Teacher Appreciation Week wrapped up last month, and Colorado educators got the usual thank-you cards, gift bags and schoolwide breakfasts. Here is what would actually make a Colorado early-childhood teacher feel appreciated: A paycheck that covers rent every week of the year.
Colorado has already invested heavily in early childhood. In 2020, voters passed Proposition EE, dedicating nicotine-tax revenue to early-childhood programs. In 2022, lawmakers created a cabinet-level Department of Early Childhood. In 2023, Universal Preschool launched, giving tens of thousands of 4-year-olds a no-cost seat.
But ask early-childhood educators whether those gains reached them, and many would say no. The median Colorado lead teacher in a state-subsidized childcare program earns $18.50 an hour. The state’s single-adult living wage is $26. Paying the people who care for Colorado’s youngest children $7 below a living wage is not an economic inevitability. It is a policy choice.
Colorado solved access first. It never solved the workforce behind it.
At the state’s 16 colleges that train early-childhood educators, a first-year bachelor’s graduate in human development and family studies earns about $29,700, roughly the same as a certificate holder, and barely half of Colorado’s $54,071 single-adult living wage. Meanwhile, infant care costs families about $21,000 a year: four times in-state community-college tuition and one and a half times CU Boulder’s tuition.
Two states have already shown what happens when policymakers treat childcare access and teacher compensation as inseparable.
Oklahoma did it in 1998 by placing universal pre-K inside the K-12 funding formula, requiring lead pre-K teachers to hold the same bachelor’s degree as kindergarten teachers, and paying them on the same salary schedule. Today, Oklahoma has one of the smallest gaps in the country between early-childhood graduates’ earnings and a living wage. Roughly 70% of Oklahoma 4-year-olds attend district pre-K, and Tulsa cohorts tracked for two decades show gains that persist into high school.
New Mexico used a different set of tools, but reached the same conclusion: Childcare systems improve when educator pay improves. In 2020, lawmakers created the Early Childhood Trust Fund with $300 million in oil-and-gas surplus revenue. In 2022, voters approved a constitutional amendment redirecting part of the Land Grant Permanent Fund to early childhood programs, generating about $150 million annually. The state then adopted a cost model that ties subsidy rates to the real cost of care and builds a $20-an-hour lead-teacher wage floor directly into reimbursement rates.
In 2025, New Mexico lawmakers funded a unified wage scale with a published floor of $66,000 for lead teachers with bachelor’s degrees and experience. By late 2025, after leading the nation in childcare wage growth, New Mexico became the first state to offer no-cost universal childcare under age 5. From 2019 to 2024, New Mexico led the nation in median annual childcare wage growth, rising 64.6% against 32.3% nationally. Over the same period, the state’s childcare workforce grew by 64%, while the national childcare workforce shrank by 7.4%. When approaching the issue systemically, both supply and demand have increased and filled the unmet needs of families and teachers at the same time.
Colorado already has much of the infrastructure needed to follow suit. Voters approved Proposition EE in 2020. Larimer County passed Measure 1B in 2025. Aspen renewed Kids First through 2040. The Colorado Department of Early Childhood holds a $3.85 million Early Educator Investment Collaborative grant focused on compensation redesign. Colorado Child Care Assistance Program wage pilots already provide years of operational data, and the Early Childhood Leadership Commission has mapped much of the remaining policy work.
Voters support all those measures. The remaining pieces are up to our state legislators: a stable long-term revenue stream, statewide cost-based reimbursement and wage-parity benchmarks tied to K-12 elementary teacher pay so that funding reaches educator compensation — improving working conditions for teachers and quality of care and outcomes for children.
There may not be a better moment for Colorado to act. Housing and childcare costs are squeezing families statewide, and affordability has become Colorado’s defining political issue. Investing in the workforce that delivers care addresses all of it at once: It expands labor-force participation, keeps working families from being priced out and pays a living wage to the people doing some of the state’s most essential work.
One week of thank-you cards is not enough for teachers. Colorado already built most of the childcare fix, but the key piece — teacher’s compensation — is still missing. The next two legislative sessions could finish it. A patchwork of local measures helps the handful of counties that can afford to pass them. Raising teacher pay statewide is a job only the state legislature can do — and there’s no time to wait.
Benazir Rowe, of Erie, is founder of Opportunity Data and works in Institutional Research at Front Range Community College in Westminster.
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