Embracing The Next Chapter

Beth Bye Talks with Alex Dueben

“I felt like the work was done there,” Beth Bye said in a recent conversation about her decision to retire last year. “I wanted to get back to working with people and working with families.”

Bye retired in 2025 as Commissioner of the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood. She was appointed to the role in 2019 by Governor Ned Lamont, following fourteen years in the Connecticut General Assembly as both a State Representative and State Senator. 

For decades, Bye has worked in early childhood education, and “retirement” is not quite the right word to describe the next stage of her life. When she made the announcement, Bye said that she wanted to get back to caretaking and working with people and has gone back to school to get her Master of Social Work.

“This came out of spending time in hospitals with Tracey,” Bye said of her wife, Dr. Tracey Wilson, who died of cancer last year. The two were the first gay couple to marry in Connecticut on the day it became legal in 2008. “After spending all that time in hospitals and caretaking and dealing with everything, I really wanted to help families who were going through this. I hadn’t intended to go back to school, but it turns out that hospitals don’t let random people give professional advice to families in these situations. Which is probably for the best,” Bye said with a laugh.

Bye described her political career as an almost accidental thing, which is odd considering how long and how much substantive change she’s helped to accomplish in her tenure, but from running for school board because of concerns over her children’s education, to her run for the state house which was inspired by her representative’s comments during the debate around civil unions in the state, for decades now, her career and her focus has always been on children and early education. 

In the last few years of her time in government, she was working on the Early Childhood Education Endowment, which will greatly expand childcare and pre-K in the state, including increasing salaries for workers, which will begin in 2027. “I feel like I had seven years to work at the office and build toward this. Certainly the last three or four years in office, we were working towards this, so there was a lot of time to structure it and think about how to do it well. To look at other states and cities and what had worked, and not worked, and learn lessons from there. And I’ve been engaged nationally for thirty years. We’re unique, but we’re not so unique, and so we could learn a lot,” Bye said.

“I feel like passing it and getting the funding was a critical step. There were people who were part of building it who are still there who understand the goals. I don’t I don’t worry at all. It was the governor’s initiative. I think he’s really committed to it. It was time. There were good people. I really had the draw to go back and work directly with children and families. I’d done that for many years of my career,” Bye said. “The framework is there and we have great advocates and a great commissioner and great staff at OEC and incredible early childhood professionals that are going to make sure this happens.” 

I made the point that stepping away as Bye did is the mindset of a teacher or social worker, where the work is important, but people will continue to do the work after just as they did before, and continuity is important. “Exactly,” Bye said. “And I think in leadership, if you’ve done a good job, things will carry on when you leave. If things fall apart, it means you didn’t set up an infrastructure that was going to outlast you. Certainly this infrastructure will outlast me, and I’m proud of that.”

All of which is true, but it also speaks to how Bye has always approached her life, and even as she talked about research projects and writing papers, she sounded excited.

“I never intended to run for public office. It just happened because of my concerns around first my kids’ education and then around civil rights and human rights issues. So I had a detour from my caretaking jobs as a teacher and really had felt like I had time to give back still,” Bye said. “I wanted to get back to direct care after my wife passed away. I was doing a lot of caregiving and I really missed caregiving. That’s just how I’ve always been in my career. Whatever calls me next is where I go.”