What if we told you that a relatively small investment today could result in all of the following down the road:

• significantly reduced incarceration rates
• higher educational attainment
• higher average household income
• lower suicide rates
• higher life satisfaction scores

Would you take that bargain?

A newly released Community Health Needs Assessment confirms what most parents in this community know, that we do not have nearly enough childcare and early childhood education available in Mesa County.

The study, which is performed every three years by Mesa County Public Health in partnership with local hospitals, focused on social determinants of health, according to reporting by The Daily Sentinel’s Sam Klomhaus.

“Big picture, we know that health doesn’t start at the doctor’s office,” said Heidi Dragoo, who leads research and planning at Mesa County Public Health.

Dragoo said the study found there is a lack of childcare and early childhood education available for families, especially in certain parts of the county which have been deemed “childcare deserts.”

We’re glad to see both the City of Grand Junction and Mesa County already taking steps to address this problem. The city has budgeted to provide childcare for its workers in its 2022 budget. The County Commissioners are planning to take an even bigger bite out of the problem investing millions in an early childhood education center located in Clifton.

The county’s effort is part of its community campus project, which will include a new community hall, an early childhood education center and a childhood training center, all with child daycare services.

The benefits of expanding access for early childhood education are enormous, as we listed above.

Getting Mesa County families access to these programs will have huge downstream impacts and the payback will far exceed our investments in this area, but there is more that could be done.

The Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act failed to gain enough support in the Senate to pass, but it proposed tens of billions of dollars a year in funding to increase the number of childcare and early childhood education facilities, increase pay for workers in that industry and subsidize the cost of care for families.

The childcare programs were a large part of the bill, but nowhere near the $1.5 trillion for the entire package. As Democrats try to restart their legislative agenda, we think pulling the childcare portion out and passing it as a single provision makes sense.

Providing for greater access to childcare doesn’t have the partisan hangups of other aspects of the bill, like the provisions on tackling climate change. Some moderate Republicans, especially ones who have named childcare as an issue they are interested in like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, could make this a bipartisan effort.

This is a critical issue facing Mesa County, Colorado and the country as a whole. We urge our Senators to make this a priority and get it done. In three years when the next Community Health Needs Assessment is released, we’d love to see positive measurable progress on this issue.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel editorial board