On a Monday back in 2006, Charlotte Brantley arrived in Denver to interview for the top job at Clayton Early Learning.
She was up for a high-profile job in Washington state at the time, but quickly called the recruiter there and said, “Take my name off the list. I think I’ve found my new home.”
That’s how Brantley ended up at Clayton, where she’s spent nearly 13 years leading one of the state’s most visible and influential early childhood organizations.
“I just had this sense that this institution was poised to go to the next place,” she said.
Now, Brantley is preparing to retire, probably sometime next summer.
In addition to running a highly rated preschool and child care program that are part of the national Educare network, Clayton provides training and coaching to other early childhood providers, runs home visiting programs, conducts research and advocates for early childhood causes.
Brantley, who has two adult sons, started her career as a college instructor and preschool teacher in her native Texas. Soon after, she began working on early childhood policy in Texas state government, and later the federal government, as a Clinton administration appointee.
Brantley, 66, sat down with Chalkbeat to talk about the most difficult decision she made at Clayton, her frustration over lagging public support for early childhood programs, and her thoughts on governor-elect Jared Polis.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your first early childhood policy job was for the state of Texas. What was that like?
I didn’t know a thing about policy but apparently the woman who hired me thought I could learn. When I walked in the door I was handed a piece of legislation that had passed, to say that Head Start, child care and Pre-K should learn to play well together from a policy and delivery standpoint. Nobody had any clue how to do it or what to do. I was handed that and told, “You go implement this.”
You’ve worked in many roles during your career. What’s your experience at Clayton been like?
What I’ve loved about being here at Clayton is everything I’ve ever done, it happens here. The advocacy, the policy … we’re part of Head Start. We’re part of the national Educare network. We get to advocate at the Capitol. We do research and training. It’s been a real highlight of my career to be here.
Can you share an accomplishment from your tenure at Clayton?
We didn’t have any positions that were focused on advocacy work when I came here and now we have a team of two plus myself. I would love to be able to put more money into that. I now have a board that gets it, that our being a player in state-level advocacy is highly valuable to the field at large.
In what you describe as the hardest decision of your tenure, Clayton closed a second child care site in 2017 that had opened a few years before in far northeast Denver. What was the fallout like?
Families were furious with us. It was just a firestorm. We actually had to have extra security on the campus for a while. I understood it. I’ve been a parent of babies too when I was working full time. It’s very stressful. People felt betrayed.
What did the closing say about the broader early childhood landscape?
The fact that we had to close that school is like a canary in the coal mine, that we are not investing enough in early childhood education as a country. We could not sustain that second school. We could have reduced its quality significantly and we were not willing to do that. By that, I mean we could have put more kids in each classroom and had fewer teachers and less qualified teachers and paid them less.
You said you hoped public investment in early childhood programs would have increased further by now. Looking ahead, what’s your outlook?
The voters just said no, again [to Amendment 73, a statewide ballot measure for education]. They said no to Amendment 66, [a 2013 ballot measure for education]. There are bright spots of local communities [raising taxes for early childhood], but until the whole TABOR mindset goes away — and maybe it never will go away in this state — people are not willing to have their taxes raised.
It’s disheartening to me, having been in this field as long as I’ve been in it. And there have been tremendous gains with the amount of public money going into early childhood. But the fact that we’re OK as a country with paying our teachers so little they qualify for food stamps — I don’t want to give them food stamps, I want to give them a better wage so they can afford to go buy food. We shouldn’t make them go through a welfare door to sustain their family.
How do you feel about governor-elect Jared Polis’s plan for universal full-day preschool?
Polis has talked about Pay For Success [financing for preschool]. That’s been done in Utah. I am a little skeptical, I will say. Number one, philanthropy will only agree to pay for something for so long. I don’t know where the money comes to pay them back. I’ll be really interested to see what he does and whether or not, with a [Democratic-majority] state house, he’ll be able to do anything more with that.
What early childhood development do you feel hopeful about?
It’s really the opposite side of the same coin. The fact that we now have a governor who ran on a platform of early childhood. I’m incredibly excited about that. Just the fact that he put that as one of the front-and-center pieces of his platform is awesome because I think it will keep the conversations going until we figure out more viable solutions to all of this.
Why is it so important to ‘figure out’ a way forward on early childhood?
The demographics of the country are changing, both in terms of the backgrounds of people and also the fact that the people who are my age — the Baby Boomers — we’re going to all die out. If you’ve got fewer young people coming into play, what that means is it’s all the more critical that every one of our kids is being given a solid start. A free public education has got to start at birth, for those families who want it.
What do you plan to do after you retire?
I have grandchildren in Florida. I’ll spend more time with them, and I have another son in Houston. Beyond that, I want to go back and learn to do photography again. I have already joined the Rocky Mountain Prep [charter school network] board. There might be another board or two I’m interested in. I’m so passionate about this work, I probably won’t be able to step away 100 percent.