This is a guest column written by John Engquist. The viewpoints expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Business Report or its staff.
Louisiana employers are absorbing a $1.3 billion annual hit. Not from regulation. Not from litigation. From a workforce that can’t show up. The reason is straightforward: Parents can’t work when they have nowhere safe to take their children.
This isn’t a family problem. It’s a business problem. And right now, it’s our problem. Gov. Landry opened this legislative session with a clear charge: strengthen Louisiana’s economy, remove barriers to work and build a workforce ready to meet industry’s demands.
Those are the right goals. But they cannot be achieved while we ignore the single largest barrier keeping Louisiana workers on the sideline. Louisiana already ranks near the bottom nationally in workforce participation at 58%. Business leaders across the state will tell you why: child care. When the system breaks down, workers don’t show up. When workers don’t show up, employers absorb the cost. When employers absorb the cost, Louisiana loses. Right now, over 116,000 children under the age of four lack access to quality early education programs. Not because their parents don’t want to work.
Because the infrastructure isn’t there to support them. Louisiana is not starting from scratch. More than two decades ago, this state led the entire South with the creation of LA-4, delivering quality pre-K to over 80% of at-risk four-year-olds before most states had even entered the conversation. That was a decision to compete. The creation of the Early Childhood Education Fund signaled that Louisiana wasn’t done—that we understood the next and harder frontier was infants and toddlers, the most expensive and most undersupplied segment of the entire pipeline. That is Louisiana’s distinct advantage. And it is what this session must protect.
The question before this session is whether we protect that progress or let it erode. Other Southern states are aggressively expanding access for four-year-olds. Louisiana already won that ground. What we’ve built for infants and toddlers is where no one else has gone. Nowhere else in the pipeline is the gap between supply and demand more acute. And nowhere else does inaction cost more.
Louisiana has 278,565 children under five and a business community that has already proven the connection between child care and a working economy. We organized. We invested. We showed what local leadership looks like. Now this session is an opportunity for the state to build on what our parishes have already started.
We built the interstate system because we understood that commerce doesn’t move without roads. Early childhood education is in the same category of infrastructure. It is the on-ramp.
Without it, the workforce doesn’t move either. Louisiana has earned its position. The work of the past two decades is real. But progress is not the same as solved, and in a session focused on economic growth, leaving this investment off the table isn’t caution. It’s a choice to give back ground we worked hard to gain.
The data is not in dispute. The cost of inaction is not theoretical. The only question is whether Louisiana leads or follows.
