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Boone campaign to aid child care workers with young children

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The Boone Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation has launched a campaign to help early child care workers in Watauga County.

The goal is to raise $50,000 to pay October’s tuition for the children of those caring for Watuaga’s youngest citizens.

David Jackson is president and CEO of the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. He calls early child care employees “the workforce behind the workforce.”

“The goal is, October of every year, we want to do something meaningful in the early childhood space here in Watauga County. Certainly is a hat tip for what went on during Helene,” he says. “But we also know that this is an industry that is incredibly important to allowing everything else to work here in the county.”

Last year, the foundation distributed more than $200,000 toward tuition for children in Watauga’s licensed early childhood centers in the wake of Helene.

Careworkers for the very young face challenges, including low wages and high turnover rates, according to a 2023 workforce study from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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