Amy Bolotin always loved taking care of kids. When she was a child and accompanied her older brother on a babysitting job, she was the one who jumped in and interacted with the baby.
“Everybody I said I would be a teacher,” she recalls, “but I knew I didn’t want to work in a traditional elementary school classroom environment.”
Back then, Bolotin’s family faced challenges.
“I grew up in what was not a typical family structure, but we had a good support system. We moved to Newton [Mass.] because my mother knew she could work and we’d be in a good school system and have access to public transportation and have one set of grandparents close by. It’s like there was a village there.”
Later, instead of pursuing education as a career, Bolotin spent several years working in retail, where she learned to appreciate the importance of creating a cozy, structured environment as well as the power of storytelling—about a person, a place, or a special item. Then she started researching graduate schools and found the infant and parent development program at Bank Street College of Education.
“At Bank Street, a whole new world opened up to me. It was the zero-to-three component. It wasn’t learning to teach reading and writing. It was child development and parent development. Once I found that world, that was where I wanted to fit in.”
Bolotin got a job working at Bank Street’s Family Center. After graduating, Bolotin’s life was a mix of career and family. She worked in Early Intervention, then she had her own children. It was after a family move from Connecticut to Boston that she landed at the JCC (the Jewish Community Center) of Greater Boston, where she started as an age group coordinator, overseeing the infant and toddler classrooms, then climbed the career ladder, becoming the assistant director and then the director of the JCC’s Early Learning Program.
Ask Bolotin what she has learned over the years, and she brings up foundational ideas.
“It’s the lesson I learned in graduate school, that 90% of brain development happens in the first five years; that all learning happens in the context of relationships. To support a child, you have to support the relationships and the people around that child. It’s the most important thing. And what has always been true is that the rest of the educational world mostly doesn’t acknowledge or value this. Caring for and teaching young children has always been a forgotten, dismissed service field. It’s not thought of as educational.”
Today, Bolotin is raising the profile of early education and care as the director of the Frances Jacobson Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel—and as a member of the fourth cohort of Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network.
“Our monthly advocacy network meetings are great because everybody in the cohort is knowledgeable and passionate. It might seem like we’re doing very different work, but we’re not. We’re doing it in different contexts. And it’s really valuable professionally to know that there are other people doing the same work, people who are making things happen in seemingly simple and small ways that are also concrete, cool, and impactful.”
“I’ve felt a renewed energy for finding ways to speak out about my expertise. It’s given me a funnel for talking about important things that nobody wants to hear. And there’s the context of resources and like-minded people and avenues for finding a place for this voice.”
“I’ve also learned that it’s easier than I thought to engage people in conversations about what I think is important.”
One example of what Bolotin is talking about:
“We don’t have enough money. Childhood programs are not supported in the way they need to be by local, state, and federal government. And I’m tired of dancing around that. There are so many early educators who are struggling in family child care programs or underfunded programs that serve children with vouchers, and there’s Head Start.
“I’m very lucky. I work in a program that serves a somewhat more privileged population, and still families struggle to afford to pay. That’s why it’s important to articulate the idea that tuition cannot cover all our operating expenses, and it never will. That should not be the expectation.
“If early childhood education and care were funded in the same way that elementary education is, and if we had a state or national policy on paid parental leave, there would be a whole different landscape. Having paid parental leave would lower the demand for infant care, for example.”
For her Advocacy Network project, Bolotin is encouraging parents to become advocates for the early childhood field and for themselves.
“Part of this work is sharing information with parents about the real costs of early education and care, about what tuition pays for, and about other sources of financial support. I also share opportunities to advocate, lobby, and understand policy. Parents can be out there explaining that the model we have is not tenable. They can share their needs with policymakers.”
Bolotin is reaching parents through a blog published in a weekly newsletter. And she is interested in possibly holding a forum with parents and legislators to discuss these issues.
What does Bolotin want policymakers to know about her work?
“I want them to understand the cost—not just the financial cost, but the emotional cost and cultural cost—of families having to bear the financial burden of early education and care. I want them to understand what it looks like when it’s done right, when classrooms have the staffing and resources that they need, and what it means when children are supported in their growth and their development, and what that means for their families.”
Those emotional and cultural costs include the energy demands and exhaustion of being a working parent, and how a more supportive culture could make families lives easier.
“It’s a quality of life issue, but on a deeply emotional level. We make people in this country work hard for their comfort and for basic needs.”
“I’ve seen how wonderful it is to watch a family grow and feel good about who they are as a family. That’s so important.”