In The News

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, a rate that has not gone up since 2009. As the current wage stagnates, its purchasing power erodes against inflation. The average living wage today—defined as an income threshold that provides basic shelter and food and keeps a person above the poverty ...

A candid debate over assigning police officers to schools is overdue in Connecticut. Like the best debate topics, this is not an easy one. The impulse in some quarters to expel police as a backlash against law enforcement would be inappropriate. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, a flurry of maj...

Child care has long operated on precarious economic footing, but the pandemic pushed the industry to the brink. Before the pandemic, Connecticut faced a shortage of 50,000 infant and toddler child care slots, meeting the need of just a third of young children, the state has estimated. Care was unaf...

At Connecticut Voices for Children we focus our research, policies and movement building on the intersectional issues of affordable housing, criminal justice, fair employment and tax reform because we know that a child’s well-being is rooted in their family’s economic security. We have been th...

Click Here for Video Clip Connecticut was already 50,000 child care slots short before the pandemic. Now it’s at 72% of its pre-pandemic capacity. With parents headed back to the office, a new report looks at whether they will be able to afford to go back to work or find a slot. “Connecticut has...

About 20% of Connecticut’s child care centers have permanently closed since the coronavirus pandemic, and preschool capacity has dropped by more than 10,000 slots since 2020, leaders of the nonprofit Connecticut Voices for Children said Monday as they released a new report on early childhood durin...

Connecticut Voices for Children (CT Voices) released a report that examines the structural barriers to access, quality, and stability of early child care in Connecticut. The report, “The State of Early Childhood During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” offers six short-term and seven long-term recommendat...

Psychologist Lauren Ruth explains how students of color are disproportionately harmed when schools use zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. Ruth is director of research and policy with Connecticut Voices for Children, which published a report last year on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline in ...

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While many Americans watched in horror as family separation policies tore families apart at the border, many of us didn’t know how frequently our laws tear apart families of color here in Connecticut. When judges sentence parents to incarceration, they can unknowingly sentence children to family s...