves in terms of Universal Childcare, Mayor Mondani, along with Governor Hochul in New York, is moving towards universal childcare. So for a number of years, they've had universal pre-K as well. And now they are moving towards universal childcare to make sure that families have support birth through five. Along with this, similar to what I was mentioning about Cambridge, part of this work is making sure that there's enough supply of seats so they're also taking policy steps.

to support providers and particularly providers in low-income communities to make sure that they can absorb a significant increase in the number of very young children, infants and toddlers. New Mexico, similarly, is moving towards universal child care regardless of income, birth to five, as well. That is also coupled with other policy moves like workforce development and some stabilization funds as well for the sector. City of Hartford recently presented a proposal for universal childcare. The soon-to-be newly elected mayor of D.C. also has indicated that She would like to do the same. And some others in cities and states as well are looking towards or have already invested funds in this sector in terms of, for an example, public-private partnerships.

to use city buildings and renovate them so that infant and toddler centers can operate in those spaces, which reduce the costs of infant toddler care because they don't have to pay the infrastructure, they don't have to pay for rent. and that type of thing. So there's a lot of really creative policy solutions happening right now to find ways to support this sector. Next slide. And finally, we were asked by the council to look at means testing. And so as you'll see in the memo that you have with you at the table, we did some analysis on this. Again, I am appreciative of our colleagues and the strategy team who helped with this analysis. As I mentioned before, we know that there are some really good reasons to choose a universal model. We know that children do better, children's outcomes Tend to be better in a universal model and also impact on family well-being and economic mobility as well.

There would be benefits, obviously, to means testing in terms of some cost savings, but there are also significant A means-tested model is more complex to administer, so there would be additional infrastructure costs that go along with that. It would be a significant departure. from the city's longstanding commitment to universal pre-K. And when we looked at the cost modeling, we looked at a few different options to figure out how much money would be saved, For example, we looked at what would happen if we implemented basically the same model as the model that the DHSP programs currently use and a sliding fee scale. And if we implemented that sliding fee with CPP, We looked at that as well, but we said, okay, what if we use that same model, but we didn't charge any fees of families that are at 100% AMI or below? And then we said, what if we didn't charge any fees of families that are at 200% AMI or below?

So with these analysis, we landed in the ballpark. If we were to use the most aggressive means testing model, we would be in the ballpark of probably under $6 million in cost savings. A couple caveats with that is that, one, we would then need to subtract some infrastructure costs. We would need some additional infrastructure to implement this model. That would probably be in the $400,000 to $500,000 range. We would have to consider Cambridge Public Schools. Thank you. Thank you. then that would come down as well probably to about the ballpark of $4 million. And important to note if we were to implement that sliding fee scale we would be imposing additional new costs on families that are in the 65% AMI range to 85% to 100% AMI range.

So again, I just want to stress that these are families that are already in some cases feeling squeezed by having to pay for extended day and summer care, cost of housing, all of these other things. So to add an additional cost for these families would not be insignificant. So then if we were to look at the model where we said, Hold Harmless the families that are at 100% AMI or below. Again, we would have to consider the public school system and whether or not families attending the public school system would be charged similarly fees. We would probably be in the $4 million range or slightly below. And when we looked at the model that said if we weren't going to charge any additional fees to families that are at 200% AMI or below, that puts us in about a million dollar cost savings. Ballpark and then we would take a little bit out of that for the additional

So the cost savings are not tremendous, but that gives you sort of a broad overview of what the cost savings would be, but also what some of the complexities would be in terms of implementing implementing means-tested model. And final slide. Next steps. in conversation with our partners around the table and other stakeholders around the city, discuss some of these policy options. As I mentioned, the infantiler working group will be finishing its work very soon within the next couple of months This summer and then we expect to be able to have that data for you as well. Madam Mayor, that's up to you.

Thank you. It's now 4.52, so we have a little over an hour for discussion and questions. I'll start with folks on the Zoom first, and then we'll alternate. Does anyone have their hands up who'd like to speak?

No, Madam Mayor.

Okay, I see a few hands up here, so I'll go to Chair Weinstein and then Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler. And just start with kind of, you can have a quick comment, but then two questions each. We'll start with that.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. Sorry that I was not able to be here in person for the very beginning of it. One thing I want to just say is that amongst the indications that this has been really successful, I think, is the kind of feedback that we've been getting, the interest amongst more folks in various areas. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just note that I had the opportunity to be on the joint working group of school committee members and city councilors when we got to the stage just before and launching this program along with Mayor Siddiqui and McGovern, then Vice Mayor, and former school committee and city council member Aisha Wilson.

And it's really exciting to see the work that we had an opportunity to help advise and coordinate to get over the I think my biggest questions which might not really be able to be answered until we determine what those next steps are, you know, is of course coming from the school committee perspective. What we anticipate might be, and so I wonder to what degree we can answer this now, what might be the role of the Cambridge Public Schools in supporting both strengthening the program, really in either of these directions, the horizontal or the vertical. and while still bearing in mind, of course, that we're still relatively early in implementing this incredible commitment. So I'm always trying to be mindful of that. But I think, to me, the priority is Let's make sure that we're doing what we're doing now and the commitments that we've already made, that we're doing them as well as possible.

While at the same time, really looking ahead to see, as we do that, where do we want to go next so that we are able to do that in a really planful way. So that's my question. And I guess a follow-up question is, as also you had mentioned, of the possibility of a structure in which there would be a paid option that involved Cambridge Public Schools. I don't know that that's even possible. Maybe the superintendent could advise on that, but that may be something where we can sort of anticipate what the boundaries are on that. Thank you.

Do you like to respond to that? Superintendent?

Thank you, Mayor, and through you to the Chair, Mr. Chair, thank you for those questions. I'll start just in response to the question about CPS's role in the University Preschool Initiative. I mean, as you saw in the data, we are Thank you. Thank you. I think the other piece that I would say, and it goes sort of to What potential next steps could be is that I and Ms. Olson and I have had many conversations since her arrival about this particular fact, and that is that from a

A legal perspective and from a few other perspectives, there will always be a population of students for whom the Cambridge Public Schools has primary responsibility. And that's true in any municipality regardless of how Thank you very much. and many more. I think there are other some there are some policy

I do think from a school system, my counsel to the school committee would be that we would have to handle in a way that is specific to the school system. and to some degree that's true. There are structural pieces of the Cambridge Preschool Program that CPS handles in one way and the other providers handle in another way. and I would say the potential for means testing or some sort of a tuition-based system would likely be something that I think CPS would need to and many more. Thank you very much.

Students in some of those state-designated high-need categories would always be something that we would need to be at the table for.

Chair Weinstein?

Thank you. Now just a note, which I should have mentioned in my question, as of course those on the school committee know, Thank you very much. that CPS was ready to take the steps we had to do to make this happen from our side. And I want to be sure that in that timeframe, we're able to anticipate and put in place We'll go to Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler.

Thanks, Madam Mayor. Through you, I had a brief comment and then a couple of questions. I think the comment is mainly thank you for all your work on this. It is a A super important piece to have rolled out. I think from my start on the council, five years ago, this program was completely new. It has been great to see it roll out and to see the implementation, doing it as a mixed delivery model, figuring out all the kinks to it. and now reviewing it and talking about what works, what doesn't, what hasn't, how can we expand it. I have, outside my role with the council, done some work on childcare policy and just the more work I do on that, the more, you know, It becomes clearly that childcare in particular policy is just fundamentally broken in the United States. We have universal education from age 5 to 18, and whether you're rich, you're poor, or wherever you live in the country, you can get public education, and that's a right.

Thank you for watching! Before that, you know, you're really on your own and it is a huge struggle for so many families. We've now said, you know, universal for four year olds. That is a huge benefit. We'd love to eventually expand that down to three and two and one and zero. But just having it for four year olds has made such a big difference for so many families. And I hear that from friends in other places. or from folks in Cambridge to say, you know what, Cambridge is expensive to live but we knew we would get universal pre-K and so that made up for the high cost of housing here knowing we could count on that because that saved us tens of thousands of dollars and it is just a huge benefit and it's really exciting to see So that's the comment. One of my questions was on The means testing and answer around that. Thank you for looking into that. That was something the council had asked for. I do think briefly.

I think means testing is actually the wrong term there. When you use means testing, I think from a policymaking standpoint, we're often thinking about only the lowest income people being able to afford it, maybe the lowest 20% or 30%. I don't think that's actually what we were talking about here. I think we were actually talking about Should we make the highest income folks pay something for it? If you're making $200,000 plus per year, should you maybe have to chip into that? I would suggest maybe income screening is a better term for that. Ultimately, that's semantic. But I think the idea from the council, and other folks can correct me if I'm wrong on this, was saying, Hey, should the highest income folks in Cambridge, should we ask them to chip in a bit? And maybe that will lead to a lot of cost savings that we can put to expanding this to three-year-olds if we're asking for the $200,000 plus, $300,000 plus.

$400,000 plus to chip in a bit. Maybe that gives us some more income to expand it to three-year-olds. It sounds like the analysis is saying actually there are not that many families that make that much. And if we were to do income screening, we would have to do it at 100% AMI. and that's if we get substantial savings and you know that would actually be challenging to make a lot of families pay for this and Maybe that's something we don't want to do. We'd love if folks would be a little more evaluated on that. It would also be really helpful if we could see a little more detail of the spreadsheets of the calculations of Hey, this is what 200% AMI actually is. This is how many families would expect. This is how much savings it would be. It's just helpful to be able to put numbers to, oh, actually, we would be requiring families making more than $120,000 or whatever 200% AMI is. to pay more and we don't want that because that is a middle-class family and we don't want to make middle-class families. It would be helpful to see those numbers in a little more detail if you could share those with the council.

But my question ultimately is there, the reason we were talking about this was not because we wanted to do income screening, means testing for the sake of it. It's because we wanted to do expansion. We want to eventually expand this to be universal for three-year-olds. If we're not going to do that via income screening because we think that is bad for whatever, for any number of reasons, we think it would be hard to implement, we don't want to make families pay for it. If we're not going to do expansion that way, How are we going to do expansion? And would love to hear any of you talk about that. How are we going to expand this to eventually get to universal pre-K for three-year-olds? What's the thought around that? Is it just going to be through tax revenue? Is there some other way we're going to do it? How are we going to Keep expanding this because we need to to expand it to three-year-olds eventually. What's the thought there if we're not doing it through income screening?

Sobrinho-Wheeler. Through you, Mayor, I think yes, we can share some of the more detailed numbers, and I think you are, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, putting your finger on it. I think a lot of this expansion would have to come through the budget process, and I do think It is helpful as we're strengthening some of the coordination and prioritization around the budget process that we're having these conversations early and then building in multi-year plans. In some ways, this is what we're seeing around the country where part of the conversation here and following up from this roundtable will be how we want to articulate a shared vision across City Council, City Administration, School Committee for where we want to go on childcare and expansion of pre-K, and then

and then we need to then do the work of figuring out both how we would implement, there's a lot of logistical challenges in terms of different models that we could be exploring, but also how do we build that into our budget process and we can build that into our projections.

Okay, thank you. And then for the other question, I wanted to ask about evaluation process for community-based organizations. And we're doing this as a mixed delivery model, so we have some Some CPP slots through Cambridge Public Schools, some through DHSP, but then a lot where we're going to nonprofits and daycare providers and saying, you know, we want you to do some of these slots. And I'll say that in this rollout of now four years, five years now, Parents and caregivers have been super excited about this program. I'm sure there are folks with questions and concerns that have brought to the council. I generally don't hear that many questions from providers. It's just like, we're so excited. From caregivers, I should say, we're so excited this exists. Where I have heard questions and concerns has been from the community-based organizations. And I don't think that's because this program has been bad. I think it's the reverse of it. It's actually been so good that every provider is like, how do we get CPP slots? When can I get some? Oh, we didn't get them this year.

How do I get some of the CPP slots? We didn't apply originally, but... but we've seen the impact of them. Everybody wants to have some of the CPP slots because it's been hugely helpful for these community-based organizations. and the ones that haven't been able to get CPP slots so far have been frustrated by that. And so I just wanted to ask a question about that. When does the CPP program accept new applications from the community-based organizations to join the program? Does that happen every year? I feel like I've heard some from providers, We thought we were gonna have a chance to join this year and we didn't. And then also, how does the cost verify? I think the thing I've always tried to understand is we have a variety of different community-based organizations participating. Some of those are more expensive than others. And I've heard providers say like, oh, this is actually like a premium daycare provider and the city is paying them more per slot or more per hour, I forget how the calculation is, than my program.

I should be getting slots because we're a cheaper, more efficient preschool provider, basically. Why is the city funding these premium providers and not the more middle of the road ones? So if you could just talk through both how you decide when to accept applications from new community-based organizations and then how you evaluate the bang for the buck, basically, of how the city is funding the CBOs.

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, so in terms of, I think I'll start with the seats. And for providers that are not part of CPP currently who want to be... Director, can you just speak right into the mic? Sorry.

Yeah.

Yes, so for providers who are not currently part of CPP and who want to be part of CPP, that was some of the strongest feedback we heard. in the first year of CPP and the consideration there was if we expanded seats and allowed a lot more programs in then what would happen is we would have a lot more empty seats across the system. So what has happened over a number of years is there have been more preschools that have opened in the city but there aren't more preschoolers from year to year. So the number of preschoolers actually has declined slightly, but at the same time there have been new preschools that are open. So it is a supply and demand conundrum. So the decision was made to only add new CPP providers when there was demand that indicated we actually needed more seats in the system. So when I mentioned very early on in our conversation this evening this formula that we use from year to year to look at the demand, look at how many students have come this year, make a prediction about how many

Students will come, what I think of as sort of children who trickle in over the course of the spring and summer to come up with a prediction for how many seats we will need for the next year. So we take that number and then we add 10%. and the 10% is added to give a little bit of a cushion. So if we had the exact number of seats as we have children, parental choice would be limited significantly. So when you think about like the percentage of families that would get one of their top three choices, that would go down significantly. So 10% allows us to make sure that families still have a robust choice-based system, but minimizes the number of empty seats in the system. So then this comes up against what I mentioned in terms of our new quality monitoring policy. And this is the first year we've been doing this. So again, it is a pretty robust system of monitoring using various metrics. to make sure that the providers in the system are high quality. And as time goes on, if we do determine that we have a CPP classroom that is not meeting those quality metrics,

They will be exited and that would open up seats to a new provider. We are now actually currently in the situation where because when I mentioned earlier we have minimized the number or reduced the number of for-profit classrooms in the system, We are now just opening up a bid process for new providers. And I want to be clear that the for-profit classrooms that have been or are in the process of being exited from CPP, the decision was not made because of quality. So the decision was made simply to be responsive to the community feedback in terms of making sure that we are using city resources to support local nonprofits and minimizing the extent to which we're sending city resources to large corporate. Child Care Providers. So not based on quality. So because we have a number of classrooms that we'll be exiting, we need to essentially backfill those seats to get us so we don't anticipate a big increase and the number of children coming to us next year for CPP, but we do need to make sure that we are holding the number of seats steady.

So last Friday we launched an RFP process to welcome new local nonprofits to join the system. So over the next, I think it's five weeks, they will have to fill out an application, and the first part of that will be a review of the documents that they send to us, and then we will actually go out and do some assessments in the programs before we make any decisions. So all that to say we do not on an annual basis welcome new providers into the system, but we look at how many seats we need from year to year and when and if it is determined that we do need more seats in the upcoming months. Sobrinho-Wheeler.

Thanks.

I'll yield now for my two questions. I may come back with a couple other follow-ups.

We have Vice Chair Zubi, and then I'll go to Councilor McGovern.

Thank you and thank you so much for this really thorough presentation. I just have one question and I was you know reading the memo as well and I wanted to talk just sort of about as we're thinking about expansion thinking about the workforce side I know it's in OEC's mission um and Workforce Development is one of the four key areas, but I'm not sure that I see it articulated in any of these expansion paths. So two things, first, I think In the memo from, I think, April, the first cost control recommendation is ensuring a supply of somewhat less costly DHSP preschool seats. And I just wanted to clarify that a big part of I think what makes those seats less costly is that we may be paying those educators less. So I just wanted to clarify that.

And then I think if one of our cost strategy is steering families towards a lower cost, Wage Sector. Then that's like part of our workforce decision. So I'd like to see us kind of paying attention to that as well. And I think the, you know, the family side costs and analysis is really thorough so I really appreciate that and I'm hoping that as we continue to have this conversation one of our next steps can be putting a number on what we're paying educators across CPS, DHSP and CBOs, especially because this is a workforce that's overwhelmingly Women. So I'm wondering if we have any demographic data on the workforce across those sectors, those three provider areas, and just want to make sure we're understanding what we're paying and who are paying the least before we lean into that sector to potentially manage costs.

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor, before I respond to that question, I neglected to respond to an important question about the cost per seat. The cost reimbursed per seat is the same for all CPP, all the community-based providers. It is calculated a little differently, obviously, for Cambridge Public Schools. That funding model is a little bit different, but for the community-based providers, The reimbursement rate is the same regardless of how expensive particular tuition is. Okay, thank you. So in terms of the workforce development, I think one of the things I'd like to highlight is our office, through my colleague Emily Callejas and others, have a number of workforce development initiatives in place. We also partner with some of our colleagues in workforce development across the city to make sure that we are offering free of charge opportunities

for early childhood educators to expand their credentials, whether it's getting a child development credential, finishing a degree at Fisher College, or also just taking CEU's continuing education units that we make available for free through our office. And so there's a great deal of work that happens there to help develop the workforce We are also partnering in a study with Children's Funding Project. That is a national organization based in Washington, D.C. that has looked at the cost, salary in particular. They look at a number of things related to financing of child care systems but they also look at educator salary. And they are taking data from across the system and will issue findings to us at some point this summer that will give us information in terms of Thank you. Vice Chair?

Thank you. Yeah, I think having a comparison of salaries across CBOs, DHSP, and CPS would be really important for the next time that we're meeting so we can take a look at that. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Councilor McGovern.

Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation and thanks to you and your staff. I'm always excited to talk about this. This has been, I'm sort of looking at the crew at the head of the table and then going back to the time that I think it was three city managers ago, four superintendents ago, your position wasn't here, and then Ellen. So it's really great to see the progress, and I think You could go back to certainly even before decades, but when Councilor Simmons was mayor, she appointed myself and then Councilor Decker. to a task force in 08 that brought together the school committee and the city to look at this so you can go back even further. So it's really, I'm so excited that we're here.

I wanted to follow up on Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler's question when he talked about sort of the expansion piece. And maybe I just didn't hear this properly. Did you say that So all four-year-olds, priority or not, are in. Priority three-year-olds are in. And then did you say there were 64 three-year-olds that didn't get a slot?

Yes, through you, Madam Mayor, 67. 67. As of last week, it was 67. So as some families may move out of the city or something like that, there will probably be a little bit of movement there, but as of last week, it was 67.

I mean, so that's not... I mean, we're not talking hundreds. So if we were to expand for those 67 kids and all three-year-olds would be getting a slot? Thank you very much. By the time we got around to saying there was a five-year plan and $36 million and then saying, oh, now we want to do it to all three-year-olds, it would be easy to sort of walk away thinking, oh, my goodness, that could be another Thank you very much.

If we decide that we want to do that, that may be a much more achievable and much quicker process than we may think. So just wanted to put that. My second question, not so much on the universal piece, but One of the things that... Are we still providing... One of the reasons that that task force was formed in 2008 was because the state had removed funding for behavioral health and special ed screening in preschools. and Cambridge had, we were providing, the state was providing it and we had I think two or three people at the time who were doing it just for Cambridge and then the state came out and said, well now we're going to do regions and those two or three people that are serving Cambridge are now going to have to serve I think it was like 10 or 12 different communities.

And so the city stepped up and said, we're gonna just do it ourselves. So are we still in terms of, again, maybe the quality and screening, are we still providing Training, intervention, screenings for kids in preschool programs who might have learning challenges or behavioral challenges so that we can make sure they're getting services as early as possible.

Yes, thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor, I will start and then I will turn it over to the superintendent to respond as well. So a couple of the things we've done in terms of behavioral health, we partner with our colleagues at the Early Years Project, and they have extensive experience in working with children who have experienced trauma and as a result are demonstrating challenging behavior in the classroom. And so that is part of the work that we do. So there is a system where through one of my colleagues in the Office of Early Childhood. If a classroom is experiencing such a situation, they contact my colleague who goes out and does an observation, does sort of an assessment. and then determines the supports that would be useful in that situation and that often involves our partners at the earlier project. to come in and give coaching to the teachers and support to the teachers in terms of understanding strategies they can use in the classroom, but also working closely with families. Another part of this is the ages and stages questionnaire. It's called the ASQ.

And that is a developmental screening, again, nationally normed, widely recognized developmental screening. So as part of the CPP program, all of our providers are required to implement the ASQ as a developmental screen very early in the school year to identify children who might benefit from a complete comprehensive developmental McGovern, and at that point, they're turned over to our friends in the Cambridge public school system for the rest of the child find process.

Thank you, Ms. Olson, and through you, Mayor, to Councilor McGovern. Similarly, we also use ASQ on the school site as part of Child Find, and there are A number of screening processes that CPS, like other LEAs, have employed since prior to the Universal Preschool Initiative here in Cambridge. Part of the evolution of that work in recent years has been partnering with OEC and DHSP to make sure that when there are children who are identified for potentially and more significant needs that CPS is better suited that we are working in partnership with them to make sure that there's a path toward the appropriate educational setting. It's not necessarily a change in policy or practice for the Cambridge Public Schools because, as I stated earlier, we have existing statutory and regulatory responsibilities that we have to attend to, but it is an additional, essentially a...

It's a more extensive net, for lack of a better term, by which to establish those relationships with children and families. And I think that's a benefit to the Cambridge community and a benefit to the Cambridge public schools.

McGovern. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, thank you. It's so important because normally for a lot of kids in a lot of communities, they're not getting those screenings until they get into public school, you know, when they're five years old. And so if we're identifying these needs that you know three years old or look even love to get to the point of doing it earlier for folks you know once once they age out of early intervention there's sort of this gap between Thank you very much for everything. I'm excited about what we're doing. I'm excited about what we're going to do. It's so incredibly important. So thank you. I'll yield.

We have a few folks on Zoom, so I'm going to alternate. I'll go to Vice Mayor Azeem and then Councilor Nolan.

Thank you, Mayor Siddiqui. I just had two quick questions. I was just wondering what our per unit, like per student costs are, if we have that number?

Yes, through you, Madam Mayor. It is 31,000 per student for the school day, which is the 6.5-hour day, an additional 193 per month for extended day. And that is for our community base, for the children who are in community-based programs.

got it I think at some point perhaps offline I'd love a breakdown of that and that I understand to some extent are like higher school costs because we have all these you know other positions and small classrooms I think that you know that's a I just wanted to make the point besides that, that I second what Councilor McGovern said and that I think that for maybe about a million dollars a year, maybe a little bit more, we could expand to three-year-olds. And I think that the smaller incremental expansions feels like A good step instead of trying to do something massive all at once, trying to incrementally expand the program. I have Councilor Nolan next.

Thank you. I will totally echo because I was on school committee when then Councilor McGovern and I mean school committee member McGovern and Councilor Decker Thank you very much. I think some real skepticism that we could even afford to do this in the city. So I know it's taken a long time and we're all anxious, but it's really a great testament that we're here. So I'm very glad. And I know it was a tremendous amount of work Not just on the council, but to direct the staff to do this. Thank you for joining us. Half my salary that I paid when my kids were young.

In particular, having someone who was born April 3rd, all of us are like, man, if you had just come out four days earlier, I could have two years of universal pre-k. This has been going on for a long time in the city. So that's just the excitement and the quality piece to hear it is so key because all of the data we know is quality is really the key that matters. So I've been following this while I'm just really... Very excited. I want to just ask a little bit about how we're blending the CPS role in early childhood. Because as much as I love CPS, I've spent much of my life following it. I continue to follow it. We also know that from an early education point of view, there's a different perspective for just early childhood play in making sure that it's not a school environment and a lot of Early Education Advocates would remind us of that, that you have to be kind of careful unless it's a Montessori program, you know, to put a three-year-old or hopefully, I hope we get to the two-year-olds and the one-year-olds and the early, the Thank you.

Thank you. As we expand to all three-year-olds, which I'm very much hoping we do, and then two-year-olds, that we're recognizing that there's a fundamental difference in the way that kids should be approached at that age compared to being in school. If that makes sense. I don't know if it's a question or just a yes, ditto, we're doing that.

If I can start, and then I'm going to turn it over through you, Madam Mayor. I appreciate what you're saying. As somebody who spent much of my career prior to taking this role in an early childhood program in a public school system, I do believe it can be done very well and it can be done in a way that is play-based and very developmentally appropriate. And I think one of the things I very much appreciate about the focus The curriculum that Cambridge Public Schools uses is it does promote learning, language, critical thinking in a way that really is deeply play-based. So I think you have to work a little harder to make sure Thank you, Ms. Wilson.

Through you, Mayor, I think what I would say is that every I think developmentally appropriate is the key term and that we have to be vigilant across children's entire schooling experience to make sure that we are not losing opportunities to infuse joy into their learning. It's sort of self-evidently important for three- and four-year-olds, but it frankly follows through across our pre-K to 12-plus programming in CPS. And so while there are There are challenges when there is hopefully across all school communities and so forth.

The data is very clear about the importance of having elements of play based education in the early childhood space. and regardless of any other curricular or programmatic decisions that we make or strategies that we employ, three year olds will still be three year olds, four year olds will still be four year olds and they will need from a socially developmental standpoint, the opportunity to be playing both inside and outside. And so that is a priority and it will continue to be a priority. and whether we talk about fun or engagement The point is that we have to be stoking within children an appreciation for their school environment, and I think that will always be true regardless of any other programmatic decisions we make.

Nolan. Yep, thanks. Right, the key obviously is developmentally appropriate, and I'm not saying it's not something people want to do, and yet it's sometimes tricky in a school environment not to have it be fed into, especially given that there's a lot of pressures from outside to do particular curriculum or test-based learning. And the JKK has always been for some teachers was actually challenging for them to even do that. So as we move forward, I'm... I think we'll all be looking to that and looking to you as leaders to ensure that it's the developmentally appropriate. The other questions, just the next steps, obviously this is Something we've committed to that I've certainly been championing for a while. The New Mexico is something I've been talking about for two years now since I heard that they used their ARPA funding and that they had real good results. So I think it might be to you, Mayor Siddiqui, this is one of the three council priorities for the financial. This is one of the three we've talked about, already established a process for social housing. Are there next steps related to this that will...

Yeah, through me.

I would say I think I've been in communication with the city manager, and others just around How do we make some further decisions as we take feedback from the council? And then there's some outstanding recommendations from the toddler care working group. And how does... Thank you so much. As has past practiced, I think the council and the school committee very much want to be active partners with the Office of Early Childhood and Education.

kind of moving some of this work forward and also talking about some of the changes Superintendent alluded to as far as policy you know the matriculation policy there's a lot of questions and so I think there's some ongoing decisions that need to be made.

Thank you. I just look forward to that and eager to be involved and to see this move forward and really excited to be here. Thank you. I yield.

So I have Councilor Al-Zubi and then Councilor Zusy.

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor, I just want to share that this is a fantastic presentation. It seems like as a city, we've spent just about a decade building something positive, and I think that's beautiful. The research that you also put out there is showing us that universal programs are outperforming means-tested ones. whether through it's reaching more children or stronger peer environments, I'm kind of taking away from what you all shared is that the gaps that we're trying to close are about extending coverage, like whether it's to infants, toddlers, summer care, age. And from my perspective, I don't think it would make sense to significantly alter the mechanisms to what we're building unless it comes with some sort of significant benefit. because I'm someone who really believes in universal childcare. I think something I noted in the presentation was on one of the slides, I believe it's slide 25, you guys point out that

cost savings are limited if means testing is not applied to middle income families. So in that way, I think like similar to the Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler's, I'd be curious to understand the projected dollar savings if we were to go means testing, just to better understand where the justification is for a potential move. and I'm saying that from the framework that if we think about it like limited if means testing not applied to middle income families being it sounds like if We want to generate any sort of meaningful revenue, we'd have to means test pretty far down the income ladder, which then is like counterproductive because we're hurting the families and the diversity we'd want to protect. and in that way the math doesn't seem favorable but then again like I would want to check out some of those projections to see you know where those savings are are they large enough to meaningfully contribute to another avenue for expansion.

And please let me know if I've misunderstood that. I'd also be curious based on this presentation like from my colleagues like what are the conditions in which you know they'd support means testing and kind of like where that bar of trade-off is. The one question that I'm sitting with right now is Fundamentally in America, we've set that K-12 is universal. So this kind of journey to universal childcare is pretty new. I'd imagine that the capacity building over the past few years through the public school system has been an adjustment. So I'd just be curious to hear about that capacity building. What's it been like? and any major barriers that you guys have found in that process?

Was there a preference as to which one of us responded first on this, sir?

Whoever wants to answer.

Through you, Mayor, to Councilor Al-Zubi, on the basis of the question was sort of how have the Cambridge public schools focused with respect to capacity building in recent years. What I would say, and some of you have heard me say this before, is that while there were some shifts in terminology and shifts with respect to the administration of our registration and assignment process, The actual composition of our student body with respect to the age groups that we were serving is consistent both before the Cambridge Preschool Program implementation and afterwards. to some degree more so potentially than other partners. for the Cambridge Public Schools, it's pretty consistent. Having said that, the point that I think it raises that I just want to mention is that as the The city determines its policy objectives related to early childhood.

The Cambridge Public Schools is, I think, somewhat uniquely situated in that our pre-K to 12 plus mission is consistent and will remain regardless of what the city's policies are with respect to the early childhood space. And I say that because as Councilor Al-Zubi says, it was a societal decision that Long predates all of us to make K-12 essentially a universal service that's provided in municipalities. It is hardly a service that we have perfected, as I know members of both bodies here are aware. and I do think that part of the challenge that we have as we continue to strive toward continuous improvement with respect to our early childhood programming to make sure our students have the most solid Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

is continuing to improve and continuing to bridge, narrow, and ultimately eliminate the achievement gaps that have persisted for far too long. So I think that it is a wise strategy and I am grateful to the Cambridge community and those of you who have led it. to have put your values into the type of investment that you have. And it's one of many things that positions the Cambridge Public Schools for success. But I feel like I have a responsibility to note that from our organization's perspective, This is the foundation, but there's an entire house that we're trying to build that we have not yet gotten to the point where we are serving all students in a way that they are entitled to be served. And that is work that continues without question.

Thank you. Oh, go ahead. I don't know if...

I'll add, if you don't mind. Just in terms of capacity building with our community-based providers, the idea was that when the community-based providers joined the CPP system, they were already meeting Thank you. Thank you. This summer. That is not to say that we don't put a tremendous amount of resources towards quality building. So I mentioned earlier in the presentation my colleague behind me who does a lot of work with teacher development, coaching, Director Mentoring, and then our Workforce Development Team that offers various professional development opportunities throughout the school year. So there's a lot of opportunities there for teachers to continue to build

Thank you very much. Some of those policies we didn't know we needed until we ran into situations and realized we needed to have a clear policy so everybody understands, families, and our providers how we're handling certain situations, attendance, for example, or transfer requests. If we have families coming to us asking for a transfer request, Those types of things are the kind of things that popped up during that first year of implementation when we realized we needed to spend a lot of time really developing very clear policies and worked with our partners across the city and also the CPP Program Advisory Board that I mentioned that played a really instrumental role in putting those policies in place.

Councilor Al-Zubi?

Thank you. I really appreciate both of your thoughts on that and again just like as an opportunity for us to strengthen our public school system as well because I mean like you said like this is to some extent outside of us like a societal thing in which we didn't appreciate that you know those ages deserve a level of dignity when it comes to learning and fun and joy I also just before I yield I want to acknowledge that in our budgeting process we combined pre-k with after school so I don't want after school to be lost in the conversation in the sense that There's a gap to close there with providing for low-income families. I know that you guys mentioned that there's going to be some sort of recommendations from the working group this summer, so I'll also be looking forward to checking that out in terms of how we take those next steps. I'll go ahead and yell.

We'll go to Councilor Zusy.

Thank you, Chair Siddiqui. I want to congratulate my colleagues and the city staff also for bringing universal pre-K into being. I think it could make all the difference for our kids and it's going to be really fascinating to see the impact on kindergartners. We're probably already getting some feedback from kindergarten teachers on how universal pre-K is bolstering. All kids. So great work. I reached out to a mom on my street and I asked her, how is this program? And she said, it's great. She just wishes it could be expanded from nine to six. And that made me think back on when I was a mom and working. I was working part-time. I was an older mom, so I started with childcare.

Two days a week and then I moved to three, but I really needed, I was a consultant, I needed a full day to get my work done. So I think, and what was really important to me was to have something that I could depend on and that was reliable and of course that was of very high quality. So I think the easier you can make it for our parents who are already like The ease will make all the difference for the program. I think if it really would only cost a million dollars to provide free preschool for three-year-olds, it would be wonderful, but I wonder whether... I wonder if some parents aren't making a choice not to do universal pre-K because they want the slots. They want to make sure, like if their kids start

At age three, they probably have to continue with the program for four, right? So my real question is, on page 23, When you're projecting a horizontal and vertical increases, have you come up with numbers for what this would cost? And again, I feel like ultimately if there's a way we can expand universal pre-K horizontally and vertically, it would be absolutely fantastic. We do need to become flush again before we'll have the resources to do that. So we'll have to do it incrementally. But do you have some numbers associated with what the cost implications might be for these horizontal and vertical expansions.

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor. We have not cost modeled that out to serve all three-year-olds. So the analysis that we did over the last year was looking at the income screening or the means testing of current CPP students. So we have not done that model in terms of if we were to go to universal for all threes, what that would cost. I think with the infants and toddlers, That one is far more complex because it isn't just a matter of, I say just a matter, that in and of itself is complex, providing tuition support. because there would need to be a number of other policy solutions there as well, including making sure that there are enough seats. Currently, there are not, particularly for lower-income families. There are not enough seats. There would need to be workforce policies in place as well because one of the things that infants and toddler providers within Cambridge and beyond Cambridge really are struggling with right now is staffing. really a staff shortage for infants and infant and toddler teachers in particular.

and then looking at the tuition. So I think whatever recommendations we eventually come up with, we'll probably look at a number of those things, maybe stabilization funds as well for some providers. So we can certainly cost model out at this point I think that alone probably will not be a sufficient solution.

Yeah, I think this we've been working on, or you've been working on this for 10 years. I think we've got another 10 years to really broaden its reach. So I think we'll be making incremental expansions to the program as we also nurture Our workforce so that we have child care providers that can provide the preschool and the after school care which are so essential. My second question was on slide 15 when we're talking about feedback from parents about the program. Again, I feel like the highlights of my son's education were in preschool. He was at Peabody Terrace, which was extraordinary. and then he went to an amazing liberal arts college.

So I feel like, anyway, I feel as though if we're paying $30,000 a year to provide students with quality preschool I want more than 79%, 72%, and 76% being very satisfied. I feel like... We really should have 95% of the parents very satisfied. So I'm glad to hear, I don't know if this is a question or a comment, but I'm really, I think it... It's an extraordinary investment that we're making in our kids with these programs. Anyway, I'm glad you're working on making them even better than they are already. But I think that's absolutely... Thank you.

Thank you. But I encourage you to make it even higher. And I don't know if you have a response to that.

Through you, Madam Mayor, I agree with you, and I think a lot of the quality of the work that we are doing is made to ensure that all of our programs across the city are high quality. We feel that we are essentially putting the city's stamp of approval When we are saying that these programs are part of CPP and we want to make sure that families feel that no matter what choice they make across the system, they are guaranteed a high quality experience.

Thank you so much. I yield.

We will go to Member Hudson. Member Hudson? Hello, can you hear me? Yes.

Yes. Wonderful. What plans are there to track this first cohort as they move through the elementary and upper school grades and understand how they're doing academically? Part of the argument here is better student outcomes, an implicit part of the argument for early Childhood care is also just the economic burden that it places on families and the logistical burden it places on working families. But to that academic point, have there been plans? made to track these grades? And if so, what are they?

Thank you, Mayor, and through you to Member Hudson. I think what I would say, at least amongst the cohort who either enter or remain with the Cambridge Public Schools, we will continue to accumulate all of the data that we have and there will be over time opportunities to cross reference and see if there are distinctions between Children who have participated in the Cambridge Preschool Program and otherwise, and I imagine the data will be disaggregated even further with respect to the and so forth. The totality of the benefits that children are experiencing. I think it's an important point and one that is another sort of example, I would say, as to how the Cambridge Public Schools sort of

I'm not sure I would say pronounced because I think the community as a whole relies on the public school system to provide that foundation for an educated citizenry. Our interests are perhaps more pronounced in that ultimately we will have the clearest data set with respect to accountability as to how we continue to serve students throughout their educational career. and I think the reason that member Hudson's point is an important one is that it is frequent that we look at age groups where we have We have significant empirical data with regard to the educational experiences that we are having. The state assessments begin in grade three. Our screeners essentially start in kindergarten and first grade and we look at that data

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. and so on and so forth. So I think it's important and I would say that we will continue to be a data-based organization so that we can identify the full benefits of this program and as importantly, understand where we have to pivot in order to serve students better.

Thank you, through you. Again, I appreciate the answer. If there's anything that we could do now in order to make sure that five years from now, 10 years from now, we are not having the same conversations we're having now about prior investments, Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us. So to the degree that we can think now about that and also put in place plans now that will kind of come as close as humanly possible to automatically executing in 10 years and saying, now let's really go back and look at it. I think that's helpful. I don't have the foggiest clue how to do it.

but I'm sure others have better ideas than I do and I think that's important. My second question is about the providers. I know that the first year was rocky in terms of the provider experience. And we touched on that. You touched on that a little bit in the presentation. Some remaining pain points for providers, like if I'm a community provider running one of these programs, besides the cutoff date for parents to change their mind and things like that, what are remaining pain points and what are we doing to address those?

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor, I think the two biggest pain points that we're hearing most frequently, one is enrollment. And as I mentioned earlier, the enrollment challenge is just simply there's more preschool seats in the city right now than there are preschoolers. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. are paid what they should be paid, regardless of which sector they work in.

That is the pain point, and what we know is that some of our providers have greater resources and greater access to resources I mentioned the Children's Funding Project a little bit earlier. That's part of the work that we are doing with them to figure out what is the right place to land with that particular policy and how can our office to make sure that their educators are paid appropriately and paid what they are deserved. Without putting them out of business and making them incur an unreasonable financial burden.

Member Hudson. Thank you, A. Yeldon. Councilor Flaherty.

Thanks for the presentation. This was really good. Come a long way from talking about Chapter 766, haven't we? I think it's important that we seriously consider, as Councillor Al-Zubi said, not applying a means-based test to middle-income families because My family was one of those 67 when my son was denied admission to a program. And we bore the cost. And it was a very, very significant cost. Ultimately, my wife decided... Just not to work anymore and I can tell you that the pre-K that my son received at that time helped him develop

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I mean, this is an exponentially different experience than many of my friends have with their kids. So I'm here to tell you as a young parent, or then a young parent, that this is real. This is a very significant service that the city is providing to young middle-income families that have children in this age group. and it's essential and it's making a big difference.

Thank you. All demographics, all kids, special needs or not, and how they turn out at the secondary school level and even college age. You know, what happens after graduation in Cambridge. My question, and I'm thinking about the connectivity between this program and the cost. and some of the other things we're funding in the city and I think there is money that we could use maybe from the Department of Transportation and all the money that we're realizing there and the overages and we could talk more about that later but my question is

of the, I think, 925 kids, or 858 accepted, 67 that were not allowed in at the three-year-old level, 925 kids. Does that number seem low to you in the city of Cambridge? from the Cambridge residents survey that we examined a few months back and how people that are living in Cambridge now tend not to have children. and that's maybe having an impact on this and probably when we think of that and the connectivity between our housing policies and my view is the impact that will have on the increased and Will families actually live in the City of Cambridge? Look at, I've got no argument that I can even think of that would say we shouldn't invest in this because we should.

And I'm here to tell you it made a big difference in my son's life. and it costs a lot of money and if the city is able to do it, let's do it because it's very difficult for middle-income families. But is that a small number? The 925. As we look at grades going forward all the way to the senior and high school this year, does it seem like a small number?

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor. I'll start, and then if any of my colleagues also want to add to that. We, as you can see in the presentation, have really good data on who we're serving in CPP. We honestly don't have such great data about who we're not serving. So it's one of the questions that we have been asking ourselves and trying to figure out is who are we not serving in CPP and why? Is it simply that their families have made choices to keep children home, to keep children with a grandparent or to go to a different school or something like that. We just don't have that data. So the best that we have is looking at the citywide census data which only comes in five-year tracks. So it doesn't even pinpoint at the four-year-old level how many four-year-olds exist in the city. The numbers that we're serving in CPP, if we take the census tract data and we sort of make the assumption that if we divide that by five, that the number of children are evenly split,

In that age range, we are serving close to what we would expect to be all of the four-year-olds in the city, but that is a very, very imprecise. So it is something that we have talked quite a bit and continue to talk about in our office is how do we get better data about who's not. who are not serving and why. We have members of our staff in partnership with colleagues at the Center for Families and others across the city have really focused extensively on making sure that we're getting the word out and particularly getting the word out to communities who may not have ready access to information, making sure that all of our materials are translated in the primary languages in Cambridge, making sure that we have folks that are in communities engaging with families that might not be coming to our website just to see what's going on. So made a lot of efforts to make sure that we are accessing families and making sure that families have the information that they need.

But I think your question is a good one, and we don't have a great answer about that yet. And I don't know if, Ian, if there's anything... If not, okay.

Councilor Ferry. And through you, Madam Mayor, and then I'll... I'll yield, and we can begin summer. But to that point about who we're not serving, and you answered the question about the communication strategy, I think that's probably the most important part about this because I wonder, and I really have thought about this, I wonder what segment, what nucleus of people who live in the city of Cambridge that have children at this age are not aware of this. Thank you very much.

These are informed people and I wager that that percentage is a small percentage of the people who have children that might be available or might be age-appropriate. to be available, to be eligible for this program. So to whatever way we can improve our communication strategies and directly to those people, I think this is Just such an incredible program. I celebrate and I congratulate you and I yield. And I do want to mention that Ms. Olson, and I'm so impressed by this presentation today, I'm sure as much as everyone else, is a Boston College graduate. And it's so...

It's so refreshing to have a Boston College person here rather than a Harvard person leading the discussion in such a studious and articulate way. So thank you for that.

Does anyone else on the Zoom have any comments, questions? In a few minutes. Member Harding has his hand up. Whose hand? Member Harding. Go ahead, Member Harding.

Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Yeah.

Go ahead.

Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate the depth in which you spent to bring this to us. And as all the exuberance and... Accolades and excitement as Mr. Flaherty, I want to congratulate you for pulling this off in its early stages. So thank you all, the city manager and the council and all who supported, including the school committee folks. I had two quick questions and I can't see... Thank you so much for joining us. The satisfaction piece. The people that I talk to, it's always about accessibility. To your point earlier, it's about sort of how close it is to the You know, where people live. But I had just a question around two questions. One is, are we providing transportation like we would if this were a school setting to all of the families or?

And with that, do we have an equal amount of seats spread across the state? access to fields and the inherent conversation that you know geographically some resources are just in certain places so could you just tell me if we are providing transportation and if If that's a main driver in how people pick the slots, what does that look like?

Through you, Madam Mayor. Yes, thank you for that question. The answer to the transportation is we do not provide transportation at the preschool level in addition to the costs. Thank you very much. Thank you. to make sure that CPP providers are evenly distributed across the city and are particularly heavy in heavily residential neighborhoods. And it is a process that we used Last year I mentioned that we reduced the number of for-profit classrooms. and our community and one of the things that we looked at is where they were located to make sure that we are not reducing the number of classrooms in areas again that are heavily residential with a lot of young children and particularly where we have a lot of priority families. and then as we go into this RFP process that is happening this summer, that is one of the main considerations.

We want to make sure that we are not overly saturating a particular community with CPPCs and we also want to make sure that the number of CPP seats is aligned with the number of young children and again with special consideration to priority families in the community.

Member Harding.

Thank you for that, Madam Chair. I just think that while I get the financial reality, and I think we know on the school side we're spending a lot of money transporting kids, but I do think... If we're forwardly thinking about this, think about that as somewhat of an obstacle in terms of supporting families. The reality is that if you're getting up already and you're putting you know a kid or two and leaving them at a bus stop and you're on your way to work to wherever that job is and you now have to get your kid who may not be in your neighborhood to a child care slot i think it's a tremendous burden on families and I understand that we are in the space we're in and this is early in the program, but I do think we need to start thinking about obstacles such as that. And I know that, you know, the other big thing is that child care at this level is super expensive. So I don't want to

Act as if, you know, I don't understand that, but I do think from an equity perspective, we need to think about what we might be able to do to subsidize or help build in some type of transportation if it's at all possible. I yield, Madam Mayor.

So we're at time. I'll just wrap up. I think there's some outstanding questions around 67 seats potentially. There's outstanding questions around evaluation. What does that look like? There's a lot of questions around what is the process to get to some of these answers that we need. So it'll be ongoing. I do have questions, but we're out of time. So I think most of my colleagues have I think we've answered or asked, but we'll follow up directly with you, director, but I think the council and school committee A lot of work on this and I think they'll continue to be very involved. And just as you've laid out on your slide, we also look forward to partnering with you to shape the next phase of the city's Early Childhood Priorities.

So with that, we will go ahead and on a motion to adjourn by Councilor Flaherty, we'll do a roll call.

Vice Chair Zubi. Absent. Member DePaulo Santos. Absent. Member Harding. Absent. Member Hudson. Absent. Member Jay Kumar.

Yes.

Yes. Member Siddiqui?

Yes.

Yes. Chair Weinstein?

Yes.

Yes. May I ask who the male voice was that said yes? Was it Member Harding? It was Member Hudson and Member Jay Kamar. I think we both spoke at the same time, but we both said yes. Thank you. Councilor Al-Zubi? Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor Azeem? Yes. Yes. Councilor Flaherty? Yes. Yes. Councilor McGovern? Yes. Yes. Councilor Nolan? Simmons, absent. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler?

Yes.

Yes. Councilor Zusy? Yes. Yes. Mayor Siddiqui? Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent. Good night, everyone.

It's summer!