Public investment in low-income kids is a hard sell. Lots of people believe that their parents don’t vote and maybe even don’t count — hey, they got themselves into this fix by having babies they can’t support. Poor kids are not a popular cause, like the arts or civic improvements.

So it’s nothing short of glorious that Rhode Island has managed, over the course of three years and with a few strategic investments, to reduce the number of families in poverty by 6 percent. That’s huge. Six percent of Rhode Island’s population of 1 million is 60,000 low-income people doing better financially. For the first time in memory, the state is not the poorest state in New England, but only the second poorest, above Maine.

We need to honor this achievement while we can, since it is gravely threatened by the state’s budget crisis.

According to Kids Count, in 2004, fully 21 percent of the state lived at or below the poverty line. The federal government’s notoriously stingy threshold for poverty is $21,200 for a family of four. So more than a fifth of the state’s kids were living with chronically anxious parents, in troubled, often violent neighborhoods, and driving their teachers nuts with their inability to focus on math facts, instead of problems at home. Reducing poverty doesn’t remove these conditions, but greatly improves the chances they’ll get better.

In 2005, Rhode Island’s poverty rate dropped to 19 percent, and in 2006 to 15 percent.

OK, so how?

No one knows for certain. But Elizabeth Burke Bryant, director of Rhode Island Kids Count, stresses that “the childcare program has been a critical part of our success story.” So let’s look at the Starting RIght program, to see how one smart investment ripples productively throughout the low-income community.

Initiated in 1998, Starting RIght recognized that welfare recipients could never make the transition to work without help with childcare. So the program offered full childcare subsidies to working parents at or below 100 percent of the poverty level. Parents making up to 225 percent of poverty paid a co-pay on a sliding scale.

But there were very few childcare spots available. So the program offered incentives to more people, mostly women with children of their own, to open licensed childcare businesses, by offering RIte Care, the state-provided health care, to those who did not have health insurance. The program also paid close to market rates. Availability ceased to be a problem.

But notice that the childcare subsidy first circulated directly to a cottage industry within the low-income community itself. Starting RIght got more parents into the work force, and it generated jobs. Cash assistance (old-school welfare) dropped by a whopping 72 percent.

Then in 2002, a series of grants launched Providence’s Ready2Learn (R2L), a group dedicated to increasing the reading readiness of low-income children. The program’s director, Joyce Butler, had been a daycare advocate for many years, and had no interest in building traditional preschools. Instead she invested her agency’s limited resources in training the people already on the front lines of caring for kids. R2L created and taught center-based, home-based and Head Start workers how to enrich the literacy skills of young children. R2L gave them books to take back to the kids.

So, however accidentally, the subsidy also helped improve literacy among the childcare adults. And no one predicted how much pride and joy these women would take in learning how to do a better job of their critically important work.

The true test of R2L’s mission came in 2005, when the children who’d had the benefit of trained preschool workers began entering the Providence schools. Until just recently, Providence gave its in-coming kindergartners a test called the PALS (Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening) to assess reading readiness. As the R2L kids came to school, the percent of new kindergartners meeting the test’s benchmark jumped suddenly from 55 percent to 64 percent. The following year, the proficiency inched up to 68 percent, which is above the national average for the PALS.

Obviously a better foundation improves the chances for a child’s academic success. If the public schools themselves could keep up that momentum, the intractable achievement gaps between low- and high-income kids would have a chance to close. And that success would further reduce poverty in the future.

A little daycare subsidy paid off, again and again. It’s a good investment.

No doubt other factors contributed to the significant drop in Rhode Island’s poverty rate. Raising the minimum wage had to help, though a full-time job at minimum wage still grosses only $15,382.

However, last year the state cut the income level for eligibility to 180 percent of poverty. This tossed 3,000 kids out of the program. The cuts rocked and downsized the childcare industry. Some newly ineligible parents gave up trying to work altogether, or made funky arrangements with whomever was available, with or without a license. Ready2Learn’s rolls dropped. Further cuts are being discussed now.

Granted, Rhode Island is in dire financial straights. But increasing poverty will certainly not save the state money.

Burke Bryant says, “We fear that families who were starting to get a toehold will have a difficult time making ends meet or working their way up the job ladder, if they’re worried about their children having safe, quality care.” Ever the optimist, she adds, “I have hope the subsidies will be restored. The state departments [DCYF, DHS and RIDE] really came together on this one, and the state’s leadership does understand how important it is.”

I hope she’s right.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.