An Open Letter to Governor Roy Cooper

Here's the dill pickles; I lost my shit.

I mean like... 100% LOST IT

It was a combination of sleep deprivation, postpartum hormones, the isolation of being a stay at home parent, and the absolute double suck of my c-sec requiring a second round of minor surgery to finally heal. And two littles. AND we got COVID mid February. All of this to explain why my last post was over two months ago. I just bailed. Crawled into my shell and completely bailed. I did find myself at a buisness meeting that I THOUGHT was church though, bawling my eyes out, sporting a t-shirt and jeans, hair in a messy bun and the infant in tow while everyone else was sharing about their entrepreneurial enterprises. That wasn't humiliating at all.

BUT I'M BACK BITCHES! I bought new eyeliner at the Walgreens today and everything. Very exciting stuff. And what brought me back was a letter I wrote to the Governor of our beloved state when he visited my daughters early learning center two weeks ago. Please to read below:

"Greetings Governor Cooper,

I am so grateful that you’ve visited my daughter’s early childhood education center on

your trip here to Western North Carolina. Born premature in 2020, she was diagnosed as

developmentally delayed in 2021 and given a "developmental day voucher". This means our family was able to enroll her in one of our excellent early learning centers and a county managed subsidy would pick up the $1,100 a month tab. We have witnessed an exponential shift in the one and a half years she has spent under the care of these educators and I, for one, have become a fierce advocate for universal access to quality early childhood education based on that personal experience. She will lose her voucher in August, and while I would love for her to continue at the center until she goes to kindergarten, we, (as a family of 4 living on a single income) cannot afford to continue to send her there, despite the obvious good it is doing her.

Part of the reason why we are unable to do so is because I, as a college educated mother working on a master’s degree, was expelled from the workforce during the pandemic and now must reenter on the lowest end of the pay scale. If I accepted a $40,000 a year job our family would make just enough to render us ineligible for childcare subsidies meaning that more than $24,000 a year of my take home pay would be spent sending my children to the early learning center so I can go to work. This has stymied my reentry into the workforce, which is something that the current population survey shows is affecting over 60% of the 4 million Americans women who also have two kids at home under 5.

Governor Cooper, if you would like to see more North Carolinians get back to work, then I implore you to consider more funding for early childhood education centers.

You can do this by funding childcare subsidy assistance for parents of young children, and by extending the grants that support paying educators what they deserve. I imagine that when Natalie, Claire, and Hilary were very young, you wanted the people in charge of their education and care to make more than the average Chick-Fil-A worker, and I am no different. My daughter’s classroom educators are trained professionals with the education

and professional development necessary to make sure that they are creating a classroom that is developmentally appropriate for my 2-and-a-half-year-old while simultaneously providing the groundwork for a successful entry into kindergarten. This is invaluable work, Governor Cooper, and if you agree, then I ask you to put your money where your heart is.

Fund early childhood education. Make North Carolina a universal access state.

Thank you,

Tiziana Severse (proud mom of a toddler in classroom G).

But here's the kicker, and the purpose of this post. I found out (after writing this letter) that there are TWO bills before the NC general assembly RIGHT NOW that will do just that!

1) House Bill 343/Senate Bill 292 will extend grants to pay early education teachers better wages. This is important because as it stands the poverty rate for early educators is more than SEVEN TIMES as high as for public school kindergarten teachers. Ya'll - come on. The people in charge of our infants and toddlers deserve better than that.

2) House Bill 343/ Senate Bill 288 will increase reimbursement rates and enact a statewide child care subsidy market floor - meaning they will make a statewide adjustment to how a family's financial need is calculated that reflects the current costs of living, and stabilize it state wide so costs for childcare don't fluctuate so wildly county to county.

And what does this have to do with you dear reader? First of all, this...

https://ncleg.gov/findyourlegislators

Go here to find out who your NC state house and senate representatives are (if you don't already know) and CALL THEM. Let them know that you, as residents of their district, support these bills and you would like their vote to reflect that. This is literally the heaviest artillery in our arsenal as citizens - they won't know what you want unless you tell them.

Now, if you live here on the edge of Buncombe County like I do, I did that heavy lifting for you (you're welcome).

Senator Julie Mayfield - 919-715-3001

House Representative Caleb Rudow - 919-715-3012

In the immortal words of Janet Jackson, "send it in a letter baby, tell me on the phone" . Postcards, e-mails, phone calls, all of it. Do all of it ya'll.

Please help - lend your voice to the vote and encourage other North Carolinians in your circle to do so as well.

Sincerely,