K. Lee Tirpak

My journey in early childhood development began at the University of Connecticut and continued at Boston University, where I earned my degree in elementary education while taking as many early childhood classes as I could. Boston had more opportunities in the field than Connecticut, and I worked at the Harvard Law School Child Care Center for several years in my first job. After getting married and graduating, I moved back to Connecticut and worked at a child care center in Storrs, where I became a teacher director in a small community program. I got very excited about public policy work through my involvement with the National Association for the Education of Young Children. When I moved to Florida in the 1980s, I started a child care resource and referral program in South Florida, working with Work Family Directions, an organization from Boston that was partnering with IBM and other Fortune 500 companies to help employees find quality child care. This was during a time when there was a lot of child abuse and neglect even within facilities, and regulations were still developing. I spent 18 years doing child care resource and referral in Palm Beach County, getting involved in policy work to put better regulations together for families, children, and providers. During the 80s and 90s, I was part of efforts that brought the Child Care Tax Credit and expanded the Child Care Development Block Grant. I also earned my business degree during this time. After 18 years, I worked for 13 years at a coalition in Broward County, helping providers understand and afford quality childcare while working with the state to find funding. Now I'm at the Achievement Centers for Children and Families in Delray Beach, Florida, where we offer quality programs to under-resourced families, serving children from one year of age to middle school, plus a teen program and family support program. I work on quality assurance, making sure all the accountability pieces are in place. It's been like a circle of life coming around. The day-to-day is not my trouble anymore, so I'm able to watch over what's going on, look at the data, see how we're progressing, and I'm a mentor now too, which is a lot of fun. The biggest challenge we face is that we've put accountability pieces in place, but we still haven't put the money in place to pay the teaching staff what they deserve. These folks work 10 hours a day, hardly get a break, and are supposed to be getting further education, yet they're the ones getting food programs and Medicaid when we really should be finding ways to pay them so they can take care of themselves and their families.