With another $19.9 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds soon coming to New Hampshire’s early childhood education sector, officials hope the funding will help combat staffing issues that experts say could cause around half of the state’s centers to permanently close by the end of the pandemic. Early education and child care center officials pinpointed staffing as one of their most pressing ongoing pandemic challenges while speaking with U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., during a virtual roundtable Monday morning. “Wages, as we know, is a huge issue and something that has been blown wide open because of COVID,” said MaryLou Beaver, director of Waypoint’s The Children's Place and Parent Education Center in Concord. “We really need to be coming together and working on a solution to how we’re going to pay the staff we require degrees from what they deserve to be paid for the quality of work that they do and how we encourage more to come into the field as well. I’m really concerned until we can start seeing more people coming back into the field I can’t go to full-time hours, I can’t fill all my classrooms and we’re going to continue to see ... spiraling for a long, long time."