Edelman: “We’ve got to begin to change our priorities”

“Invest in our children, in good and bad times.” That was the message that came from Marian Wright Edelman as she stood before a packed crowd in the Old Judiciary Room of the State Capitol on April 30.

Edelman is the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) and has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. The mission at the CDF’s “Leave No Child Behind” is to ensure every child has a “healthy start, head start, fair start, safe start and moral start.” She was an invited speaker of House Speaker Christopher Donovan and Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams and the event coincided with legislation passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate – the first of its kind in the nation – addressing the impact of the recession on children. The bill awaits Governor Rell’s signature.

“Thirty-five thousand children in the state are expected to fall into poverty during this recession – that’s $800 million in lost earnings,” said Rep. Karen Jarmoc, Children in the Recession Task Force co-chair. “We learned so much and why it’s important for Connecticut to be a leader on this issue.”

“Karen and I worked together to bring the bill out on the floor – we double-teamed them,” said Rep. Diana Urban, co-chair of the task force with Jarmoc. “We turned it into a situation where they couldn’t say ‘no.’”

Taking care of the state’s most vulnerable – its young children – is a moral decision, said Sen. Donald Williams.

“Investing in their future pays off for all of us,” said Williams. “We have to intervene early to make a difference.”

In introducing Edelman, Williams called her a champion of women’s, civil and children rights.

“What’s good policy for children in the recession is good policy for children NOT in the recession,” said Edelman as she took the podium.

“No child should suffer the lottery of geography or lottery of birth,” she said, as she spoke of meeting a young boy who was involved in rioting shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The boy told Edelman he had no future and Edelman has set out to prove that boy wrong.

Prevention and early intervention is cost-effective and helps save money, she said, and high-quality early care and education helps ensure that every child gets the education they need. She noted a person is basically sentenced to social and economic death if he or she can’t read. Statistics quoted by Edelman note that a child is born into poverty every 32 seconds in the United States and a black boy has a one in three chance of going to prison; a Hispanic boy, a one in six chance. These stats are driven by poverty and racial disparities.

“We’ve got to begin to change our priorities,” she said. “We know what to do and how to do it,” she said, pointing to things such as prenatal care and prevention programs. Connecticut spends three times more on prisons than it does on children, she said. The country pays more on one second on the military than it pays a Head Start teacher.

“We don’t have a money problem; we have a values problem – we have a voice problem,” said Edelman. It’s time to change the terms of the debate and invest in children because children simply cannot wait. It’s time to create a level playing field for all children.

“Children are key to our future – we need to invest in them; we cannot afford to not invest in them,” Edelman said. “We can’t cut children.”