Nashville early educators are getting help with a cost that can make their own jobs difficult to afford: childcare for their children. A new scholarship pilot is reducing that expense for 23 workers at eight nonprofit centers, with the broader goal of helping the industry retain its workforce.
The Nashville Early Education Coalition announced the Retaining Early Educators as Professionals Scholarship on Wednesday. Its first-year budget is $400,000, supported by The Frist Foundation, the Joe C. Davis Foundation, The Women’s Fund and the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
According to the coalition, participating workers will save an average of $6,300 annually. Rather than paying employees directly, the program sends grants to childcare providers, which must charge their employees substantially below market rates for care. The coalition plans to accept more applications in the future.
The assistance targets a difficult intersection of household and workplace finances. Childcare centers need enough tuition revenue to operate, while families struggle to cover the price of enrollment. Early educators can find themselves on both sides of that problem, earning modest wages while paying for their own children to attend.
For Cia Whitlow, a teacher at St. Luke’s Community House in West Nashville, the scholarship arrived as she prepared for the birth of her second child earlier this year. Even with an employee discount, she estimated that childcare for two children would consume more than one-third of her take-home pay.
That expense would have competed with food, diapers, transportation and other bills. Whitlow learned about the pilot shortly before giving birth and was selected for assistance. She said the scholarship eased her anxiety about keeping up with household expenses.
Whitlow now has a 2-month-old and a 2-year-old enrolled at St. Luke’s. Another scholarship recipient there, colleague Lia White, has a 4-year-old son in Whitlow’s class. Their families illustrate how closely the work of providing early education can overlap with the need to secure it.
Melanie Shinbaum, the coalition’s executive director, said the initiative recognizes that early educators are often parents whose own families bear the financial strain of their work. The coalition, founded in 2024, is working to address an industry in which high prices for families coexist with tight operating budgets and low compensation.
Those pressures can affect the availability of care beyond any individual center. Families need dependable places for their children in order to work, and providers need a stable staff to offer that care. Assistance with employees’ childcare bills is intended to make remaining in the profession more financially workable.
Cynthia Osborne, executive director of Vanderbilt University’s Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center and a professor of early childhood education and policy, said research shows that 90 percent of jobs pay more than childcare teaching. She described Nashville’s effort as an important step toward making those jobs affordable for the people who hold them and attracting the workers families need.
The local pilot also comes as Tennessee works toward a similar approach. The General Assembly passed legislation this year establishing a childcare scholarship, but litigation over its funding stream has kept that program from getting underway. Shinbaum hopes the state can learn from Nashville’s experience and existing efforts in states such as Kentucky.
Osborne’s policy center identifies four broader state policies that can strengthen support for families with young children: expanded Medicaid coverage, paid family and medical leave following a child’s arrival, a minimum wage of at least $10 an hour, and a refundable state earned income tax credit worth at least 10 percent of the federal credit.
Tennessee has none of those four policies. The center notes that state income taxes, which Tennessee does not levy, are the usual mechanism for providing tax incentives to families.
For Nashville’s scholarship recipients, the immediate benefit is narrower and more direct: a smaller childcare bill. The pilot links that household relief to a workforce objective, helping educators continue caring for other families’ children while meeting the needs of their own.