The accessibility and cost of quality child care is a key factor in workforce productivity in our state. Parents without access to affordable, reliable child care suffer from absenteeism and diminished job performance. Child care costs are the second largest expense for Connecticut's families with young children, and for a lower-income family with two young children, child care costs total a quarter to a third of their total income for the year.3 Investment in child care quality benefits parents, children, and society as a whole. Research on elementary school students in Connecticut shows that high-quality early care and education reduces the number of children who need extra remediation services once they enter school, which results in an immediate return on investment for the state of $10,000-$13,000 per year per child.4 The economic returns extend beyond savings in educational costs. National longitudinal studies on low-income children attending high-quality early education programs found that as adults, participants earned higher lifetime wages, and had a lower incidence of both welfare enrollment and incarceration. Every dollar invested in these programs yielded a return to society of $8 to $17.5 Previous