A new report indicates that pay and conditions for Hawaii’s early childhood educators must be improved dramatically in order to attract and retain enough added workers just to resolve the severe current shortage, not to mention expand preschool access to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032 to fulfill the state Legislature’s directive.

Median hourly wages for early childhood educators are approximately $13 to $17 per hour in Hawaii, well below the “living wage” estimate of $28.50 per hour for the state, says the report by the independent nonprofit RAND Corp.

“Although median wages for child care workers in Hawaii exceed the national median, the pattern is reversed once the high cost of living in the state is accounted for,” the report added. For instance, the median annual pay for a Hawaii child care worker in 2021 was $13.79 an hour, or $28,690 a year, but when adjusted for Hawaii’s cost of living, it became $12.31, or $25,616 a year. That trails the national median of $13.22, or $27,490, the report said.

The report also said local wages and salaries for early educators are not competitive with jobs requiring similar levels of education or experience.

The most important takeaway from the report is that “across the board, we do not pay enough, nor are we doing enough to get enough workers in that pipeline,” Deborah Zysman, executive director of the Hawaii’s Children Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group that served as an advisory group for the report, said in a Hono­lulu Star-Advertiser interview. “We do not have a lot of folks wanting to go into early care and learning, because the pay is abysmal.”

The report, titled “Early Childhood Educators in Hawai‘i: Addressing Compensation, Working Conditions, and Professional Advancement,” is one of the most extensive reports to date on compensation, working conditions, professional growth incentives and more for Hawaii early childhood educators. The Hawaii Early Childhood Educator Excellence and Equity Project, also called ECE3, based at the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Education, commissioned the RAND Corp. to conduct the fact finding.

The RAND research team conducted interviews with a dozen Hawaii and national experts, and nine focus groups with a combination of 50 center- and home-based providers and college students. A survey distributed to state Department of Human Services-licensed center directors and regulated family child care providers in Hawaii yielded responses from 99 directors and 48 family child care providers representing 143 center-based sites.

Attracting and retaining more early childhood educators is crucial given that at last count in 2018, there were only about 3,400 people working as licensed and registered providers with the state Department of Human Services. About double that number actually are needed to provide full staffing for the 60,000 Hawaii children needing early childhood care and education right now, Zysman said.

How many more educators would be needed on top of that to provide full staffing for all 3- and 4-year-olds and how much that would cost is not yet known, said Theresa Lock, an early childhood instructor who directs the ECE3 Project. The report by RAND is meant as a starting point for the state to build a plan and budget, she said.

“As we redesign the early educator preparation programs through higher education, we also need to close the compensation gaps to recruit and retain more highly qualified early educators,” Lock said. “The RAND report is the first step to achieving our vision of building a well- prepared, well-supported and well-compensated early care and education workforce for our children, birth through age 8, and families in Hawai‘i.”

In 2020 the state Legislature passed Act 46 to signal the intent to expand the state pre-K program to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032. This year House bill 2000 allocated $200 million for the construction, expansion or renovation of prekindergarten facilities. House Finance Chair Sylvia Luke has said in the past that building out preschool classrooms to serve about 20,000 children by 2032 would cost about $2 billion by 2020 estimates, or another $200 million annually for 10 years.

Neither measure supplied the resources required to generate the needed workforce, the report notes.

It recommends a three-pronged road map:

>> Stabilize the early childhood workforce through wage supplements, initiatives to address benefits and working conditions, a pilot project testing an improved salary scale, and expanded apprenticeships.

>> Strengthen and sustain the workforce through an improved salary scale, compensation parity and initiatives to address benefits and working conditions.

>> Support workforce policies through facilities investments, workforce registry, capacity for benchmarking compensation, key workforce indicators and other data systems.

Lock said an important next step underway is the convening of a Compensation Implementation Plan Task Force, composed of representatives from multiple agencies, to borrow lessons learned from other states and create pilot programs for improvement.