In part one of this look at childcare in Hawai‘i, I wrote about the part of our childcare system that never shows up in a State government spreadsheet — my 4:30 p.m. pickups as "Jiji" among thousands of grandparents and aunties providing "free kūpuna labor" worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The next question: Who in the Hawaiʻi State government is actually responsible for overseeing all of this? (Hint: No one.)
Early childhood touches education, health, human services, workforce development, and economic growth. Without a central structure, these responsibilities easily become fragmented across government — one office tracking licensed slots, another administering subsidies, a third running public pre-K, with none of them necessarily talking to each other, let alone to the informal network that fills the gaps everywhere formal systems fall short.
Other states have recognized this coordination problem and responded in strikingly similar ways, even when their local politics and funding mechanisms look vastly different.
New Mexico created a dedicated Early Childhood Education and Care Department and paired it with a 2022 constitutional amendment — approved by over 70% of voters — that redirects a share of the state's Land Grant Permanent Fund into early childhood programs on a permanent, self-sustaining basis. New Mexico also wrote a crucial policy into its eligibility rules: grandparents raising grandchildren can access childcare assistance without meeting standard work or school requirements. That is a state drafting kinship care into law rather than relying on it as free kūpuna labor.
Voters in Multnomah County, Oregon, approved a dedicated income tax on high earners to fund universal preschool, directing funds specifically toward raising early childhood educator wages. The rationale was simple: you cannot expand access to care with a workforce leaving for better-paying jobs elsewhere. Fund the wages first, and the available seats will follow.
Washington, D.C. folded pre-K into its per-pupil public education funding formula, treating early learning as a foundational grade level in the city budget — a decision that helped it achieve the highest early-learning coverage in the nation.
These jurisdictions took different paths — some built cabinet-level agencies, others modified tax codes or school funding formulas. But the broader lesson for Hawaiʻi isn't to copy any single model. It is simpler: Every one of these places decided early childhood was important enough to organize government around, rather than leaving it scattered across disparate agencies.
If early childhood is a top State government priority in Hawaiʻi, it deserves a dedicated agency, a permanent funding mechanism, or at minimum a unified mandate tasked with overseeing the complete system.
Hawaiʻi should seriously consider establishing a Department of Early Childhood.
However, I would strongly advise against starting with another lengthy strategic plan. First, we need to build a comprehensive map.
Hawaiʻi should create a real-time Early Childhood Dashboard that brings the entire ecosystem together. It should tell us: How many keiki are there, and where do they live? Who cares for them during the day? Where are the licensed childcare slots, and where are the geographical deserts? What does care actually cost families relative to local wages? How many parents could return to or advance in the workforce if care were accessible? How much informal care is being provided? And ultimately — are Hawaiʻi's children entering kindergarten ready to learn?
This dashboard would also allow Hawaiʻi to benchmark itself against peer states — not for the sake of comparison, but because New Mexico, Multnomah County, and D.C. all had to answer these same questions before taking action. None of them had perfect baseline data, but they moved forward using the best available numbers. Hawaiʻi does not need absolute precision before starting; it needs enough clarity to stop guessing.
A dashboard is an active management tool. If Hawaiʻi's childcare affordability is worse than comparable states, we should know. If parental workforce participation is lagging due to coverage gaps, we should know. If specific regions — like Windward Oʻahu or the Neighbor Islands — face acute shortages, the data should reflect it. If a new state initiative works, the numbers should prove it. If it fails, we should pivot.
The objective is not another static government website full of statistics nobody outside an agency reads. The objective is to move the needle for local families.
Only after we understand the full structure of our childcare system should we decide where to invest state resources:
- Maybe Hawaiʻi needs to construct more licensed childcare centers.
- Maybe it needs to raise worker compensation — as Multnomah County demonstrated, pay scales, not just seat capacity, are often the primary bottleneck.
- Maybe it needs to expand public preschool by integrating it directly into the Department of Education’s budget, rather than leaving it to survive one legislative appropriation cycle at a time.
- Maybe we need expanded after-school care or employer-matched options.
- And maybe the data will reveal that free kūpuna labor is so load-bearing that Hawaiʻi should establish a family caregiver tax credit, a stipend, or an eligibility carve-out like New Mexico's, formally recognizing a contribution the state has relied on for free.
I do not have all the answers yet, and that is the point. We shouldn't select the solution before we accurately measure the problem.
Tomorrow at 4:30 p.m., I will be back in that preschool parking lot. I might be answering an email from a client in New York, and then I will fasten my granddaughter into her car seat.
Her preschool teacher will have done her part. Her parents will do theirs. Jiji will do his.
Hawaiʻi needs to see how all these pieces fit together. Before we decide what to build, what to subsidize, or whom to pay, we should first understand the childcare and early-learning system we already have.
Ray Tsuchiyama’s series explores one central question: How does Hawai‘i use the wealth and land it already has to create its next economic future? He can be reached at ray@guild.im
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