The Long Beach City Council has adopted the 2024-2029 Early Childhood Strategic Plan, with an emphasis on holistic family health and expanding services for the city’s youngest residents.
This plan is the second iteration aimed at improving the health and life of children in Long Beach ages 0 to 8. The original plan was created in 2018 “to address the fractured Early Childhood Education system in the Long Beach community,” according to City staff. The 2018 plan was meant to serve the community’s needs through 2023.
In 2019, Long Beach created the Early Childhood Education (ECE) Strategic Plan Oversight Committee, who led the creation of the new plan by conducting 13 focus groups made up of families and educators. According to the plan, there are 32,474 children between the ages of 0 and 5 living in Long Beach. Of this population, 27% of children under 5 years old live in poverty, and 91% of those are “children of color,” according to the most recent plan.
“We know that the best and most important upstream work we can do in terms of anti-poverty, anti-violence, all of the things we’re trying to Band-Aid now within our community, can be done best and most effectively in the early childhood years when we take families with little ones and wrap them in those services, so that they grow up in a community that’s free from violence so that on the back end, 10 or 15 years later we’re not reinvesting in those families and those communities where we could have done the work early on,” said Councilmember Megan Kerr.
Much of the new plan focuses on bringing these families and children into supportive services by increasing accessibility and increasing awareness of Long Beach’s Early Childhood Education programs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in six children ages 3 to 17 have a developmental delay, disorder or disability. However, only 42.8% of children in Los Angeles County undergo developmental screenings.
Plans to bridge this gap in needed services include increasing language access and physical accessibility. An increase in communication among separate entities was also identified as a way to coordinate screenings for children, by bringing together the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), the health department, perinatal services, Child Health and Disability Prevention programs and the ECE Committee.
Services like the Early Learning Hub connects families to childcare and early education opportunities through a singular online service. The program was made in collaboration with the LBUSD, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Early Childhood Education Committee.
The Committee stated that increasing awareness and use of this service is one of their main goals, along with bolstering the site to include referrals to wrap-around services. Other goals include building up the city’s early education workforce, which took a dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from the City.
“The early education workforce is foundational to providing the high quality, nurturing experiences children need in their early years. It’s essential that we not only invest in the children we serve, but also in the educators that make that work possible,” said Sara Seriano, chair of the Early Childhood Education Committee.
Main goals in the plan are broken down as follows:
- Families: Support strong and resilient families.
- Access: Increase access to early care and education services via a mixed-delivery system.
- Workforce: Support the development of a strong early-childhood serving workforce.
- Quality: Strengthen the quality of early childhood programs and services across the city.
- Environments: Support safe, healthy and accessible environments for children and families.
- Partnerships: promote Partnerships that align ECE services and integrate the voices of children and families.
Early Childhood Education services will be funded through its 2025 budget, roughly $2.17 million:
- $78,000 from the City’s general fund
- $1.33 million from the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative
- $278,000 from the Help Me Grow grant
- $480,000 from the county DCFS Educational and Development Services
Director of the Health and Human Services Department Alison King encouraged families to attend the Celebration of the Young Child event on April 26, 2025 to speak up about the services they would like to see.
Residents can read the full Long Beach Early Childhood Strategic Plan here.
