Montgomery County outlines five‑year early‑childhood plan, council presses to spend $350,000 left from $1M COA appropriation

Montgomery County officials and community partners on Friday presented updated data and a draft five‑year “common agenda” for early care and education, and described several funding and procurement actions intended to increase the number of publicly funded seats, stabilize the workforce and launch infrastructure projects — even as council members pressed the executive branch to resolve a contract and spending dispute that left roughly $350,000 of a $1,000,000 council appropriation unspent.

The presentations sought to pull together separate strands of work that county staff, Montgomery College, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and nonprofit partners are pursuing to expand access, recruit and retain teachers, and build a more coordinated system for children birth through age 5.

"It's that less than half of our children in our county enter kindergarten ready to learn and thrive," said Kimberly Resnick, executive director of the Children's Opportunity Alliance, summarizing the problem the common agenda aims to address. The alliance presented a slide pack showing about 72,000 children under 5 in Montgomery County, an estimated 33,600 licensed childcare seats and roughly 11,000 publicly funded seats in the county's current mix of programs.

The Children's Opportunity Alliance (COA) recommended targets intended to expand publicly funded seats and strengthen the workforce. "Our target will be to increase the number of children 0 to 5 in publicly subsidized seats ... to a goal of 18,000 in the next 5 years," Resnick told the joint Education and Culture and Health & Human Services committees. The COA also proposed workforce goals — including a 30 percent increase in the…