Investing in the Early Years

New Hampshire Has a Significant At-Risk Population

• New Hampshire has a relatively low poverty rate of 12 percent for young children (ages 0 to 5 and net yet in kindergarten). But after accounting for the income required to achieve an adequate standard of living (defined as three times the federal poverty level), 45 percent of the state's young children live in families with income below that threshold.
• Accounting for various risk factors at birth, as many as one-third of all births in New Hampshire could be considered at risk because of low birth weight, low family resources, or other stressors that can compromise healthy development.

At-Risk Children Face Continued Disadvantages

• Children who experience low income and other early life adversities enter school with lower levels of readiness than their more-advantaged peers. These patterns are manifested in considerable gaps in measures of student achievement and high school graduation rates when charted by income level.
• Public investments in young children in New Hampshire include such programs as home visiting in the first few years of life, subsidized child care, and early learning programs. These programs are not funded to reach all income-eligible children and their families, nor are they funded to reach higher up the income ladder where children still face risks in early childhood that could compromise their development. There is also scope to improve the quality of the available programs.

Early Intervention Shows Distinct Benefits

• Analysis indicates that benefits occur in multiple domains from home-visiting models that serve at-risk mothers, begin prenatally, and continue through the first few years of the child's life. The strongest evidence for sustained benefits comes from the Nurse-Family Partnership program. Our benefit-cost analysis for New Hampshire of this program shows a return of about $4 to $6 for every dollar invested.
• Extensive research has documented short- and longer-term benefits of participating in scaled-up high-quality preschool programs, particularly for children in low- to moderate-income families. Our benefit-cost analysis for New Hampshire of a high-quality one-year state-funded voluntary preschool program that would be available to children in families with incomes up to 300 percent of poverty indicates a positive economic return of about $2 for every dollar invested, with an even higher return for a program targeted at the lowest-income children.