Colorado House OKs changes to early childhood program

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(The Center Square) – An effort in the Colorado House to prevent what Republicans argued amounted to “mission creep” in a bill on the state’s Department of Early Childhood failed on Thursday before the legislation passed on second reading.

Another vote will come later for the yet-to-be-scheduled, third reading of House Bill 26-1259. If the bill passes again, it would go to the Senate for consideration.

The bill would change several parts of state law relating to CDEC. The changes include lowering the age of eligibility for children in a mental health program from 8 to 6, requiring certain identifying records be kept confidential and making permanent a licensing exemption for informal child care. The bill is “Department of Early Childhood Clean-Up.”

Rep. Emily Sirota, D-Denver, said the legislation is meant to make technical changes and “clean up” the law that established Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood.

Sirota sponsored legislation in 2022 that established the department as well as the universal preschool program.

“We are now at a point where we have identified some things that maybe got missed or lost in the shuffle and require some clarification and other programmatic needs that have come up in the course of this new department and new program that we are just need to making simple tweaks to,” Sirota said on the House floor on Thursday.

Republicans said they have concerns over “mission creep” in the department and introduced several amendments to the bill to prevent that from happening. All seven proposed amendments were rejected by the House, which has a Democratic majority.

One amendment would have made a behavior health representative on the department’s commission serve in an advisory and not a voting role.

“I know the title of this bill say ‘clean up,’ ” Rep. Scott Bottoms, R-Colorado Springs, said. “This amendment will actually help it be kind of more like that. This bill actually has some policy changes. To me, policy change is not ‘clean up,’ and so this amendment theoretically could lighten those policy changes, although I don’t think enough.”

Other amendments proposed keeping records of children confidential and a prohibition on collecting data “related to a child’s political beliefs, religious beliefs, or social or ideological identity.”