Two bill packages — one seeking to lower child care costs and expand options, especially in areas without significant child care options, and the other to clarify child neglect and abuse statutes — passed through the Senate Housing and Human Services committee on Tuesday morning. 

Only two of the bills in the first package, which would essentially codify the state’s and adjust reimbursements under that program, which child care benefits to families under a certain income threshold by splitting the cost of an employee’s child care between the employer, the employee and the State of Michigan, faced opposition from the Republican members of the committee, still passing on party lines. 

In a on the bills earlier in March, Sen. Rosemary Bayer (D-West Bloomfield), who sponsored one of the bills in the package, said that the child care system is “in crisis,” which is having a $2.9 billion annual economic impact on the state. 

“The system is shrinking. Families can’t afford or find accessible child care providers,” Bayer said. “Providers are losing employees, shrinking or even closing down, and families are struggling to pay for services if they can find one, with costs often over $1,100 a month.”

“The astronomical cost of child care, coupled with the hoops and hurdles providers must jump through to stay open, continues to fuel a crisis that impacts our families, workforce, and broader state economy,” said Sen. Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing), sponsor of , one of the bills which passed unanimously, in a press release following the vote. “By cutting some of the costs and red tape facing providers, we can start to address the child care deserts that exist throughout the state, especially in our rural communities.”

Prior to the vote, Sen. Sylvia Santana (D-Warrendale) emphasized that, though she supports the bills, she also hoped to see further conversations about the impacts of these bills on businesses offering child care programs — which Sen. Jonathan Lindsey (R-Coldwater) added could call into question the need for MiLEAP, the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, more broadly. 

“If we’re serious and we’re dedicated to making sure that access to child care is available, definitely there needs to be more oversight in this area, and also maybe just a really a deep dive into how these rules in this book reflect when it comes to the actual common sense of child care and those provisions that we’ve put in place,” Santana said. “So I’m dedicated to this package of bills. I don’t mind getting it out of committee, but I do want to have a broader conversation with stakeholders, as well as those business owners who are definitely feeling the pinch of some of the rules within this book that may not make common sense at this point for them to be able to really continue as business owners.”

The other two bills in that package, which would establish a review and appeal process for certain violations of child care organization rules and set in place standards for investigations, passed unanimously.

Both bills in the second package on altering the child abuse and neglect statutes also passed unanimously. They would specify the definitions of child neglect and abuse, specifically excluding “independent activities” like walking or bicycling to school or playing outdoors from qualifying under child neglect and abuse statutes.

“The idea is to make sure that our childhood welfare laws are aligned with reasonable childhood independence and that parents child care providers, first responders, schools, day cares, everyone has the right information about what is neglect and abuse and what is not, so that we can reduce the number of false reports and unneeded investigations,” said committee chair Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), who sponsored one of the bills, in an on the legislation. 

All of the bills will now be reported to the full Senate for a vote.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

was originally reported by Amanda Becker of . .

An effort by Democratic lawmakers to lower snowballing child care costs has a new high-profile front woman: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York representative is now the lead House sponsor of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Child Care for Every Community Act, The 19th has exclusively learned. Ocasio-Cortez replaces original House sponsor Mikie Sherrill, who is now the governor of New Jersey.

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The progressive women’s effort comes as Republicans at the national level are calling for larger American families but have struggled to craft policies that make it easier for parents. Ocasio-Cortez’s backing also comes as Democrats head into a midterm elections cycle where they plan to highlight affordability issues, which polls show are a top concern for voters, including finding affordable child care. High-profile Democratic strategists are already suggesting that universal child care be added to the party’s official policy platform ahead of the 2028 presidential elections.

“We’ve turned childhood itself into a privilege, not a promise. It is time that we give all families the quality, affordable child care they deserve,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement to The 19th.

James Carville, who advised President Bill Clinton, among others, wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times: “When 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good.” David Plouffe, who managed President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and advised the 2024 campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, recently said that universal child care should be in Democrats’ 2028 platform.

Warren is a senator from Massachusetts who made affordable child care the central pillar of her own 2020 presidential campaign, and she has introduced a series of bills in the Senate related to reducing its cost. If enacted, the most recent legislation would result in half of U.S. families paying no more than $10 a day for child care and cap costs for families in higher income brackets. It would use a sliding scale modeled on the U.S. military’s child care program. There is no funding mechanism attached to the legislation.

“In the wealthiest country on the planet, we can’t keep treating affordable, high-quality child care like a luxury reserved for only the richest Americans,” Warren wrote to The 19th.

Democrats at the state and city levels have already made moves to implement universal or reduced-fee child care. In New Mexico, where lawmakers have been working to lower child care costs since 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced last year that the state would as of November.�� In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on the issue, and one of his first moves after being sworn in was announcing a plan for universal child care for children under five. In San Francisco, which has some of the highest child care costs in the country, Mayor Daniel Lurie recently launched a “Family Opportunity Agenda” that would likewise ensure children under five can access child care.

Analysis of polling done by the First Five Years Fund, which aims to build bipartisan support for child care policies at the federal level, showed that voters of all political persuasions believe child care is unaffordable and lawmakers should do something about it. Seventy-two percent of Republican voters, for example, said increasing federal funding for child care was an important priority, along with 70 percent of political independents and 90 percent of Democrats.

While President Donald Trump has said Republicans want to reduce child care costs, and they have aimed to do so by restructuring tax incentives, he has also cut off federal funding for child care programs in states seen as political enemies. During his reelection campaign, Trump that child care is “relatively speaking, not very expensive.” Congressional Republicans have not prioritized legislation related to child care affordability.

“Universal child care is incredibly popular, being able to access affordable child care that works for your child and your family is not a ‘red’ or ‘blue’ issue, it’s something that people across parties experience every single day,” said Julie Kashen, director of women’s economic justice for the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

The Trump administration says it’s planning to freeze about $10 billion in federal support for needy families in California and four other Democrat-run states, as the president .

The plans come on the heels of the Trump administration , citing fraud allegations against daycare centers in the state.

The state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz — who ran for vice president against Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024 — announced Monday he was dropping out of running for reelection. He pointed to fraud against the state, saying it’s a real issue while alleging Trump and his allies were “seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”

On Monday,  that the administration was expanding the funding freeze to include California and three other Democrat-led states, in addition to Minnesota. Unnamed federal officials cited “concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens,” The Post reported.

Early Tuesday, President Trump alleged that corruption in California is worse than Minnesota and announced an investigation.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

He did not specify what alleged fraud was being examined in the Golden State.

LAist has reached out to the White House to ask what the president’s fraud concerns are in California and to request an interview with the president.

“For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said an emailed statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal childcare funds.

“Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office  on social media, arguing that since taking office, the governor has blocked $125 billion in fraud and arrested “criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers.”

Criminal fraud cases in CA appear to be rare for this program

Defrauding federally funded programs is a crime — and one LAist has investigated, , which surrounded meal funds.

When it comes to the federal childcare funds that are being frozen, the dollar amount of fraud alleged in criminal cases appears to be a tiny fraction of the overall program’s spending in California.

A search of thousands of news releases by all four federal prosecutor offices in California, going back more than a decade, found a total of one criminal case where the press releases referenced childcare benefits.

, brought in 2023, alleged four men stole $3.7 million in federal childcare benefits through fraudulent requests to a San Diego organization that distributed the funds. All four pleaded guilty, with one defendant sentenced to 27 months in prison and others sentenced to other terms, according to authorities.

It appears to be equivalent to one one-hundredth of 1% of all the childcare funding California has received over the past decade-plus covered by the prosecution press release search.

Potential impact on California families

The plans call for California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Colorado to lose about $7 billion in cash assistance for households with children, almost $2.4 billion to care for children of working parents, and about $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, according to unnamed federal officials  and .

In the largest category of funding, California receives $3.7 billion per year. The program is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

 ”It’s very clear that a freeze of those funds would be very damaging to the children, families, and providers of California,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives “at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

 ”It is a significant portion of our funds and will impact families and children and providers across the whole state,” she added. “It would be devastating, in no uncertain terms.”

About 270,000 people are served by the TANF program in L.A. County — about 200,000 of whom are children, according to the county Department of Public Social Services.

“Any pause in funding for their cash benefits – which average $1000/month – would be devastating to these families,” said DPSS chief of staff Nick Ippolito.

Ippolito said the department has a robust fraud prevention and 170-person investigations team, and takes allegations “very seriously.”

It remains to be seen whether the funding freeze will end up in court. The state, as well as major cities and counties in California, has sued to ask judges to halt funding freezes or new requirements placed by the Trump administration. L.A. city officials  with that, including shielding more than $600 million in federal grant funding to the city last year.

A union representing California childcare workers said the funding freeze would harm low-income families.

“These threats need to be called out for what they are: direct threats on working families of all backgrounds who rely on access to quality, affordable child care in their communities to go to work every day supporting, and growing our economy,” said Max Arias, chairperson for the Child Care Providers United, which says it represents more than 70,000 child care workers across the state who care for kids in their homes.

“Funding freezes, even when intended to be temporary, will be devastating — resulting in families losing access to care and working parents facing the devastating choice of keeping their children safe or paying their bills.”

Federal officials planned to send letters to the affected states Monday about the planned funding pauses, the New York Post reported. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, state officials said they haven’t gotten any official notification of the funding freeze plans.

“The California Department of Social Services administers child care programs that help working families afford safe, reliable care for their children — so parents can go to work, support their families, and contribute to their communities,” said a statement from California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel.

“These funds are critical for working families across California. We take fraud seriously, and CDSS has received no information from the federal government indicating any freeze, pause, or suspension of federal child care funding.”

This was originally published on .

For the first five years of children’s lives, many families are experiencing child care challenges — which have been at the center of discussions among since Gov. Josh Stein established the group in March.

But gaps in child care do not disappear once children start kindergarten. Finding affordable, high-quality child care solutions for school-age children should be part of the state’s continuum of care, advocates and providers told the task force Monday.

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“The parents I work with don’t experience child care as a 0 to 5 situation,” said Beth Messersmith, task force member and campaign director of MomsRising’s North Carolina chapter. “They experience it as a 0 to 12 situation, or older.”

Many families need care before and after the school day and during the summer months in order to work and keep students safe and engaged. However, four in five students in North Carolina do not have access to the out-of-school care they need, according to from the national Afterschool Alliance.

Students, including young children, are instead spending time unsupervised. About 3% of K-5 students, 11% of middle school students, and 34% of high school students spend an average of 5.7 hours without adult supervision per week, according to the same report.

Providers shared their struggles to serve children despite high demand and the benefits children, families, and businesses see when out-of-school care is accessible. After-school programs face many of the same challenges as child care programs. And some child care programs serving children before kindergarten also serve school-age children when school is out of session.

Families need care that works with their schedules and engages students in activities that support them academically and socially, said Elizabeth Anderson, executive director of the , a nonprofit under the Public School Forum of North Carolina. That requires funding, workforce supports, transportation, and creative partnerships, Anderson and a panel of providers said.

“The more we can create a spectrum of opportunities for birth through grade 12, the more that children and families in our state are going to recognize the positive economic impacts of those investments,” Anderson said.

Report due in December on child care solutions ahead of short session

The governor’s task force will release a report by the end of December with recommendations on how the state should expand access to high-quality, affordable child care. Stein formed the group earlier this year as pandemic-era child care funding ran out and advocates across the state and country called for consistent public investment to meet families’ needs.

The state legislature did not allocate new funding for child care this year and did not pass a new comprehensive budget. Some new funding, though lower than advocates’ and state officials’ requests, was included in budget proposals from Stein’s office and the House and Senate, but those proposals were not ultimately passed.

The main child care legislation that was passed made regulatory changes to loosen staffing requirements and allow providers to serve more children in classrooms with appropriate space and teacher-to-child ratios.

The task force will meet again in February, though a date is not yet set. Ahead of next year’s short session, members on Monday discussed what role the group should play in moving policy solutions forward, including six recommendations in the :

• Set a statewide child care subsidy reimbursement rate floor.
• Develop approaches to offer non-salary benefits to child care professionals.
• Explore partnerships with the University of North Carolina System, N.C. Community Colleges System, and K-12 public school systems to increase access to child care for public employees and students.
• Explore subsidized or free child care for child care teachers.
• Link existing workforce compensation and support programs for early childhood professionals into a cohesive set of supports.
• Explore the creation of a child care endowment to fund child care needs.

As the state faces many funding requests, federal funding uncertainty, and slim tax revenue, members said more legislators need to be aware of the state’s child care crisis and why it’s relevant to the state’s economy and future.

“Maybe we have some more work to do around actually educating and engaging members of the General Assembly to get this on their radar and build more champions,” said Susan Gale Perry, CEO of and task force member.

Funding to address issues of access, quality, and affordability is needed, members said, and considering existing funding streams rather than new ones might be more politically feasible in the short term.

“Certain proposals about, ‘Let’s just go raise taxes,’ are probably not going to be something that is going to get across the aisle agreement, but it does create the opportunity to looking at areas where tax rates are already set, or certain revenue streams are already existing,” said Mary Elizabeth Wilson, task force member and the Department of Commerce’s chief of staff and general counsel.

, who chairs the task force along with Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt, said he and other legislators will be introducing legislation that would double the tax rates on sports gambling.

“If it’s for the children, everybody needs to support it,” Burgin said. “And I don’t believe in gambling … I’m doing it because we need the money.”

Child care fixes would also increase tax revenue, said Erica Palmer-Smith, executive director of nonprofit NC Child and task force member.

“(The generated revenue) would more than cover the overall cost that we would need to put in in the long run to fix the child care system,” Smith said.

‘The gap between 3 and 6 and between May and August’

Many families either do not have an after-school program nearby, do not have transportation to programs, or cannot afford programs, Anderson said in a presentation to the group Monday.

In 2025, 188,295 children participated in after-school programs, but 664,362 additional children would have if they had access, according to the presentation.

Programs are funded through a mix of private grant funding, public funding, and parent tuition. The two biggest funding sources are from the federal government: the , which funds child care subsidies for young children and school-age children up through 12 years old, and through the Department of Public Instruction.

After-school programs exist in all different types of facilities — community-based organizations, schools, faith-based organizations, and child care centers and home-based programs. Anderson described these programs as “folks stepping in to fill the gap between 3 and 6 and between May and August.”

Students benefit when they access out-of-school programs, she said. In the case of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, 72% improved their attendance in the 2023-24 school year, 75% of students had decreased suspensions, and 90% improved their overall engagement in school.

Anderson said the skills employers are seeking align with those that children are gaining from after-school programs, like problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration, communication, and leadership.

“We know that our after-school programs are an important place where children get to interact with one another and interact with mentors and positive adult figures that help them build these skills, which ultimately help them to become more successful, independent earners in the future,” she said.

Like child care programs in the early years, after-school programs not only help children, but allow parents to work. In a survey from the national report, 91% of parents said these programs help them be able to keep their job.

Families face particular challenges in the summer months. from LendingTree of more than 600 parents found this year that 66% of parents who seek summer care struggle to afford it, and 62% had taken on debt to pay for summer care.

Anderson said more conversations on child care should extend beyond the early childhood period. She pointed to that found educational and occupational attainment improvements were higher when children had access to both early care and education and out-of-school care once they entered school.

“It is something that parents need and want,” she said. “I think that we talk a lot about what happens for children birth to 5, but a child does not turn 5 years old and suddenly not need opportunity.”

Subsidy funding and reform would help, experts say

North Carolina is one of 23 states that does not have state level funding for after-school care, Anderson said. Anderson and panelists said funding is needed to retain teachers, increase access, provide transportation, and help families afford care.

Jon Williams, manager of the statewide at the Southwestern Child Development Commission, is focused on increasing the quality of out-of-school care across the state. He said the transient nature of school-age professionals disrupts consistency for children, families, and programs. A burdensome orientation process creates challenges for owners and directors constantly onboarding new people.

Williams said business training for after-school program directors would be helpful. Many have educational backgrounds and lack the business expertise to be successful in a challenging environment.

“They don’t have that financial background that is needed to run a business, and that creates a lot of financial instability,” Williams said. “If they don’t know how to orient or get new staffing in, that creates a huge problem.”

A policy change that several panelists and task force members raised as a need is to align the for child care subsidies across age groups. Right now, families who earn less than 200% of the federal poverty line are eligible for child care subsidies when their children are 5 years old or younger. But for school-age children, the threshold lowers: families must make less than 133% of the poverty line.

That disrupts care for families whose children need after-school care going to kindergarten or for families with multiple children of different ages who would prefer to send all of their children to one program.

A statewide subsidy floor, which is one of the policy priorities of the task force, would also help school-age care providers, said Erica Simmons, vice president of youth development at YMCA of Catawba Valley.

The floor would raise the per-child rate that child care programs receive to the state’s average rate. In cases where programs receive more than the average rate, they would continue receiving the same amount.

“(The floor) would make it a little more equitable,” Simmons said.

She said it costs similar amounts to provide care at her licensed programs in rural and urban communities. But the subsidy rates are much lower in rural areas.

“We have the same requirements for staff, we have the same programming requirements,” she said. “There’s no difference in the amount that we spend per program as an organization. However, there is a very big difference in what we are able to capture for subsidy. So there’s a big funding gap.”

Williams said there was a gap of $8,000 for one program just last month between the cost of services and the subsidy reimbursement. Annually, some programs in her network accrue around $100,000 in funding gaps for caring for children through subsidy.

Programs also receive subsidy payments retroactively. Changing the timing of funding could relieve some of the financial burden from programs, Williams said.

“I get paid via subsidy after I provide the services, and that’s a huge problem if I’m already in the red,” he said.

“… When we think about the mental health of our administration and our directors, that just adds fuel to the flame,” Williams said. “And it creates another gap, a 30-day gap, where I can say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and then that care drops off. So we have to rethink how we get that money out in the state. We have to rethink the rates at which they are given.”

Panelists also shared that liability insurance rates have risen drastically. Williams said her program’s rates have increased by 44% over the last year, a trend among child care providers overall.  from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) found 80% of respondents saw their liability insurance costs increase in the last year and 62% reported difficulty finding or affording it.

Updates on care for public employees, workforce supports, and funding models

The task force has been split up into three subgroups which have been studying how to move toward the group’s six recommendations.

Samantha Cole, child care business liaison at the Department of Commerce, said a subgroup focusing on expanding child care access for public employees has looked at models across K-12, community college, and UNC-system schools to create child care solutions.

They studied on-campus early learning models at Buncombe County Schools’ , North Carolina A&T University’s , and at Haywood Community College.

“We really see that there have been a lot of successes that have come about in these three examples and others, but they’re hyperlocalized,” Cole said. More external communication is needed for other campuses to understand how and why peer institutions are offering child care.

Madhu Vulimiri, senior advisor for health and families policy for Stein’s office, said the subgroup focused on workforce compensation and supports has been studying strategies to ensure early childhood teachers have access to non-salary benefits like health insurance.

They have studied the possibility of adding early childhood teachers as an eligible population for , subsidizing ACA marketplace premiums through state dollars, and educating early childhood providers about the recently launched Carolina Health Works, which offers options for groups of small businesses.

The group is also studying how existing workforce supports like TEACH scholarships, child care academies, and apprenticeships could be more seamlessly tied together to strengthen the early childhood profession. They have requested that the Hunt Institute create a map to demonstrate what supports are available in what counties.

“That will help us see more holistically, where do we have resources and where are there gaps, and help us hopefully target future resources that we might have to expand those statewide,” Vulimiri said.

The third group, which is focused on financing, has been studying several states’ approaches to endowments and other funding mechanisms for child care, including Nebraska, Connecticut, Arizona, Montana, and Washington, D.C. They aim to develop a paper that weighs the options for North Carolina and analyses costs and benefits of each.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Starting Nov. 1, New Mexico will offer free child care to every family in the state. There will be no fees to pay and no income limits to sign up, according to the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

State leaders and newspapers across the country claim it as the first universal child care paid for by a state.

People who support the program say it will help parents keep their jobs, give child care workers better pay, and make the economy stronger — adding it will also help the state’s youngest children who get the care.

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“The well-being of kids is tied to the well-being of the adults in their lives,” said Dr. Philip Fisher, a professor of early childhood at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. “And adults’ well-being depends on their economic circumstances.”

But there’s a problem. New Mexico might not have enough child care centers to actually take care of all the children whose families want help. There simply aren’t enough spots available, especially for babies and families living out in smaller towns.

The state has gradually helped more families with child care assistance since 2019. By 2023, families making 400% of the federal poverty level were able to get help, opening the program to more middle- and higher-income families.

Right now, about 27,000 children across the state get child care, according to the Legislative Finance Committee’s  on Early Childhood. Officials think another 12,000 children will join the program when it becomes universal.

But the committee found, as of this year prior to the new subsidy going into effect, there were only enough openings for about one out of every three babies under age two. The shortage was even worse in rural counties where almost no licensed infant care exists.

The number of child care spots dropped by 3% between 2019 and 2023. That’s mostly because the number of people providing child care in their homes dropped by half, according to  from the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Most of the drop  in unlicensed home-based care—places that were simply registered as providers.

Not counting those home providers that closed, the numbers would show more licensed child care centers, which have higher quality ratings from the state. But home-based providers are more likely to offer care at night or in a family’s native language. With so many of them gone, families who work night shifts or want someone who speaks their language may have a harder time finding the right fit, according to the institute. It’s worth noting that the share of assistance going to families at or below the poverty line fell by nearly 3% between 2019 and 2023.

State officials know there are not enough child care options and have announced a $12.7 million fund that offers low-interest loans to build new centers or fix up old ones. They plan to ask lawmakers for another $20 million. The growth will focus on care for babies and toddlers, low-income families, and children with special needs. The state is also working with businesses and schools to open more locations and is trying to recruit new people to run child care in their homes.

To keep workers, state officials plan to pay child care centers more money so they can cover their real costs. Programs that pay staff at least $18 an hour and stay open 10 hours a day, five days a week will qualify for incentive rates.The state plans to boost child care in underserved communities by making sure workers get fair pay and by using data to make smart choices, said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

Fair wages can help child care workers think of early education as a real career instead of just a temporary job. That means they can build lasting relationships with the children and families they serve, Groginsky said. “We use data to drive our decisions. We just completed a supply-and-demand study with interactive maps showing which parts of the state have the largest gaps. That will guide how we fund applications through the new loan program.”

Even with those plans, questions remain about who will benefit most and how much difference the system will make for children.

While supporters say universal child care is a win for families and the economy, Republican lawmakers  that removing income limits means taxpayers will now help pay for child care for wealthy families.

Legislative Finance Committee analysts have also questioned the program’s impact on learning. Their 2025 report found that while child care meets an essential need for working families, it does not have the same effect on kindergarten readiness as public pre-kindergarten programs.

But Fisher said the benefits go beyond teaching ABCs and 123s.

Stable, predictable, caring relationships are the foundation of healthy learning and development, he said. That matters more than exposing young children to math or reading skills that they will pick up anyway once they start school.

Healthy child development has more to do with relationships than what kind of child care you use, he said.

“There is not like a prevailing amount of evidence that having a child in a kinder care situation is going to lead the child to be a college graduate [versus] having them cared for by the lady down the street or in your apartment complex is going to lead them to end up, you know, incarcerated,” Fisher said.

Fisher also questioned whether the market alone can give families what they need.

“It’s a broken market,” he said. Parents can’t afford what high-quality care actually costs, employers don’t usually help cover it, and providers often don’t make enough to live on.

When adults are stressed about money, he said, it directly affects children.

“It’s easy to imagine that if you’re an adult who’s taking care of a young child, that if you yourself are worried about not having enough food for you to feed your family, or you’re skipping meals so you can feed the children, or you’re worried about eviction, or you can’t pay for health care, that those things weigh on you and that they take away from your ability to really buffer your child from what’s going on around them,” he said.

Groginsky said the stakes are high.

“The first five years is the fastest period of human development, with over a million new brain connections per second in a baby’s brain,” she said in an interview. “It’s those responsive, nurturing relationships that drive positive outcomes.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

Therefore, the response begins at City Hall.   

Education leaders and equity advocates reject the idea that standing up for students and protecting funding are mutually exclusive. Both can and must be pursued. Every child in New York City deserves to feel safe, seen and supported in school. The new administration should be guided by that commitment. 

EdTrust-New York has expressed to work closely with the Mamdani administration to fulfill the long-standing promise of free, universal child care for children age two and under, as well as full access to Pre-K and 3-K. Families across the city still pay up to $26,000 annually for child care, and too many remain on waitlists.

Meeting this demand requires sustainable funding, additional child care sites, a well-paid workforce and full-day programs in neighborhoods where families live. Such investments would give all children a strong start. 

New York City must also confront the alarming reality that nearly half of fourth graders score below basic proficiency in reading, with even worse outcomes for Black and Latinx students. While initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves mark progress, they need ongoing support and expansion.

EdTrust-New York encourages the Mamdani administration to continue expanding multilingual materials, provide interventions for English learners and students with disabilities, and ensure that all educators receive training in the science of reading. At the same time, the city should work toward developing a comprehensive adolescent literacy plan to support middle and high school students.

Mamdani’s leadership should reflect a deep commitment to a curriculum that honors the identities and experiences of all students. Fully implementing culturally responsive education means expanding Black, Native American, AAPI and Latin studies, as well as giving educators the training and tools needed to teach the curricula. The city’s schools also need greater investment in collective care teams, educators, counselors, nurses and social workers who can provide the academic and emotional support students need.

Segregation continues to divide New York City students by race and class. The incoming administration has an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward integration by encouraging all districts to create integration plans, using admissions models such as lottery. The city also needs to recruit and retain more educators of color and publicly report school integration data to track progress. 

The Mamdani administration should also protect and support immigrant students and multilingual learners, who face growing threats from federal policies and systemic barriers. Schools can strengthen scaffolds in literacy and math, expand bilingual curricula  and provide mental health services for students facing trauma.

In addition, older immigrant students should have access to the full high school experience, not just for language acquisition or diploma-completion programs. Higher education partners can also play a vital role also by expanding financial aid and creating safe, supportive pathways for undocumented students to attend and graduate from college. 

Improving school climate is another key priority, particularly the need to shift from exclusion and punishment to belonging and support. With more than a third of students chronically absent — especially Black, Latino, and those from low-income backgrounds — and many affected by punitive discipline, the city can invest in restorative justice and mental health programs.

That should include funding restorative initiatives in all schools, training educators in healing-centered approaches and increasing weighted funding for the most-affected student groups. 

Under mayoral control, New York City has achieved important system-wide progress, such as the expansion of universal pre-K and the launch of NYC Reads. Mamdani should maintain this structure but ensure stronger accountability and input from parents and students. He can build on this success by ensuring that parents, students and caregivers, who should be granted voting power on Community Education Councils, have meaningful influence over district policy decisions. 

Finally, the Mamdani administration should expand access to college and career pathways. Too few students can enroll in college in high school programs that boost college success. Let’s expand these programs citywide, closing access gaps and strengthening support in college. That should include proven initiatives like CUNY’s ASAP and ACE, which help students persist and graduate despite financial emergencies. 

As Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to lead the nation’s largest school system, he inherits both profound challenges and enormous opportunities. This moment offers a shared chance to build a public education system that not only aspires to equity but truly delivers on that promise. 

In at least 11 counties across North Carolina, early childhood education agencies and community colleges are running child care academies designed to get new teachers into classrooms faster than traditional routes — and they’re doing it at little to no cost to participants.

Lasting from two to six weeks and requiring 20 to 64 hours of class time, these child care academies are customized to meet the local needs of the communities they serve.

In recent months, there’s been growing interest in expanding access to child care academies as a way to address early childhood educator shortages. found 60% of licensed child care providers in North Carolina were experiencing staffing shortages.

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Mary Olvera, the director of teacher education for the North Carolina Community College System, said that more than a dozen additional community colleges are preparing to offer child care academies or have expressed interest in doing so, which could help ease those staffing concerns.

A $1.476 million pilot to expand child care academies with state funding was included in the earlier this year. The pilot funding did not make it into the General Assembly’s “,” which was signed by Gov. Josh Stein in August.

The North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE) has grants of up to $50,000 available for as many as 10 community colleges or universities in the UNC system that want to run their own child care academies between Oct. 15, 2025 and July 31, 2026. .

Child care academies were also lifted up as “scalable local solutions” in a February . The governor’s North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education highlighted child care academies in its June .

“I’m very happy for the attention that child care is getting right now,” Olvera said. “The governor’s task force is coming up with lots of really wonderful recommendations, and it does feel like they’ve taken a little turn that’s more solution-focused; people seem to be getting on the same page.”

Given this momentum, here’s what we know so far about where child care academies are operating, what they look like, how they’re funded, and how their graduates are helping to fill gaps in the early childhood education workforce.

Child care academy models

There are two basic models of child care academies that have developed in recent years — a classroom-ready model and a teaching credential model. Both are referred to as child care academies.

They may be administered by local Smart Start partnerships, community colleges, or Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) organizations, but are typically a collaboration among two or more of these entities.

Olvera said the classroom-ready model originated at .

This model requires at least 20 hours of classroom instruction and qualifies students to work in a licensed child care facility. Trainers in the classroom-ready model help students register with the North Carolina Identity Management Service (NCID) and complete required health and safety training — including CPR, First Aid, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Infant/Toddler Sleep Safety (ITS) — as well as criminal background checks.

Prospective teachers and their employers would typically have to manage this process and incur associated costs on their own. That’s not the case with the child care academy.

“It was designed to get people everything they need to step into work,” Olvera said.

Upon completion of the classroom-ready child care academy, students are qualified to work in a licensed child care facility, but not as a lead teacher.

The teaching credential child care academy model is different. It includes all of the training from the classroom-ready model, but also the curriculum for EDU 119 — the semester-long introductory community college course that has historically been required for prospective lead teachers in licensed child care classrooms. Another route to becoming a lead teacher is five years of experience in a licensed facility.

“So we’re incorporating training in child development, the domains of development, activity planning, social-emotional development, brain development, all those topics that we touch on in 119,” Olvera said.

When students complete the teaching credential child care academy, they earn a continuing education credit (EDU 3119) that transfers to any of the state’s 58 community colleges and counts in place of EDU 119, which gets them the teaching credential that qualifies them to be a lead teacher. Olvera said this also sets students up to continue toward an associate degree in early childhood education.

In addition to qualifying students to work as a lead teacher in licensed child care, the EDU 119 credit also qualifies potential teachers to work as teaching assistants in elementary school classrooms.

Olvera said the child care academies also give students the opportunity to learn about , , and apprenticeship opportunities, all of which can propel them toward higher incomes in the long run. Plus, some models host job fairs or find other ways to connect prospective teachers directly to employment opportunities when they graduate.

“I think the greatest benefit for this is you’re exposing students to local resources,” Olvera said. “So if we’re working with a Smart Start or a CCR&R, we’re pulling in what’s local, and so the students are getting an opportunity to really meet people in the field.”

Counties currently offering some form of a child care academy include: Buncombe, Cabarrus, Catawba, Davidson, Davie, Durham, Johnston, McDowell, Rowan, Stanly, and Wayne. If you know of additional child care academies in other counties, please email Katie Dukes: kdukes@ednc.org.

Child care academies in action

EdNC interviewed leaders from five child care academies to learn more about how they operate and how they’re funded.

Classroom-ready models

The Smart Start partnerships in Wayne and Johnston counties received joint funding from the Camber Foundation for their child care academies. Both partnerships work closely with their local community colleges to offer the classroom-ready models to prospective early childhood educators. Both programs run for about 60 hours over two to three weeks, and include much of what would be required for earning the EDU 119 credential.

Valerie Wallace, executive director of the , said they hosted five child care academies in 2024 and 2025, three of which were funded by the shared Camber Foundation grant. In addition to covering the full cost of the training, they provide students with graduation incentives and tuition assistance if they continue their education, putting their average cost per student at $1,040.

Wallace’s colleague Shelly Willis, director of program coordination and evaluation, said 63 students have graduated from their academies, with more than half either going directly to work in child care or pursuing higher education.

Wallace and Olvera were involved in crafting the language in the that included funding for a child care academy pilot. Funding would have gone specifically to the child care academies in Wayne and Johnston — in addition to 10 more counties — with the provision that:

That would mean shifting from the classroom-ready model to the teaching credential model in Wayne and Johnston Counties, which Wallace said they’re ready to do.

“We’re kind of hoping it’ll go through with the partnership between the North Carolina Partnership for Children and the community college system, so that the alignment piece is there with that continuing ed (credit),” Wallace said.

Their next child care academy will run from Oct. 13 through Oct. 24.

Emily Englehart, the professional development coordinator for the , said they hosted three child care academies during the 2024-25 fiscal year. Twenty-six students have graduated, 14 of whom secured jobs in child care facilities, and four of whom are pursuing higher education.

The program costs around $430 per student, which is covered by the Camber Foundation grant they share with Wayne County.

Englehart said their next child care academy runs Oct. 6 through Oct. 24, and those who are interested can reach out to her via email for a registration link: eenglehart@pfcjc.org.

Priority will be given to Johnston County residents who are not currently working in child care and have no prior experience.

The child care academy in Stanly County is led by Cyndie Osborne, the program head of the early childhood education department at . Working with trainers from the (the local Smart Start) and (the local CCR&R), students spend two weeks getting classroom-ready.

Osborne said she’s run two child care academies so far under the classroom-ready model, but she’d love to implement the teaching credential model — she just doesn’t have the funding to cover the cost of a college course.

“What we have to consider is why it is important to have educated individuals working with young children,” Osborne said.

Students at the Stanly County child care academy paid for some aspects of their training, but could be reimbursed through a grant from the that also covered the cost of some classroom materials.

Thirteen students have completed the classroom-ready model in Stanly County, and Osborne said five to 10 have received jobs as a result. She’s considering offering another child care academy in the spring of 2026.

“There are waiting lists for parents in our county, not having space because the centers don’t have teachers,” Osborne said. “So that was kind of the push for me.”

Teaching credential model

Katie Dowdle, the director of early childhood education at , leads a teaching credential child care academy. The first one was held for two weeks in July.

“And I mean, it’s like ‘The Fast and the Furious,’” Dowdle said, comparing the pace of the continuing education course to the popular movie series about street racing.

Dowdle said the requirements for getting into an early childhood education classroom can be overwhelming, especially for young students. She told her academy students: “This is where you start. This is where we can get you going, get you into school, get you that experience of being in a child care center, and then pursuing your associate’s degree.”

Six students finished with the credential that qualifies them to be lead teachers in a licensed child care setting. Four went directly into child care classrooms and two are pursuing higher education in Dowdle’s classroom this semester.

A three-year grant from the Dogwood Health Trust covered the costs, which Dowdle estimates to be between $500 and $600 per student. The grant also covers the full cost of tuition and materials for students pursuing their associate degree in early childhood education at McDowell Tech.

Dowdle said the fast pace of the child care academy’s teaching credential model was made possible through collaboration with the community.

“People really rallied behind the idea of it,” Dowdle said, referencing coordination with the county’s health department, the sheriff’s office, and McDowell Tech’s own EMS and EMT trainers.

Because McDowell County has a small population, Dowdle was able to develop personal relationships with licensed child care centers and pre-K classrooms, helping her match the community’s need to her student’s qualifications after they earn their teaching credentials through the child care academy.

“We’re small but mighty,” Dowdle said. “We don’t have the manpower to do a whole lot of things, but this is something that I think we could do well.”

Durham County has also adopted the teaching credential model, but their first child care academy lasted six weeks instead of two.

Kristi Snuggs, president of , said the Durham child care academy is a collaboration between her organization (the local CCR&R) and .

Funding came from Duke Community Affairs — specifically the Duke Doing Good Economic Mobility Grant — along with Durham PreK. The cost per student was an average of $1,264.

Snuggs said she thinks spreading the EDU 3119 credit across six weeks gives students more time to reflect on, process, and apply what they’re learning. And the length of the Durham child care academy didn’t seem to deter students from signing up — Snuggs said they had 140 applicants for 20 slots.

“Ours was outrageously popular,” Snuggs said. “And the other cool thing about ours is it’s aligned with Durham PreK and we’re really trying to make the workforce match the children, and so every (aspect) of ours was bilingual (in English and Spanish).”

She’s working with Durham Tech to schedule their next child care academy during the 2026 spring semester.

Snuggs said the Durham child care academy adopted the teaching credential model because when students complete the program, they’re able to start their careers as a lead teacher right away, putting them on track to earn higher incomes.

Dowdle made a similar point.

“The thing is, these positions that they’re going into, they’re not making a lot of money,” Dowdle said. “The reason that you’re in child care in the first place is because you have a heart for children, it has nothing to do with pay.”

She said starting their careers debt-free and with a credential that can transfer to course credit for continuing their education can improve their long-term career outlooks.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .

Child care is so expensive for parents in college that it often exceeds the cost of their education. For years, one federal program has been helping lower those costs, until this year when the program has faced cuts under the Trump administration.

Now, Democratic lawmakers are leading a push to save it.

House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and Sen. Tammy Duckworth are reintroducing a bill Thursday to dramatically grow the $80 million Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program, which awards four-year grants to about to offer child care to low-income students, the lawmakers shared exclusively with The 19th.

Duckworth and Clark have been reintroducing this legislation for almost a decade, but this year has brought new challenges.

In his 2026 budget, President Donald Trump called for a , saying that “subsidizing child care for parents in college is unaffordable and duplicative.” It’s an effort the president has supported . The House also recommended eliminating the program, and the Senate has suggested maintaining the current level of funding, but a budget has not yet been finalized.

Already, fewer schools are participating this year because the Department of Education decided not to open the application process, so schools that would typically be reapplying for a four-year grant were shut out, experts told The 19th.

Then in August, the department made an unusual move: It notified 13 other colleges that they would no longer be receiving grant funding to run their child care programs, arguing that some of the recipients were teaching toddlers about gender ideology and the concept of race. The decision is part of the administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, though advocates said what was being taught were simple concepts to help toddlers, who are beginning to understand race and gender.

The Education Department did not respond to The 19th’s questions about cuts in grant funding, but Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the department, that the “Trump administration will not fund programs that are not in the best interest of the American families they are intended to serve.”

Rescinding more than a dozen grants in the middle of their cycles — impacting schools in California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and other states— has been destabilizing for those programs, experts told The 19th. Edward Conroy, a senior policy manager on the higher education team at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said that schools relied heavily on CCAMPIS funding to operate and that some will likely be closing their on-campus centers when the money runs dry. That could be as soon as this month. The schools were informed just before Labor Day, when some had already begun their school years.

“If you’re on a four-year grant cycle, unless something goes really sideways, you’re expecting those funds to continue for the four years,” Conroy said. “It’s very unusual for them to be ended. It’s even more unusual for them to be ended with essentially no warning.”

Some institutions are appealing, but the future of the federal program is in question.

Clark argued that this all means it’s “even more reason to continue to push” for her bill. But that effort is also likely to face some opposition in the current political climate because Clark and Duckworth are not only suggesting the program continue operating, they want to raise its budget by more than six times what it is now.

The new price tag: $500 million.

More than 3 million college undergrads — 1 in 5 — have children, and about have kids under the age of 6. An estimated of those students are women, many of them and . The largest share of those students are .

The CCAMPIS program, which was established in 1998, targets those low-income students to help them reach graduation. Overall, student parents are about to drop out of college, and only about of single mothers who are students reach graduation within six years.

But in , the cost of center-based infant care exceeds the cost of in-state college tuition.

“There is no reasonable way for someone to be a full-time student, work and also afford child care,” said Elliot Haspel, a national child care expert who has written on the subject. “The math doesn’t math. It can be back breaking, which is why we need parents to access some kind of subsidy.”

The CCAMPIS program not only supports students (those who qualify for the Pell Grant can access the program), but smaller community colleges that don’t have the discretionary funds to operate their own child care programs. Grantees can either establish their own on-campus centers or partner with local facilities. One study at Monroe Community College in New York analyzing data from 2006 to 2014 found that 71 percent of students who used on-campus child care , compared with 42 percent of student parents who did not use on-campus child care.

“It really punches above its own weight in terms of what it can do,” Duckworth told The 19th. “Many of these programs are training centers for students who are getting degrees in early childhood education so it’s a real win, win, win, and it’s a relatively cheap program for what it provides.”

But only a small share of the students who need on-campus child care are being covered by the program as it exists now. A report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about parents were supported by the program in 2018. An earlier report from the analyzing program data from 2016 to 2017 found some 4,000 children were on waitlists. And because the funds are offered on a sliding scale to students, some only get a covered by the program.

It’s a : Care is too expensive and too hard to find, and those who can’t afford it or find it have to make difficult decisions around whether to care for their kids or continue to work .

“We are asking parents of young children to foot this incredible bill when we need them and it is in the interest of everyone to help them find and be able to afford child care,” Clark, who represents Massachusetts, told The 19th. “It is not only good for families and good for kids, it is really good for our economy.”

By expanding the program and its funding, Clark and Duckworth are hoping it can be better designed to actually support what students need. On-campus child care options declined from 2012 to 2021, according to a report from New America. And though CCAMPIS has been steadily receiving more funding annually, from $15 million in fiscal year 2017 to $75 million in fiscal year 2023, fewer institutions have received grants.

Advocates believe a $500 million price tag would allow the program to better cover the cost of administering child care, cover more students who need it and . New America estimates that expansion would cover .

“The $500 million is based on need and what we are seeing from people who would love to access this program but can’t,” Clark said.

The bill would reauthorize CCAMPIS through 2031 and raise the minimum grant amount in the law’s statute from $30,000 to $75,000  and establish a maximum grant amount: $2 million. It will also require that on-campus child care centers meet either federal or state quality standards, or be accredited by a respected national early childhood accrediting body; grant funds can be used for these quality improvements.

Clark told The 19th the legislation is also about giving smaller colleges the funding they need to more efficiently stand up the infrastructure to establish on-campus care. A higher minimum grant amount is “going to encourage more colleges, more universities to participate in this,” she added.

In prior years, the bill has had Republican co-leads. This year it doesn’t. Still, some Republicans do want to see improvements to the program, including Rep. Nathaniel Moran, from Texas, who has previously to also raise the minimum grant amount and add additional flexibility into the program.

Duckworth said that reintroducing the bill is in some ways about sending a message on priorities, that they are not giving up on improving the program.

“It’s also about getting the word out so colleges in and universities in red districts and red states can speak to their congressmen and their senators and say, ‘Hey, you know what? You should probably sign on to this,” Duckworth said. “There are students everywhere that have children, and they need the help, and so I’m hoping eventually somebody will sign up.”

But the $500 million price tag is likely to be a sticking point at a time when the federal government is looking for areas to cut costs.

Richard Davis Jr., a policy analyst for higher education at New America, said that while increases are badly needed for the program, “there’s still a real fight ahead to sustain funding.”

For American families, child care is a major line item in family budgets for those with young children, yet the Trump administration has not made the issue a priority despite it being one that across the political spectrum would like to see the federal government address.

“Given there is so much talk about a pro-family agenda with the Republican Party, we think there is a really great opportunity for increasing support for children and families in this way,” Davis said.

And, Haspel added, even if the $500 million figure is aspirational for advocates, there is some value in introducing legislation that draws Americans’ attention to efforts that directly address their needs.

“Something like introducing a bill and saying, ‘Hey, we actually want to increase it,’ can help force that conversation,” Haspel said. “Make those who oppose it say why.”

This story was originally published on The 19th.

During the five years when pandemic-era funding was used to stabilize the state’s licensed child care programs, the number of licensed FCCHs decreased by 19%. Since the funding ran out at the , they’ve decreased by 3% — the largest single-quarter decline in the two years since EdNC began tracking these changes.  

There are efforts around the state the reverse this trend.

In a Charlotte banquet hall on a recent Saturday night, leaders in ballgowns and tuxedos gathered together to celebrate a group of entrepreneurs who had completed a leadership program specifically for home-based providers. 

With funding from the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, (HBCC Haven) program paid monthly stipends to the 10 members of the inaugural cohort — women who operate FCCHs and those who run license-exempt family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) care in their communities across North Carolina.

The cohort participated in leadership training, mentorship, and advocacy skill-building with the goal of empowering them to advance change in the state’s child care systems. They completed their training at a crucial moment for home-based care in North Carolina.

Diverging numbers for licensed centers and homes

Based on data provided by the N.C. Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) Council in partnership with the state Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE), EdNC that North Carolina lost less than 6% of licensed child care programs, which include both centers and FCCHs, during the five years when stabilization grants were used to supplement teacher wages. 

That remains true since the end of stabilization grants, but data on licensed child care through the end of June 2025 shows that FCCHs now make up all of those net losses because the number of licensed child centers has returned to — and slightly surpassed — pre-pandemic levels.

There were 3,879 licensed child care centers in February 2020 and 3,886 in June 2025 — a net gain of seven sites. During that same period, the number of licensed FCCHs dropped from 1,363 to 1,061 — a net loss of 302 sites. 

And from April to June 2025, the first quarter since the end of stabilization grants, North Carolina had a net gain of 44 licensed child care centers. FCCHs saw a net loss of 35 FCCHs in that timeframe. 

Despite the net gain in the number of licensed child care centers, enrollment has decreased by 2% since before the pandemic. For licensed FCHHs, that decline is 23%. The overall has increased in North Carolina over the last five years.

As EdNC works in coming months to understand both the recent increase in the number of licensed child care centers and the decrease in overall enrollment, please reach out to Katie Dukes with any insights you might have.

While we don’t yet know why the number of licensed centers is increasing, Courtney Alexander, a program director for MDC, has a strong sense of why licensed FCCHs are decreasing.

“Many of the family child care home providers do not have retirement (funds), and they do not have (health care) benefits, and many of them are already over 40 or over 50,” Alexander said. 

Alexander said some of her own colleagues are former home-based providers who gave up their licenses to take other forms of early childhood work that would provide access to health care and retirement benefits.

“If the state was able to offer benefits to every early care and education teacher like they offer to the public school teachers, that would be a great infusion of support,” Alexander said. 

And as home-based providers leave the early care and learning workforce, Alexander said there’s little incentive for new educators to fill those gaps due in part to low wages and lack of benefits — a problem faced by centers as well.

Role of home-based early care and learning

While a greater number of North Carolina’s youngest learners are enrolled in licensed centers than in licensed FCCHs, home-based care plays an essential role in the state’s early care and learning landscape. 

“Why it matters is the net loss of those spaces is very important to a family’s ability to be able to find care,” Alexander said. 

Alexander and Theresa Stacker, executive director of NC Early Childhood Foundation, identified a wide variety of reasons that families choose home-based care. 

In rural areas with less population density, home-based care is more practical than centers. Home-based care can also be the best cultural match for families, especially when it comes to language development. Home-based providers can provide more one-on-one learning opportunities, which is especially beneficial to identifying and supporting students with learning differences. 

Both Alexander and Stacker noted that home-based providers have more flexible hours, which can benefit factory and health care workers, as well as first responders and some military personnel. 

“Family child care homes have been, by far, the leaders of having different available shifts for families,” Stacker said. 

“Where would families who work second and third shift find care if they only had centers to rely on?” Alexander said. 

Home-based early care and learning also plays an important role in providing infant care. 

Alexander noted that parents tend to prefer home-based programs over center-based programs when it comes to infants. 

She said new parents especially are more likely to want their infants to be with people from their community who they already know and trust, and who will develop a personal relationship with their child.

In licensed care, FCCHs enroll a higher proportion of infants than centers. In February 2020, 9% of students enrolled in FCCHs were infants, compared to 6% of students enrolled at centers. 

The net loss of licensed FCCHs is affecting the availability of infant care. By June 2025, infant enrollment at centers had dropped one percentage point — but it had dropped three percentage points at FCCHs. 

For both Alexander and Stacker, the decrease in licensed FCCHs represents a decrease in families having the freedom to choose the best early care and learning fit for their children. 

“The families choose these women because they trust them and because they don’t want to worry about their children while they’re trying to work,” Alexander said. 

“When you lose family child care homes, you’re losing an important piece of that child care fabric,” Stacker said. 

Subgroup trends

In addition to monitoring overall licensed child care trends, there are three subgroups of counties that EdNC has been following since we started tracking quarterly net gains and losses in licensed child care. 

Here’s the latest on the western counties that make up the area covered by the , majority-Black counties, and counties with large Indigenous populations.

In the Dogwood counties (Avery, Buncombe, Burke, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Swain, Transylvania, and Yancey), the number of licensed child care sites is 3% lower than before the pandemic.

In the majority-Black counties (Bertie, Edgecombe, Halifax, Hertford, Northampton, Vance, Warren, and Washington), the number of licensed child care sites remained relatively stable during and after the pandemic, with the same number of licensed child care sites in June 2025 as February 2020. 

And in Robeson and Swain, which both have large Indigenous populations, the number of licensed child care sites has also remained relatively stable. It’s worth noting that while the number of licensed sites in Robeson is still slightly higher than before the pandemic, it’s been decreasing since fall 2024. 

Editor’s note: The Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation and the Dogwood Health Trust support the work of EducationNC.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

New Mexico will offer child care at no cost to all residents, regardless of incomes, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham , thus becoming the first U.S. state to offer universal free child care, she said.

The state Early Childhood Education and Care Department will begin writing rules to entirely remove the income eligibility threshold for a family to receive child care assistance by Nov. 1. The state currently parent copays on child care for families whose income is up to 400% of the federal poverty level.

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“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” the governor said in a statement issued following a news conference. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”

The free child care will save families on average $12,000 annually, the governor’s office said.

During Monday’s news conference, Lujan Grisham said reaching the milestone of free universal child care required asking the Legislature and New Mexico voters for sustainable sources of funding. New Mexico voters in 2022 a Constitutional Amendment that pushed state lawmakers to tap into a state fund and use it to build out the early childhood education system in the state.

“That was always the vision,” she said. “It took us this long to realize it, but by golly, we did.”

Along with the expanded access to free child care, the state in one week will allow entities like local governments and schools to start applying for low-interest loans to expand or create new child care facilities, under rules to the state’s Child Care Facility Loan Fund passed in the most recent legislative session, Early Childhood Education and Care Department Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said.

Between 12,000 and 13,000 new child care slots could open up, with a goal of 55 new licensed child care centers, 120 new licensed homes and 1,000 new registered homes, she noted.

“We see the interest, we’re also talking to industry leaders who are very interested in this, and also school superintendents,” Groginsky said. “I think it’s an all-in strategy from industry, business leaders, our schools and our community-based providers.”

Lujan Grisham said universal child care is “the backbone of creating a system of support for families” that allow parents to go to work or college.

“It’s going to make New Mexico extremely attractive to build your business here,” Lujan Grisham said. “It’s going to make New Mexico extremely attractive to come here and raise your family.”

The new rule will also address pay for child care providers, the governor said. According to a handout at Monday’s news conference, under the proposed rule, providers will earn additional funding if they pay all entry-level workers at least $18 to $21 per hour and remain open at least 10 hours per day, five days per week.

Monday’s announcement builds on six years of progress in the state, said Dr. Neal Halfon, founding director of the . He said New Mexico is the first U.S. state to put in place a blueprint for “an ecosystem of early childhood supports,” including a first-of-its-kind statewide comprehensive, actionable data program.

“This portfolio of strategies — I’m telling you as an outsider — is a really big deal,” Halfson said. “As a developmental scientist, we’d like to see every place have this kind of scaffolding in place. This is a national model.”

In the most recent legislative session, lawmakers increased the department’s budget by $113 million to $995 million total, including $463 million specifically for child care, Groginsky said. The state in 2020 also created a new pot of money called the Early Childhood Trust Fund, which started at $320 million and now has $10 billion, Lt. Gov. Howie Morales said during the news conference.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

Child Care Providers United — the union that represents about 60,000 family child care providers in California — has reached a tentative deal with the state after its contract expired July 1.

Under the , childcare providers in the union will get $90 million in one-time stabilization payments and $37 million a year for cost-of-living adjustments. They’ll also continue getting retirement and healthcare benefits, and be paid by enrollment rather than attendance.

Max Arias, chair of Child Care Providers United, said many home-based educators have had to  in recent years.

“ The rates are so low right now that providers are literally receiving $7 to $10 an hour after all the expenses are paid based on the amount of hours they work, and that is the crisis that we’re seeing so having some support right now was very important,” Arias said.

The fight for higher pay

In 2019, home-based childcare providers in California who get subsidies from the state to care for lower-income families  to collectively bargain with the state.

Child care providers are some of the  in the country — a recent report found that the .

Arias said the new one-time stabilization payments would amount to roughly $300-$400 a child, and that the union will continue working for a new rate system to boost the amount providers get reimbursed — which they had originally expected this year. He said the union has a commitment by the state to reach an agreement on a new rate structure by the next budget cycle. 

Historically, the reimbursement rates have been paid on “market rates,” which  because they’re based on what families pay. Experts call the child care industry a “broken market” — where the costs are too high for families to pay, but workers themselves are making too little to get by.

Arias said a new rate structure would allow for providers to get paid the  real cost to provide care.

“Then there will be true stabilization in the sense that people can actually then afford to be able to stay open,” he said.

This was originally published on .

The number of child care workers who struggle to meet basic needs like food, healthcare and housing is on the rise, according to a 

The Stanford Center on Early Childhood’s RAPID project started surveying child care providers around the country back in 2021, when about 40% of workers said they struggled to afford a basic need.

In March of this year, that rose to nearly 70% — the highest since the project started.

“ We’ve started to talk about some of these data as like representing the canary in a coal mine kind of a scenario,” said Philip Fisher,  director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.

Since child care providers are among the , challenges in the economy — like the rising cost of food — “are hitting home for them more than they would for other people,” Fisher said. Providers have to buy goods like diapers and food for their child care centers that eat into their income. Many have had to make the .

Where are the biggest problems?

One of the most notably worsening problem for child care providers has been health care — where nearly two-thirds of workers said it was a material hardship this past spring. In 2023, nearly 37% of child care workers were .

The majority childcare providers also said utilities were a struggle to afford.

Fisher said those two rise to the top because providers are often prioritizing their limited money on needs like housing and food.

“Food is something that people continue to try to acquire, even if they’re skipping meals. But utility payments typically go quickly and health care is another thing that typically goes out the window, because people are prioritizing other things when that happens,” he said.

He added that the rising numbers point to worsening economic challenges, like low wages and the rising costs of living.

“ I think we see that represented really clearly in this data that the people that we’re depending on to provide nurturing care and high quality care to our kids are themselves really earning at a level that makes it very difficult to subsist,” he said.

This was originally published on .

The vast majority of infants and a plurality of toddlers in Massachusetts live in child care deserts, new state data show. Despite the recent increases in early education system capacity, sizeable gaps remain between available seats and the overall number of children, and program capacity falls short for tens of thousands of young children in each early education age group across the state.

Around 59,000 (70 percent) of infants, around 43,000 (43 percent) of toddlers, and around 10,000 (5 percent) of preschoolers in Massachusetts live in an access desert. The state defines this as areas where for every three children there is only one child care slot, though there are regions particularly in central Massachusetts where the ratio is greater than ten children to one slot.

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Enrollment differences between regions, student age groups, and income levels paint a picture of a system struggling to meet potential demand and that is most available to those at the highest income brackets.

“We know the need is considerable, so we know that growth is good, but it doesn’t tell us whether or not that growth is particularly responsive to where child and family need is perhaps strongest and greatest,” Tom Weber, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education, said at a recent  focused on improving early education data practices. “Or is it in fact responsive to other environmental factors, like the rules and policies that we put in place or where we have decided presently to concentrate our public funding?”

The data were presented at the second meeting of the Data Advisory Commission on Early Education and Care, an entity created in the state budget signed in July 2024 to better understand the gaps in the child care landscape. Comprised of state, education, and business leaders, the commission’s goal is to improve the quality of data collection on child care needs, figure out how best to use it, and make sure the public has access to it.

Coming out of the peak of the Covid pandemic, which shuttered centers and placed much of the child care burden on parents juggling remote or essential in-person work, enrollment and capacity have been on the rise, researchers with the Department of Early Education and Care noted.

Over the last two years, the early education and care system has added about 17,000 new seats, bringing the total capacity of licensed center-based care, licensed family child care, and state-funded programs to 259,744. Care options for infants and toddlers have the fewest overall seats compared to other age groups, but their capacity has risen the most – 5 percent over the last year compared with 3 percent growth for preschoolers and 1 percent growth for school-age children.

While all regions of the state have seen increased capacity since 2023, the rate of growth slowed in central and southeast Massachusetts over the past year – regions already struggling with accessible child care. Enrollment in formal care for newborns to 5-year-olds peaks at 56 percent in the Boston area and northeast Massachusetts, with the least (48 and 47 percent) in central and southeast Massachusetts, respectively.

In families earning less than half of the average median income, 51 percent of children are enrolled in formal care. That drops to between 37 and 35 percent for families making half to 100 percent of the standard income, and spikes to 66 percent at the highest wage brackets of more than 150 percent of the standard income.

“We see the highest enrollment rates or those who have higher financial resources,” said Michelle Saulnier, a data analyst at the early education department. “This is an opportunity for us to maybe conclude that those who are in the higher income bracket may be a closer measure to parent preference and demand for enrollment in formal care,” she said.

Essentially, the families with the most resources are enrolling about two-thirds of their children in formal care, which can give education researchers clues about how many children may need spots to meet true demand.

Research published last year from Professor Jeffrey Liebman at the Harvard Kennedy School that 80 percent of families surveyed who were not currently using formal care would use it if they could afford it. Plus, 70 percent of those currently using it would use more hours if it were more affordable.

Ashley White, research director for the early education department, noted that the state collects information on child age, care type, and region for those using child care financial assistance programs. But there are still holes in data on family income, race and ethnicity, country of origin, disability status, and household language. Improvements to systematically collecting that information would bolster the data sets, White said.

The department does not currently collect data on early intervention for developmental delays, though partner groups and sister agencies focused on these interventions have some relevant data that the early education department can aggregate.

There are similar data gaps for families on wait lists for licensed programs, making it hard to gauge the demand for the different types of child care and where it would make sense to add seats.  Across the state, data on children and families is generally limited to those accessing care funded through the grant program that supports child care providers, so White said there is a need to “think creatively” about how best to gather information on education and care needs outside of the C3 program.

The state is also the family portal and case management system for child care financial assistance programs, which at the moment involves a number of different tools and applications. Some parts involve more of an open notes field, which makes it hard to capture and sort information systemically. A better digital intake process would let them collect more “granular” data, unify the experience for families, streamline care management, and improve operational efficiency.

“I think one of the wonderful things about the family portal is that it’s going to allow us to collect more information earlier in the process and have to do less verification and going back to families and asking for them to update information,” White said. “So we’ll know more initially than we ever have before.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Despite having some of the most resources and economic support, a recent national study ranked Indiana’s early education system 42nd in the country — and second-to-last when it came to accessibility.

The , shared earlier this week, is simply the latest confirmation for Hoosier parents that Indiana’s child care market is struggling. Experts, business leaders and politicians agree that Indiana needs more child care, but can’t seem to agree on the best way to meet the moment.

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Facing budgetary pressures and depressed revenue forecasts, state leaders opted to trim funding and narrow eligibility for early learning and child care resources earlier this year. Seats for state-funded preschool, known as On My Way Pre-K, while vouchers for subsidized child care have on a waitlist.

One federal program, Head Start Indiana, hopes to help close the gap left by vanishing state funding, but faces its own challenges with flat federal funding.

“We are the quietest, most successful 60-year old program in the federal government’s history,” boasted Rhett Cecil, the organization’s executive director. “… (our programs) are going to support their families and children. They’re allowing families to work or get job training or further education. And our services — that child care and early education — are free for those families.”

Just under 13,000 families in all 92 counties utilize the program, which receives roughly $181 million in federal funding annually. That budget line was briefly threatened by the Trump administration, which walked back proposed cuts in favor of flat funding — which does mean services will be lost as inflation and other costs eat into the bottom line.

The second-term president also covering Indiana back in April — though the federal Administration for Children and Families announced it would dedicate one-time funding to Head Start locations earlier this week , but not for other programming costs.

Additional federal support could allow it to expand to meet the need following state cuts, leaders hope, and continue employing almost 4,000 Hoosiers.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, we get $100 million more dollars. How many more teachers and classrooms could be opened?” Cecil mused. “How many kids could we serve off that waitlist?”

Importance of child care

Participating in and access to child care resources for young Hoosiers, such as better school readiness skills. Some national research has found that early education may also and could generate .

In Indiana, the shortage of child care options costs the state an estimated , over a quarter of which is linked to annual tax revenue lost.

The 2024 study from the Indiana Chamber of Commerce emphasized the need to free up parents, mostly women, who’ve left the workforce “as a direct result of childcare-related issues.”

“There’s some data out there that one in four Hoosier parents leave their job over child care gaps, and it really impacts talent and workforce,” said David Ober, the chamber’s vice president of taxation and public finance. “It’s hindering economic momentum in the state and so it is a huge deal for us.”

For the last few years, tackling the state’s child care crisis has been a top legislative priority for the organization, which represents the interests of thousands of Hoosier employers. Ober said the chamber is working to plan a child care summit later this year to identify potential solutions.

According to Brighter Futures Indiana, average full-time weekly care costs families — with even higher prices for infants and toddlers. That doesn’t factor in type of care or quality, and prices vary by community.

Families can spend more on their young children’s care than on a college education — if it’s even available in their communities. Rather than pay the price, many Hoosier parents simply drop out of the workforce at the same time that employers are scrambling to hire talent.

Ober highlighted recent legislative efforts to expand child care, including one that expanded a tax credit for employers directly providing their employees with child care resources. Other bills have tweaked staffing ratios and created a pilot program for so-called microcenters.

But workforce remains a challenge, even for Head Start centers, earning its own legislative study carveout. Over 20% of Indiana’s child care workers left the field during the pandemic — a shock that “has not really fully healed,” Ober said.

“If you ask any provider in the state, workforce is the hardest problem,” Ober said. “… How do you get educators and keep them? There’s so much more work to be done there and it’s challenging.”

Traditional market forces struggle to balance affordability for parents against costs for child care, a gap sometimes covered by government subsidies.

But Ober insisted that “child care is infrastructure,” especially for the businesses reliant upon employees who are parents. Changing funding is “going to just exacerbate underlying problems,” he added.

“Those numbers are pretty stark,” Ober said. “And then when you add in changes at the state and the federal level, it creates new problems that we all have to come together and work on,” he concluded.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

After almost 20 years in business, Milestones Preschool in Inglewood closed its doors this month.

It was a decision that preschool director Milena Bice had been putting off for years. She’d turned her family home into a small business, transforming the house on a quiet tree-lined street into a playground of childish delights, complete with a sand pit, fruit trees and even a brood of chicks waddling around a small pen.

Bice loved her preschool. She loved the way it allowed her to care for her own kids when they were little, and how she could continue to apply therapeutic approaches to her work long after they’d outgrown preschool. Over the years, she developed a reputation for her care for children with neurological differences.

But child care is no easy business. Margins were about as slim as can be. When parents couldn’t afford to pay full tuition, Bice felt it was her duty to keep caring for their kids anyway. The question of closing loomed over her as her business survived the ups and downs of the global economy: first, the 2008 recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic more than a decade later.

But this month, Bice finally called it quits. She was sick of charging families high fees and still struggling to pay herself at the end of the month. And for the first time this year, she said her preschool didn’t have anyone on her waitlist. One reason is — or TK — no-cost public kindergarten that becomes an option for all California 4-year-olds this fall.

“ I can’t compete with free,” she told LAist in a recent interview. “And in this economy, I think a lot of families are hurting.”

Bice’s predicament mirrors a statewide challenge. As families sign their 4-year-olds up for TK, some childcare and preschool providers say they’re losing enrollment and it’s threatening their businesses. While teachers struggle to adjust, childcare remains an unaffordable and unmet need for many families across California, especially with very young children.

Child care is still a major need for CA families

Even as transitional kindergarten expands, there’s no shortage of need for child care. The California Budget & Policy Center  that just 19% of infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children who are eligible for state subsidized care are enrolled. The need is especially great for children age 2 or younger — .

A  from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found that most early education programs will need to pivot to younger kids to meet the need and stay in business, and that centers and home-based childcares are hurting from declined enrollment since the pandemic.

Anna Powell, the lead author of that report, said early educators struggling to adapt to the changing landscape of their industry are a byproduct of the state’s massive investment in universal TK, but lack of similar investment in others.

“ If one area, for example TK, receives a lot of resources to scale up to reach demand, in theory, that is positive,” she said. “What happens when you don’t invest in all the quadrants at the same time is that there can be these unintended consequences.”

Transitioning to younger kids is a challenge

Powell said that caring for younger kids requires a number of shifts in how child care programs operate. Teaching expertise is different for younger children, and staffing ratios are smaller. The time a provider might expect to have a child enrolled is also shorter, since kids are heading to the public school system earlier. This means early educators could face more turnover.

There’s also the matter of teaching preferences. Caring for a 3- or 4-year-old is very different from taking care of a 1-year-old. , just 20% said they’d be interested in teaching infants and toddlers.

David Frank, who runs a preschool in Culver City, told LAist in April that he’s also closing his doors this year. He said that 4-year-olds used to make up a third of the school’s students, and his enrollment was down from 34 to 13. His preschool already took 2 -year-olds, but he didn’t want to go any younger. One reason is it would require him to reconfigure the school to create a separate space for the youngest children.

Frank said he’s not against TK, but he couldn’t keep making it work.

“ I’m happy that children will have good, free education,” he said. “But as a person trying to run a business … it’s just no longer a viable plan to stay open anymore.”

Advocates say even more investment is needed

California’s transitional kindergarten is a plan years in the making, and, , it has achieved a big goal: offering a free option for every family with a 4-year-old in the state.

That program runs through the public school system, but child care and early education offerings for the state’s youngest children continue to be a patchwork of different types of care with no similar central system. The state funds a public preschool program for 2- to 5-year-olds for low-income families, which has received more money in recent years. Many private programs receive state subsidies for serving low-income families, and the state has increased the number of seats it funds in recent years.

It also bumped up reimbursement rates for 3-year-olds to entice more providers to take younger kids.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office pointed to these changes, telling LAist that it has invested heavily in a universal Pre-K program that extends beyond transitional kindergarten.

Some advocates and childcare providers say still more game-changing investment is needed. The state has promised the childcare providers that receive its subsidies to  to reflect the “true cost” of care, but this year . The union representing those workers is currently bargaining with the state, saying providers can’t wait for a raise.

Patricia Lozano, the executive director of advocacy organization Early Edge California, said TK’s ripple effect on early education programs shows that the state needs to do more to provide for its youngest children.

“ TK was one of the key things we’ve been advocating since it was passed,” she said. “But that’s just one piece. I think the whole system itself is problematic. It’s underfunded.”

Lozano pointed to New Mexico as a potential model for California. The state has  by directing gas and oil revenue to state childcare programs. She said this type of consistent source of money is especially important amid threats to federal funding and state budget cuts.

“The  bottom line is we need to have that source of funding protected,” she said.

In the meantime, Milena Bice’s preschool in Inglewood is closed. She’s not sure exactly what happens next. She can’t go work at a public school. Despite , she doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree or teaching credential.

While she debates the future, Bice is holding onto her childcare license. Who knows? Maybe she’ll want to reopen someday.

was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of .

, and so is the risk of exposure and infection at child care facilities, which often serve kids too young to be vaccinated against the highly contagious disease.

Children’s health is the most immediate challenge amid an exposure, but not the only one. Parents may face three weeks of quarantine that requires them to keep their child at home, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to work without reliable child care.

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A mother in Iowa is highlighting just how complicated things can get. Martha Martin has been posting on social media about the ripple effects after a person who visited her 9-month-old son’s day care in Cedar Rapids later tested positive for the illness. The individual was vaccinated and is . Not all of the infections appear to be connected.

It took public health officials several days to notify the day care of the exposure, but Martin’s son — who had not yet received his first dose of the because of his age — was able to receive a post-exposure antibody known as . The alert came too late for her son to get an emergency MMR shot, which can be available within 72 hours of exposure.

Martin said she and her husband took their son to an emergency room for the antibody treatment, and she has received some mixed messaging about whether the couple will be on the hook to pay out of pocket. Other children from the day care were given immunoglobulin shots through a clinic organized by UnityPoint Health – St. Luke’s Hospital and the local county public health department. A spokesperson for the hospital system confirmed those details but did not respond to questions about the cost of the shots.

“Day cares can be a terrible place to have a measles outbreak,” said Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatric infectious diseases physician and president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “There’s going to be babies there that are too young to receive a measles vaccine. And they are at very high risk, if they get measles, to get a severe case.”

The state of Iowa for non-immune people, a typical period in part because of how long a person may be able to spread the disease. But Martin said the day care instructed the couple to keep their son at home for 28 days .

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that, not sure what we’re going to do about me going to work, my husband, everything like that,” Martin said that has now been viewed 2.5 million times.

Martin initially responded to an interview request from The 19th but later stopped communication.

A senior staff member who answered a call at the Iowa day care directed inquiries to local and state public health officials. A spokesperson for the public health department in Linn County, Iowa, said it continues to monitor the day care and other places of exposure as needed after “hours and hours” of contact tracing. A spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that the day care is open and highlighted its protocol .

Martin said her son appears to be fine for now, but she knows symptoms can take some time to emerge. She said while her employer has been understanding, she will use vacation days and her husband will take unpaid time off to care for their son. Throughout her posts, Martin hammered one point a few times.

“Get your kids vaccinated,” she said, adding: “Your kids, you yourself not getting vaccinated — you are harming everybody else.”

In late March, a measles outbreak in West Texas reached a day care in Lubbock, where a child with measles infected several children, according to news reports. Some parents were told to keep their kids at home for 21 days of quarantine.

A representative for the Texas day care did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its co-owner that the facility took a mix of precautions in order to keep its doors open. That meant sending some children home and isolating vulnerable children into a classroom while they still attended day care.

“Sending an infant home for 21 days is a huge burden on working families so there was the need to balance risk of exposure vs the need for income,” said Katherine Wells, director of the Lubbock Health Department, in an email.

America’s child care system runs under different levels of regulations, with varying rules by state when it comes to handling infectious disease outbreaks.

Ruth Friedman is a senior fellow at , a progressive think tank, and former director of the (OCC). She said day cares work under tight financial margins, and infectious diseases like measles could be a major financial blow, a dynamic that has parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic when some centers had to reduce services or close.

“If you destabilize the attendance and enrollment of children in child care, it can very quickly lead to programs closing their doors and child care broadly becoming unavailable to a community,” she said.

Wells said some parents expressed anger about their child being quarantined, while others said they were simply fearful about their children being exposed to the disease, which can make people very sick: complications include pneumonia, brain swelling and death. Children under 5 and pregnant people are . And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 5 unvaccinated people with measles are hospitalized.

The first MMR shot is typically administered to a child between 12 and 15 months of age, with a second dose between the ages of 4 and 6. Children between 6 months old and a year are eligible for an earlier shot if they live in or travel to an outbreak area or are traveling internationally.

Iowa health officials , which can include receiving the second MMR shot as early as 28 days after the first dose. Two doses are 97 percent effective against measles, which is at .

The risk of measles at day cares is not new. Between December 2023 and January 2024, that spread in part because . The child, as well as the parent, later tested positive for measles.

Dr. Ericka Hayes, an attending physician and senior medical director of infection prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the chances of more outbreaks in child care settings will depend on factors like vaccination rates within the facility and how it adheres to its policies around illness. She noted that children are contagious with measles — often a primary symptom — but other early signs of infection can look a lot like a common viral infection: fever, cough, runny nose, and red and watery eyes.

“So equally important is if a child is sick they should be excluded from day care,” she said via email.

Friedman said the case out of Philadelphia previews a potential conflict that could emerge as parents reckon with health considerations amid work responsibilities that ensure they can pay their daily and monthly expenses. Federal law does not require employers to offer paid sick leave to its workers, leaving such options up to states. In some cases, .

“There’s this tension — what are you supposed to do with your child if you need to work?” she said. “From a family perspective and from a child care sector perspective, I think the implications could potentially be really, really troubling.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .��

Two years ago, Nicolle Orozco Forero walked into an in-home day care in Seattle, Washington, looking for a job. She was barely 22, a whole five feet tall — if that. But she was calm, focused. Her presence struck the owner, Stephanie Wishon, because it’s not easy to find qualified staff who can work with children with disabilities.

Orozco Forero had experience working with kids who had autism back in Colombia, so Wishon had her come in for a trial run and hired her after the first day. The children, who needed someone who had love and care to give in abundance, gravitated toward her. She was good at the hardest stuff. She changed diapers and outfits the moment they were soiled. She was vigilant; her kids stayed pristine. And she got them to do the things they wouldn’t do for other people, like say “ah” when it was time to get their teeth brushed or sit still long enough for her to twist a braid down their back.

Some people just have that way about them.

And people like Orozco Forero are exceptionally rare. Already, the staffing shortage in child care is near crisis levels. It’s far — about of those families say they face significant difficulty finding care for their kids, partly because there are too few people with the ability, expertise or desire to work with their children. Immigrant women like Orozco Forero have been helping to fill that void. They now make up of all child care workers.

At home, Orozco Forero was also caring for her own young boys, one of whom started to show symptoms of a serious illness over the past two years that doctors have not yet been able to diagnose. She took some time off to care for him last year, before returning to the kids at Wishon’s day care.

Her work has kept an already precarious safety net together. Without women like Orozco Forero, families who have nowhere else to turn for care have to make difficult decisions about how to survive and keep their children safe. Without her, the safety net snaps.

And that’s exactly what happened on June 18, the day she was detained.

It was supposed to be a routine meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Orozco Forero and her husband had been to all their monthly meetings for the past year and change, since their asylum charge was denied in April 2024.

The family — Orozco Forero; her husband, Juan Sebastian Moreno Acosta; and their two sons, Juan David, 7, and Daniel, 5 — fled Colombia two years ago. Moreno Acosta, a street vendor, had been persecuted by gangs .

After arriving in the United States, they sought the help of a lawyer with their asylum claim, but when they couldn’t pay his full fee ahead of their hearing, he pulled out. They represented themselves in court and lost the case. With no knowledge of the U.S. court system, they didn’t know they had 30 days to appeal the ruling, either. Ever since, ICE has been monitoring them, requiring they wear a wrist tracker and meet with an immigration officer once a month, sometimes more, according to a family member. (The 19th is not naming the family member to protect their identity.) It’s unclear why ICE has allowed them to stay in the country all this time, though it’s not necessarily uncommon; ICE typically prioritized immigrants with felonies for deportation.

Orozco Forero had seen the reports of illegal immigrants being rounded up at their immigration appointments. President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort has led to the detention of about , like Orozco Forero, who now make up of those detained. Her husband does have a misdemeanor reckless driving conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol on his record, but he completed a court-mandated alcohol course for that and has no other convictions.

Still, Orozco Forero wasn’t worried when she headed to her appointment on the morning of June 18. If ICE planned to detain her, Orozco Forero thought, they would have asked her to come with the boys, right?

And she had been doing everything right: She’d gone to all her appointments, taken documentation to show she was going to school at Green River Community College taking courses in English and early childhood education. She had completed a child care internship that trained her to open her own licensed in-home day care. Her licensure approval was set to arrive any moment, likely that same week, and the day care was just about ready to go.

But that morning, her family was still wary, asking her to share her location just in case.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Orozco Forero texted her family member: “They are going to deport us”

“Nicolle what happened? Nicolle answer me,” they texted back. “What do I do?”

“I can’t speak I feel like I’m going to faint,” Orozco Forero replied. And then: “I’m sorry it wasn’t what we expected.”

Two-and-a-half hours west, on the coast of Washington in a town called Southbend, Wishon was frantic. Orozco Forero had texted her, too. ICE was asking for the boys.

In two years, Wishon had grown incredibly close to Orozco Forero, who had cared for her own kids. After her family moved to the coast, Wishon rented out her house in Seattle to Orozco Forero, whose boys were excited to have a home with a yard.

Wishon’s husband, Gabriel, hopped into his truck and headed to Seattle. Wishon, meanwhile, got on the phone with the Orozco Forero family’s ICE agent and every lawyer she could. They were going to take them into detention at a facility 2,200 miles away in Texas, a facility that was to detain families. Wishon wanted to find a lawyer who could stop the deportation order, and she wanted to make sure the boys would be reunited with their parents if they took them to meet the ICE agent.

And that was especially important, not just because they were young children, but because Juan David is still sick.

For the past year, he’s been seeking treatment at Seattle Children’s Hospital for an illness that is turning his urine muddy. So far, doctors have determined he’s losing red blood cells and protein through his urine, indicating a possible kidney issue, but they haven’t yet zeroed in on what is causing the problem. They likely need a kidney biopsy to be sure.

“Given the complexity of his case, it is essential that Juan remain in the United States for continued testing and treatment,” his nephrologist Jordan Symons wrote in a March letter to ICE. “We kindly request that you consider this medical necessity in your review of his immigration status and grant him the ability to stay in the United States until his treatment and evaluation are completed.”

Juan David’s care team has been monitoring him closely to ensure his red blood cell and protein levels never drop too low. His condition could become serious quickly.

“You can die from that,” said Sarah Kasnick, a physician’s assistant who is familiar with his case. Kasnick is also a foster parent, and Orozco Forero provided care for her family.

When Gabriel Wishon arrived to pick up the boys, they were confused and disoriented. Where were their parents? Why was everyone crying? They didn’t want to go to Colombia, they told him on the drive. They wanted to stay in the United States.

Around 5:30 p.m. that evening, he met with the ICE agent, who had waited past her work hours for them to arrive.

“Bye boys, you are going to see your parents right now. They are right inside,” Wishon told them. He watched them walk in carrying two stuffed animals, a Super Mario doll and Chase, the popular cartoon dog dressed as a police officer.

The families Orozco Forero cares for are now in a free fall.

Jessica Cocson, whose son has been in Orozco Forero’s care for more than a year, described her in a character letter to ICE as a “blessing to us in ways I struggle to fully express.”

Orozco Forero and her husband “support working families, provide quality childcare, and demonstrate compassion and commitment every day,” Cocson wrote. “It is heartbreaking to think that someone who gives so much and asks so little could be forced to leave.”

Tamia Riley, whose two sons with autism were also in Orozco Forero’s care, said losing her was like watching “a father walking out the door.”

“These people, these day care providers, sitters, they are a form of family members for me and my children,” Riley said.

Now, the day care she was set to open lays empty. Inside, the walls are plastered with posters listing colors and sight words. There are cushioned mats on the floor and play stations. Tables with tiny chairs. A tall pink dollhouse. High chairs and a pack and play for the babies. Outside, two play houses, a ball pit, toys to ride on and little picnic tables set across an artificial turf. But no children to enjoy any of it.

Big Dreams Day Care she was going to call it, for the dreams she wanted the kids in her care to strive for, and the ones that were finally coming to fruition for her.

Orozco Forero’s detention has rattled child care workers across the country. In Texas, workers represented by the Service Employees International Union have been rallying in her name. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, of the family’s release at a rally on June 29 in San Antonio. And a group of union workers is attempting to deliver supplies to the family. It’s an effort Orozco Forero knows little about; she only has limited communication with those on the outside.

Tricia Schroeder, the president of the Seattle-based SEIU chapter that represents care workers, said that, for years unions like hers have been working to improve quality, access and affordability in child care, a system in such deep crisis it’s been called by the Treasury Department

Immigrant women like Orozco Forero were part of that effort to improve access, doing jobs few Americans want to take on.

“Detaining child care providers, especially those who care for kids with special needs, just deepens the crisis in early learning,” Schroeder said.

Orozco Forero was also the connective tissue that kept families employed. Her loss has rippled across industries.

Kasnick, the foster parent, said one of the children in her care had been tentatively set to start at Orozco Forero’s day care as soon as it opened. Orozco Forero had been the only provider who would take the child, who has autism and is nonverbal.

Orozco Forero had cared for the girl at Wishon’s day care as if she was her own, even taking her in once when the child’s care had fallen through and no foster family in the entire county would take her in because of the complexity of her needs. The girl arrived at Orozco Forero’s house at midnight on a weekend “with no clothing, toys, medication or any of her belongings … this did not [deter] Nicolle and Sebastian instead they immediately went and purchased all the things” the child needed, a social worker wrote in a letter to ICE. Kasnick said Orozco Forero was even considering becoming a foster parent.

Without her, Kasnick is out of options: She quit her job as a physician’s assistant to care for the child after Orozco Forero was detained.

“There are now 44 patients a day who don’t have anyone to provide their health care, and I can’t go to work because Nicolle’s day care didn’t open,” Kasnick said.

In the weeks since, Kasnick has had an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, she said. How could this happen to someone who gave back so much?

“The security of knowing that you can be in your home one day and in a prison the next week, and you didn’t do anything except exist?” she said. “It makes you feel like there’s no good left in the world.”

Orozco Forero’s family has now been in ICE detention for nearly a month awaiting a bond hearing that could buy them time in the United States. Orozco Forero and the boys are together; her husband is in the same facility but separated from them.

Juan David hasn’t been eating. It took three weeks for him to receive medical care, Orozco Forero told her attorney, James Costo.

Costo has been working to get the details of why ICE allowed the family to stay in the country with monitoring after they lost their asylum case last year. There has been an order for their deportation since then, but ICE never attempted to deport them until the Trump administration ramped up efforts. The number of immigrants without criminal convictions who have been detained has since May.

The process to fight an asylum claim and appeal a denial is complicated — there are court deadlines, documents that need to be submitted and translated.

“They think maybe they can do it themselves and go in and say what happened but they are not understanding the whole legal process,” Costo said. “The system isn’t made for things to be easy.”

Costo is hopeful a judge will allow them to stay in the country temporarily as Juan David seeks care. They have almost no family left in Colombia, and no way to obtain care for him there, their family said. If they can stay, then perhaps Orozco Forero could try to obtain a work visa as a domestic worker.

He has gathered letters of support from numerous people whose lives the Orozco Forero family touched, and Wishon set up a to cover her legal expenses.

In the letters, Juan David’s first grade teachers call him an exceptional student who went from one of the lowest reading levels in the class — 10 words a minute — to one of the highest at 70 words a minute.

“He shows the qualities of a model citizen at a young age — dependable, ethical, and hard-working,” wrote his teacher, Carla Trujillo.

They were all on their way to shaping a better future, Wishon wrote in hers. The couple “worked tirelessly to build a better life for their children and to open their own licensed child care business. In all my years of employing and mentoring caregivers, I have rarely met a couple as responsible, driven, and capable as Nicolle and Sebastian.”

“This family is not a threat,” she concluded. “They are an asset.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .��

Parents, you’re not imagining it: The cost of child care is rising. By a lot.

The average annual cost of care in 2024 was $13,128, a 29 percent increase since 2020 — outpacing even inflation. That’s according to an from Child Care Aware, a national child care advocacy group that calculates average prices every year.

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The rapid rise of child care costs is swallowing larger portions of families’ income. On average, a married couple earning the median annual income in their state is draining about 10 percent of their earnings on child care. A single parent spends 35 percent of their income on child care.

In some states, it’s a lot worse. For a married couple with an infant in center-based care, by share of median income are Hawaii (17.9 percent), California (16.3 percent), Maryland (15.8 percent), Oregon (15.5 percent) and Nebraska (15.1 percent). In those states, single parents earning the median income are paying about half their earnings on child care.

That means child care costs are rivaling home costs as the top line item in most family budgets. In 45 states and Washington, D.C., child care for two kids costs more than a mortgage. In 49 states and D.C., child care for two surpasses what families pay in rent.

For years, the list of states where parents are likely to pay more for an infant’s care than higher education has been growing. According to Child Care Aware, the cost of center-based infant care exceeds the cost of in-state college tuition in 41 states now. The organization uses three methodologies to arrive at its average, looking at price, supply of child care providers and the number of child care spots, pooling data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., to arrive at its annual price analysis.

“Child care prices are a sizable part of family budgets — they are by no means under control for the majority of families,” said Anne Hedgepeth, chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware. “If we are going to talk about family budgets, and if we want to talk about things you could solve for family budgets: Make a dent in child care prices. You would really bring down one of those highest costs or expenses for a family.”

Child care remains so expensive because of staff needs and federal investment. To preserve the safety of babies and toddlers, centers are required by law to have more teachers in the classroom. The federal is one person for every three to four infants and young toddlers, and one person for every seven when you get up to 3-year-olds, but each state sets its own ratio. That’s different from a kindergarten classroom, where classes may have one teacher for every 20 kids, for instance. The costs of employing that many people are also not offset by substantial federal, state and local investment like public education is subsidized. So parents are left footing the bill, and centers can only pay their teachers about minimum wage to keep costs as low as possible. Profit margins at centers are only

For years, the United States has toyed with the idea of investing more broadly in child care. Currently, the federal government only covers some costs for very low-income families — and even then only about are able to access subsidized care. But broader proposals that go as far as introducing a “universal” child care system have repeatedly been .

After the pandemic, when , the United States got as close as it ever has to investing more broadly in the industry. Through September 2023, states received a historic investment of $24 billion in stabilization grants that helped keep centers open and raise wages for teachers at .

But after those funds ran out, Congress did not allocate any additional resources.

Among families, there is broad support for more federal and state investment in child care, regardless of political party. In a nationally representative Child Care Aware , 82 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents and 68 percent of Republicans said they want their elected officials to increase funding for child care and early learning.

That support is also resounding among men. Another nationally representative found that 90 percent of men, including 87 percent of Republicans, are in favor of ensuring families have access to affordable care.

Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Republicans have grown somewhat more vocal in their support of child care investments. On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said he supported child care but didn’t offer any policy proposals for improving affordability or access. Former President Joe Biden proposed a $400 million child care package that included universal preschool, but it .

At the moment, the closest the Trump administration could come to a child care investment is an update to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, a tax break for families on their child care expenses that could be in the final version of Currently, most families only get an average tax break of about (the maximum parents can claim for one child is $1,050), which doesn’t do much to offset child care costs that easily run into the thousands. A bipartisan effort in the Senate to update the tax credit could get added into the package. (The House version that passed in May did not include it). The Senate’s Child Care Availability and Affordability Act would increase the maximum amount parents can get back in their taxes through the credit to .

Julie Kashen, a senior fellow and director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, said improving the tax credit is a good policy move for the families that benefit from it, but ultimately it doesn’t solve the problems facing the child care industry as a whole.

“It’s one piece of a much larger puzzle,” Kashen said. “If you can’t afford to lay out the money up front to pay for child care, then it doesn’t help you that you have a refundable tax credit.”

Advocates worry child care has so far been a footnote in this administration. In April, a leaked version of Trump’s budget called for , the federally-funded program that provides early learning and other services to half a million very low-income preschoolers ages 3 to 5. After from child care providers and parents across the country, the proposal was ultimately withdrawn.

“It tells us a little bit of what it looks like when policy makers — in particular, members of Congress and members of the administration — hear about child care from the constituents, and what they heard was how much of a non-starter it is to eliminate these core early learning services in every district across the country,” said Hedgepeth of Child Care Aware.

Still, it will likely be a battle to keep the existing child care safety net — a battle increasingly at odds with the majority of American parents who are looking for relief on child care costs.

Because the reality is simple, Hedgepeth said:  “This is not what people are looking for.”

In the last 18 years, Wilkes County has lost 56 child care programs, 67% of its child care capacity. This year, thanks to a scrappy community effort, local leaders saved the county from losing another.

Sharon Phillips and her daughter Katy Hinson, owners of PlayWorks Early Care and Learning Center, cut the ribbon on their new location inside Wilkesboro United Methodist Church in April, expanding their business after months of wondering whether they’d survive at all.

“I consider what happened there a miracle,” said Todd Maberry, former managing director of the , a project at Duke Divinity School focused on helping churches assess their communities’ needs and find new ways to meet them. The center, which is closing this summer, helped the Wilkesboro church decide how to use an empty wing to help address a local lack of child care and bring in new revenue.

The specifics of the initiative, called “Big Building, Little Feet” — both the people behind it and the speed at which they raised more than $600,000 as the five-star program faced eviction — are specific to this community. But the model itself, Maberry said, has lessons for the entire state.

“There’s not one of the 100 counties that doesn’t have a church that has an empty educational wing sitting there,” Maberry said. “This can be a blueprint.”

With  and bipartisan state leaders , local leaders like those in Wilkes County are convening, collaborating, and raising money to make things work for their neighbors in the meantime.

“Communities need to think outside the box,” said Michelle Shepherd, executive director of , the local  partnership. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway. These children deserve quality child care, and what does that look like, and what do communities have to offer?”

A child care need, a church need

In 2023, Phillips and Hinson were touring every vacant building in town.

They were looking for a larger space to expand their 10-year-old business and help fill child care gaps. That year,  funded by the Leonard G Herring Family Foundation found that the county needed 836 additional child care slots, almost double the capacity it had. The report’s findings, released by the Wilkes Economic Development Corporation (EDC),  in the business community.

“The child care study revealed what a crisis we were in,” Hinson said.

Hinson and her mother were already struggling with a balance familiar to child care owners. They did not have enough revenue to pay teachers much more than minimum wage, couldn’t raise tuition without pricing out families, and were unwilling to cut costs by lowering quality. Stabilization grants funded through the federal American Rescue Plan Act were expected to dry up, leaving a large gap in the budgets of .

“We just kind of felt like we had done all we could on our own two feet,” Phillips said.

Phillips and Hinson were coming up short in their search. 

“We had knocked on doors, we had toured all the vacant buildings, we had been to town officials,” Phillips said.

Then they started conversations with a local entity with its own financial struggles: Wilkesboro United Methodist Church. 

“Our church has dramatically shrunk … especially post-COVID,” said Gilbert Cox, who has attended the church since 2008 and was the chair of its finance committee at the time. 

Cox recalled holidays when he first joined with people overflowing into the aisles and Sundays with regularly full pews. A couple of years after the pandemic, the church was lucky to have 50 members attending services.

“This is a very common story for a lot of congregations in the country, particularly in North Carolina, particularly in rural places, where mainline churches have just been decimated by a pandemic, by disagreements,” Maberry said. “And Wilkesboro is not immune to that.”

Plus, more than 90% of the church’s space was sitting unused more than 90% of the time, Cox said.

“Eventually, what was an asset was going to turn into a liability,” he said. “The maintenance of it, and it stored more and more. I think we found five pianos. There were two in a closet we didn’t even know about.”

The church entered a six-week “design sprint” with the Ormond Center called the Community Craft Collaborative to figure out a different path forward. The process aims to helps churches better understand their community through data and interviews, and then encourages them to come up with an idea to experiment with.

Through a conversation with the EDC, Cox learned about the child care study’s findings. The organization connected him to Phillips and Hinson, who had recently reached out in their search for a new home.

By the end of the sprint, the church presented its idea: house and expand PlayWorks. Phillips and Hinson toured the church’s facilities and heard from the church’s leadership that they were on board.

“How could we take what is becoming a liability, and better connect to the community?” Cox said.

‘A gut punch’

In April 2024, a contractor gave an estimate on the building renovations necessary to meet regulatory standards. It would cost about $1.6 million. Everyone involved agreed: “It was insurmountable,” Cox said.

The potential collaboration felt like it had died, and Phillips and Hinson were back to square one.

“Everybody ghosted,” Phillips said.

While they were already down, they were hit with what Phillips described as “a gut punch.” In June 2024, the program received an eviction notice from its landlord, a local theater company that wanted to repurpose the space. PlayWorks had to be out by September. Their hunt for a new building became a make-or-break endeavor.

“I can just remember thinking, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? We don’t have any choices,” Phillips said. “I immediately called Michelle at the partnership.”

Shepherd, who had been the executive director of Wilkes Community Partnership for Children for about a year, said she immediately understood the urgency. With a background in K-12 education, Shepherd had spent her time at the partnership learning about just how dire her county’s child care needs were and developing relationships with a whole new sector of educators.

“We just couldn’t let them fold,” she said.

Shepherd’s leadership was a game-changer.

“When she wouldn’t give up, I wouldn’t give up,” Phillips said.

Through a $15,000 grant from the Ormond Center, the church paid an architect for renderings, moving forward without knowing whether things would work. Through a stroke of luck, a local contractor was called in to do the building’s measurements who was interested in bidding on the project. This time, the estimate came in at about $600,000.

“Michelle says, ‘Don’t give up,’ so it breathed new life into the possibility,” Cox said. “Even though the church didn’t have $590,000, Michelle — she deserves all the credit — she said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’”

Time crunch

Everyone got busy. Hinson and Phillips asked their landlord for an extension on the move-out date. The church began a deeper process with the Ormond Center to map out the details of the project. Shepherd, with no fundraising experience, started making calls.

“We all stepped out in faith that it would happen,” Hinson said.

The child care study helped Shepherd tell potential donors the story of the community’s need, she said, and explain the importance of child care for workforce participation.

“This was not some ‘Betty Froo Froo’ project; this was a necessity for our community,” she said. “That really played on the heart of business people in the community.”

Hinson and Phillips got an extension from their landlord for their move-out date to November, and then to April 2025.

Once Shepherd received the first big ‘yes’ — a $250,000 donation from an anonymous community member — others started following. 

“That was my big driver, that we can’t tell these kids, ‘You’ve got to go home,’ and parents that they can’t work that really want to work,” she said.

She reached out to people with a connection to PlayWorks, who understood the importance of the high-quality care and education it provided for children and families. She received donations from dozens of individuals, including a large contribution from private donor Janice Story and funds from church members and partnership employees.

She also reached out to foundations and community groups, securing grants from the Carson Foundation, the Leonard G Herring Family Foundation, the Cannon Foundation, the North Carolina Community Foundation, and United Way of North Carolina.

The effort did not receive any local or state public funding.

“All of a sudden, Michelle had almost a half a million dollars in a matter of almost weeks,” Cox said.

The Ormond process provided real estate and zoning expertise, as well as  to help the community tell its story. It was rooted in “asset mapping,” Maberry said.

“We’ve got a church with empty space, we’ve got an incredible child care center that is flexible and can move, and we’ve got a local nonprofit that’s committed to the well-being of children in the county,” he said. “Those are great assets. They can begin to look at, ‘OK, well, there’s a child care crisis, and one of the better ones is about to go away. How do we solve that?”

Shepherd said her mother was a salesperson, and always told her that salesmanship requires a good product and a powerful “why.” She had both.

“We had people that gave $50 up to $250,000,” she said. “It truly was a community, dollar-by-dollar fundraiser.”

Making it to opening day

From November 2024 to March 2025, the team reached their goal. The local contractor agreed to start construction before all the funding was secured to help Phillips and Hinson reach their move-out deadline.

There were many obstacles. The team almost had to call off the project once again when they realized the extent of the plumbing needs to have appropriate sinks in each room. They coordinated between sanitation, the county inspector, fire safety, and the state child care licensing under the Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE).

“There was not a single source that you could go to who could give you all the answers,” Cox said.

PlayWorks closed on March 20 and 21, a Thursday and Friday, plus the following Monday. In that long weekend, they moved with the help of family and friends and set up every classroom. On Monday, the center had its final sanitation inspection and a visit from DCDEE. They opened their doors to children on Tuesday.

The execution of the move, Phillips said, was a miracle in itself. Through the months of ups and downs, she kept thinking of the families she serves and the educators she employs.

“I kept going back to, how do we tell our staff? How do we tell our families? We are in such a child care crisis, there aren’t spots available in many places in the other child cares. How can we disperse 60 children in this county? You know, where are they going to go?”

On the day EdNC visited PlayWorks, Hinson and Phillips were moving in sync. Hinson went between classrooms, providing extra hands for fussy infants. Phillips met with licensing officials in the office during their second DCDEE check-in, which required a fire drill.

“We never really dreamed that something like this would happen,” Phillips said. “We’re just the proud recipients.”

The day before, they had celebrated the team’s accomplishments with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, during which church leaders called the moment “a revival.” But the next day, it was back to the work they both love and are challenged by.

The new space will allow PlayWorks to expand from serving 55 to 88 children as they add three new classrooms (for infants, toddlers, and 4-year-olds) in the coming months. 

The church is providing the space at less than $6 per square foot, Cox said, compared with the area’s average commercial lease of $28 per square foot. It is also covering utility costs.

Phillips said they do not expect any problem filling the new seats. They will first check with families on their waiting list. An interested family was visiting the program during the fire drill, during which all children were walked or rolled to a gazebo in the parking lot.

“Word of mouth is just really getting around,” she said.

Valuing educators

Phillips and Hinson are still hiring and rearranging teachers to staff the new classrooms. Each room has three teachers for now, for “an extra layer of quality.”

They start teachers, depending on education level and experience, at anywhere from $10 to $15 per hour. The median wage for the state’s child care teachers was $12.31 . Though PlayWorks is not immune to  experienced by the field, multiple teachers have stayed for several years.

Teacher Rachel Brionez has worked at PlayWorks since it opened because of “the environment that Sharon and Katie have created” among the staff, the families, and the children. Educators refer to Phillips and Hinson as “the dynamic duo.”

“They value us, and that makes coming to work so much better,” Brionez said. “You don’t dread the alarm clock going off.”

Brionez said her experiences in child care have not always been positive. Phillips said the same about her early career experiences.

Because of the low pay, high stress, and instability, Phillips had discouraged Hinson from going into the field. She pushed her to be a nurse instead. That all changed after one conversation, while Hinson, a high schooler at the time, was helping her mother with her pre-K class.

“She just broke down in tears, and she says, ‘I’m not going to be a nurse,’” Phillips said. “We both cried. And she said, ‘This is all I know through you.’ … I told her, ‘We will do something for your career.’ And that’s why we’re here.”

‘A slim margin’

Because of temporary state funding, the funding cliff that worried providers like Phillips and Hinson in 2023 was pushed back. In March 2025, programs received their final installment of the compensation grant, which has helped them raise teacher pay and plug the gap between what families can afford and what it costs to provide high-quality care.

“With the stabilization grant money from the state, we were able to give teachers those raises and bonuses, and we’re going to do all we can for that to continue,” Hinson said.

Advocates and DCDEE are asking the state legislature this session for child care investments to support the state’s child care subsidy program, which helps working low-income families afford care, and the early childhood workforce. None of the current proposals would provide the level of funding providers were receiving from stabilization grants.

“It’s worrisome,” Phillips said. “I really put it on the back burner, just knowing that, with the move and everything, we’ve got to move forward.”

As Phillips and Hinson both breathe a sigh of relief, they know their future remains unclear.

“We’ll make it on a slim margin — or I hope we will,” Phillips said. “I’m just thinking very optimistically that we’ll make it work, but it’s going to be very hard.”

A win-win model

Shepherd said the mutually beneficial partnership required resources that not every community has. She sees the state playing an important role in providing grant money to repurpose space — similar to the .

“I just think this is a great model for a lot of places to look at underutilized space and how to bring in some revenue for both,” she said.

Maberry is hoping to find a new way to continue the work of the Ormond Center, which had 55 relationships with churches. Some were working on child care projects, he said. Others were opening mental health services and helping their communities with affordable housing.

“Churches are at their best when they are meaningfully integrated into their community and are making their communities better places to be and to live,” he said.

The Wilkesboro project is an example of the power of dynamic partnerships and possibility in a time of disruption.

“For the church, it’s energized them,” he said. “Like they’ve got kids in their building now, all day, every day, and they’re starting to think, like, OK, well, if we can do this, what else can we do? Imagination can be contagious.”

The children, staff, and administrators at PlayWorks are settling in. Across the street is an assisted living center whose residents can now see playing children on their walks.

Phillips said she does not know whether Hinson will ever let her retire. They both said the new space feels like home.

“With some hard work and perseverance, we’ve made it,” Phillips said.

This was originally published on .

The crisis impacting the early learning sector is layered. Families are struggling to find affordable, high-quality care. Providers are stretched thin, often unable to make ends meet. The ecosystem of policies and funding is shrouded in uncertainty, creating chaos and instability. 

Still, through it all, bright spots have emerged. There are talented educators supporting our nation’s youngest learners in powerful ways. There are researchers, policymakers and advocates working tirelessly to improve the lived experiences of families with young children and early learning professionals. There are programs creatively tackling some of the field’s most pressing issues, like compensation, the rising cost of care and access to high-quality programs. And broadly, the public has become more aware of the need for a strong, sustainable early care and education system.

The 74 wants to help readers make sense of the sector’s complex challenges — and to highlight innovative approaches to solving them. That’s why we’re excited to introduce zero2eight, a new vertical dedicated to early care and education that will publish stories from — and for — those who see early learning as essential to setting every child up for future success.

Zero2eight will be dedicated to covering the news, practices, policies and research shaping the experiences of young children, their families and the early learning workforce. We’ll examine the landscape of American child care and early childhood education; emerging research in early childhood development; and novel solutions that are pushing the field forward.

Our coverage will build upon the robust archive of work published by Early Learning Nation, an independent magazine that launched in 2018 as an initiative of the Bezos Family Foundation and joined The 74 in fall 2024. As its readers know, Early Learning Nation has played a key role in raising awareness and deepening public understanding of American child care and early learning. Through the years its industry-leading team of writers and analysts have brought unique expertise and experience to these topics, which they’ll continue to do here at The 74. 

“The key issues affecting America’s K-12 students begin well before kindergarten and continue well beyond high school graduation,” 74 CEO Steve Snyder said last fall, as he announced the merger. “Our partnership underscores The 74’s commitment in broadening our editorial priorities and deepening our coverage of equity, solutions and progress as we follow children from cradle to career.” 

Early Learning Nation’s six-year archive will be available on zero2eight. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll also be resurfacing some memorable “must reads” from over the years.

It is with excitement and pertinence that we launch zero2eight. We hope you’ll follow and share our work on The 74 (bookmark our new home) and join our growing community. And, of course, be sure to sign up for The 74’s daily newsletter.

Sarah Osofsky returned to school last year to earn her master’s degree in social work, hoping to give back to her community and find a job that would pay enough to survive Hawaiʻi’s high cost of living.

Now, less than two weeks away from graduation, the mother of two is struggling to find a position that can sustain her family.

Most social work jobs she’s seen in recent months offer salaries of $60,000 or less — enough to disqualify her from safety net programs like food stamps, but not enough to comfortably provide for her kids. She’s considered moving back to California where she has family who could support her, but she wants to stay in Hawaiʻi so her children can be near their dad.

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“What I’m balancing right now is, do I take a low, low paying job that then I’ll qualify for services like food stamps and Medicaid,” Osofsky said, “or do I hold out and try to find those few and far between really good jobs that will make enough so I don’t qualify but I don’t need it.”

Osofsky’s struggle is a familiar one for working families in Hawaiʻi. In 2024, nearly 30% of Hawaiʻi households were living paycheck-to-paycheck and struggling to afford basic necessities like housing, child care and food, according to an annual count of the state’s ALICE families — an acronym for people who are asset limited, income constrained, and employed.

Like Osofsky, roughly 40% of these families considered leaving the state over the past year, according to a study from Aloha United Way.

While some reports indicate that more locals have been returning to Hawaiʻi in the last few years, the state’s high cost of living continues to drive some families away, straining the public education system and economy.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education said its kindergarten enrollment dropped from 13,000 in 2019 to nearly 10,800 this year, citing estimates that 20% of people leaving Hawaiʻi are school-aged kids. The department is now starting the process of consolidating small schools, although it hasn’t yet identified which campuses are at risk of closure.

A few years ago, state lawmakers grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic proposed a bold slate of reforms to improve the plight of working families: free school meals for all, universal access to preschool and paid family leave. But the state’s big plans for progress have resulted in incremental steps, and some families and advocates say change isn’t happening quickly enough.

Lawmakers this session created a working group to study paid family leave but failed to turn the yearslong proposal into law. The state expanded eligibility for preschool tuition subsidies and funded preschool construction but failed to address the ongoing shortage of early learning educators. And Senate Bill 1300 — considered one of the biggest wins for students this year — expanded access to free school meals but stopped short of providing them for all kids.

At the same time, uncertainty looms around the future of programs that rely on federal dollars to support working families, including school meals and early learning centers.

Amid the upheaval, state lawmakers were hesitant to pass big spending measures this year, opting instead to set aside $200 million to help Hawaiʻi prepare for federal funding cuts. But some advocates say now is exactly the time for the state to make a bigger investment in families.

“The state Legislature, and frankly, the counties, should be thinking, ‘Bad stuff is coming,’” said Deborah Zysman, executive director of Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network. “We don’t quite know what yet, but we should be thinking about how to take care of our own people.”

An Urgent Need For Child Care

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Osofsky worried about the social development of her son, who was just turning 2 when lockdown restrictions began. But when he began attending the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa Children’s Center later that year, Osofsky said, he received services for his speech delay and became comfortable making friends and recognizing letters.

But paying for preschool was a challenge, Osofsky said. The Preschool Open Doors program provides a state subsidy to help cover tuition, but her son was ineligible when he started because the program only covered 4-year-olds at the time. The program expanded to include 3-year-olds last year.

Hawaiʻi has pledged to offer preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032. The Ready Keiki initiative, led by Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, currently estimates the state needs to add more than 330 classrooms in the next seven years to provide preschool to an additional 6,700 children.

While lawmakers successfully expanded access to tuition subsidies and funded more preschool construction this year, progress toward the state’s ambitious goal has slowed on other fronts.

One successful bill this session expands eligibility for preschool subsidies by including 2-year-olds and repealing the requirement that families must use the subsidy at a nationally accredited provider, which has created financial and administrative barriers for smaller programs in the past, Zysman said.

But the Department of Human Services is on track to spend only $20 million of its $50 million budget for preschool subsidies this year, said Scott Morishige, administrator of the department’s Benefit, Employment and Support Services Division.

To ramp up its spending, DHS is considering expanding the income eligibility to 500% of the federal poverty line. If DHS adopts the rules this summer, Morishige said, a family of four could make up to $184,000 annually and still be eligible for assistance, compared to the past income limit of $110,000.

The state budget sets aside $20 million to build more public preschool classrooms over the next three years. The state plans on opening 25 public preschool classrooms this fall and an additional 25 classrooms the following year, far less than previous estimates that Hawaiʻi could build 40-50 classrooms annually.

While the state would like to take a more aggressive approach to opening public preschool classrooms moving forward, Luke said, the Ready Keiki initiative is also relying on private providers and charter schools to help expand access. The state is starting larger construction projects, like standalone preschool centers, that could add seats more rapidly as they open in the next few years.

“There is an urgency for us to open as many preschool seats as we can,” she said.

But families’ demand for preschool could grow beyond what the state has anticipated if the federal government stops funding its own child care programs. Head Start, which relies on federal funding and serves roughly 2,800 children and pregnant mothers, is currently Hawaiʻi’s largest provider of early learning services, said Ryan Kusumoto, president and CEO of the nonprofit Parents And Children Together.

The Trump administration has previously threatened to cut funding entirely for Head Start, although the most recent version of the federal budget keeps program funding intact. Some Hawaiʻi Head Start programs are still waiting to receive confirmation for next year’s funding, and the recent closure of some regional offices could create backlogs in awarding this money, said Ben Naki, president of the Head Start Association of Hawaiʻi.

“There’s no existing infrastructure that can pick up those 2,800 kids,” Kusumoto said. “And we’re talking about kids who don’t have any other resources.”

First Steps For Free Meals

Since September, Christine Russo said paying for meals has become a greater challenge for her family as her twins joined her 10-year-old in attending school every day. She sets aside roughly $180 each month so her kids can purchase breakfast and lunch at school — a challenge for the public school teacher, whose husband is a retail store manager.

Russo’s kids don’t qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, but she said her family could still benefit from the ongoing push to bring back a pandemic-era program that made meals free for all students.

Lawmakers stopped short of funding a universal free meals program this year but took incremental steps by passing Senate Bill 1300. Starting next year, the state will provide free school meals to students who currently qualify for reduced-price lunch. The following year, eligibility for free school meals would be expanded to families making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, or roughly $110,000 for a family of four.

The bill appropriates $565,000 to provide more free school meals next year and an additional $3.4 million for the program’s expansion the following year. More than 68,000 students in the Department of Education qualified for free meals this year, and 10,000 qualified for reduced-price meals.

The bill also requires schools feed students who don’t have enough money to purchase lunch or already have meal debt. Students have accrued more than $105,000 in meal debt this school year, DOE communications director Nanea Ching said.

At Castle High School, junior Tayli Kahoopii said she receives free meals, but some of her friends don’t qualify. When someone doesn’t have enough money in their account to purchase lunch, the register makes a buzzing sound — loud enough to embarrass students and, in one instance, deter Kahoopii’s friend from trying to purchase meals for a week.

“On a daily basis, you see kids getting their food taken away, and there’s really nothing that they can do about it,” Kahoopii said, adding that it’s difficult for students to learn and focus when they don’t have access to food during the school day.

Rep. Scot Matayoshi, who has introduced bills for the past three years proposing free school meals, said SB1300 is an important step. But he still plans on advocating for universal free school meals in the coming years, especially since it would reduce the administrative barriers schools and families face in determining who qualifies for free meals.

Daniela Spoto, director of food equity at Hawaiʻi Appleseed, said providing all students with free school meals could also become more important with federal funding on the line. Proposed federal cuts to a program allowing schools in low-income areas to provide free meals to all children could impact 52 schools and more than 27,000 kids in Hawaiʻi, according to estimates from the Food Research and Action Center.

“It should be a staple for our schools to have free school lunch,” said Castle junior Haliʻa Tom-Jardine, who will begin qualifying for free school meals next year. “It should be a right.”

‘Bad Things Are Coming’

During the pandemic, people saw lawmakers step up and meet the needs of working families through federal initiatives like the child tax credit and free school meals, said Kayla Keehu-Alexander, vice president of community impact at Aloha United Way. Now, she said, state lawmakers need to do the same during times of uncertainty.

“If we don’t start making some big policy changes around the cost of living, around housing, we could potentially be looking at a larger out-migration than we’ve had in the past,” she said.

Hawaiʻi is already starting to see the possible impacts of out-migration on its schools and economy. While some people are coming back to Hawaiʻi to raise families, Keehu-Alexander said, it’s unclear if they’re joining the workforce in areas with the worst staffing shortages, like education or healthcare.

Looking ahead to next year, Zysman said she would like to see a successful bill establishing paid family leave in Hawaiʻi, which would provide caregivers paid time off to care for their loved ones. Lawmakers have failed to pass a bill for several years, although they did approve a resolution last month establishing a working group that will study how to implement paid family leave over the next year.

Zysman added that she’s concerned about the long-term impacts of the historic tax cut lawmakers passed last year. While she supports cuts that can make it more affordable for people to stay in Hawaiʻi, she said, she’s worried that tax breaks for the wealthiest will make it harder for the state to fund programs that can keep working families afloat.

“In my gut, I feel like bad things are coming,” Zysman said, “and we should have acted more preemptively.”

This was originally published on . Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

A Brief History of the CDCTC

The origins of the CDCTC track back to 1954, when a very limited deduction was introduced for child care expenses. According to a prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “The provision was intended to recognize the similarity of child care expenses to employee business expenses and provide a limited benefit.” That deduction was converted into the CDCTC in 1976, as mothers were flooding into the labor force and the nation had no publicly-supported child care system for them. There have been periods of reform since then, but the credit has been stuck in the mud for more than two decades: It has been $3,000 for one child and $6,000 for two or more children since 2001. Without adjustment for inflation, , according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. There was one exception, which was a in 2021 which had a significant impact for many working families. (That boost increased the average credit award by more than $1,500 and led to almost 3 million more families claiming it).  

As a result, the average credit per family , meaning their tax liability is reduced by that amount. Reducing the taxes one owes by a few hundred dollars is not nothing, but hardly enough to make much of a dent in , which commonly run in the thousands and can easily tip into five figures.    

The Good

The CDCTC’s strongest suit is how it functions as a broad vehicle to defray child care costs. (Families can claim the CDCTC to offset the cost of care for a spouse or adult dependent with a disability, but CRS notes that it is used “almost exclusively” for child care.) The credit has become especially key for middle-income families since there is no other federal government mechanism to support them with child care costs; all other federal child care assistance is targeted to low- and moderate-income families. Middle-income families , yet they fall into something of a “donut hole” — they often make too much money to qualify for public assistance, but not enough money to be able to comfortably afford programs’ sky-high prices. Absent a strong universal child care system, the CDCTC (or some variation thereof) is necessary to provide some relief.

The CDCTC is also fairly inclusive. While one needs the taxpayer ID of the individual or program used to provide care, the provider can be nearly anyone other than a parent, meaning that it is not limited to licensed care providers.

The Bad

The CDCTC offers important support for many families, but the design is car-with-a-fat-tire clunky. The on claiming the credit is 20 pages long. There are a number of elements including eligibility criteria, extensive rules around earned income, work-related expenses and filing a joint return, and a provider identification test. It is, in short, not an easy credit to claim. Only utilize it.

Moreover, the credit does nothing to support broader systems-building in child care. The fundamental problem is that there is not enough public money in the child care system, so it exists as a failed market with high costs for parents, low pay for providers and scarce supply. The government alleviating a sliver of a families’ expenses during tax season leaves the structural issues completely untouched. On a philosophical level, it keeps child care support in the realm of fiscal tax policy as opposed to being seen as essential social infrastructure.

The Ugly

The CDCTC is strongly regressive, meaning that the benefits flow disproportionately to more affluent families. “Currently, nearly 44% of tax returns that claim the CDCTC come from families with an AGI [adjusted gross income] over $100,000; only 6% of returns from households making under $25,000 a year claim the credit, despite those households accounting for 33% of all returns,” Elise Anderson, a researcher and policy analyst at Capita.

One reason for the huge disparity is that the CDCTC is non-refundable, meaning that a parent needs to owe a particular amount each year in order to receive the full credit. In other words, if a household has no tax liability — which is true for the majority of parents in lower-income households due to the standard deduction and other credits — they don’t get any benefit. 

Finally, the CDCTC categorically excludes stay-at-home parents; families that do not have both parents working outside the home may not claim the credit. The ostensible logic that the CDCTC is a credit to defray tax liability for parents in the labor force doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Families with a stay-at-home parent contribute income taxes by filing jointly, and the labor of many stay-at-home parents enables a spouse to work, particularly if one parent works a job that doesn’t lend itself to regular, predictable hours, like an electrical lineworker or a firefighter who works on wildfires, for example.

What Ideas Are Being Proposed?

There is a reasonable argument to be made to . However, that is not realistically on the table at present. Instead, there are a few different reform options :

The most relevant proposal, due to the profiles of its sponsors, is . The legislation was introduced in early March by a bipartisan group led by Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, and New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and California Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal. It has endorsements from groups not always seen together such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Federation of Teachers. Britt is  to see the legislation folded into the Republicans’ budget reconciliation law. 

If passed, the maximum amount of expenses that a family could claim would increase to $5,000 for one child and $8,000 for two or more children. It would also make the CDCTC partially refundable, meaning that a portion of it would go to families even if they owe no taxes, and lower-income families would have access to a larger credit. In practical terms, a family with one child with an adjusted gross income of $15,000 would be able to claim a credit of $2,500 on $5,000 worth of child care expenses and have that amount refunded if they did not owe taxes. Under the current law, that same family with the same expenses can only claim $1,750 and none of it is refundable. 

Whatever policy, if any, ultimately ends up making its way into the budget reconciliation package, the CDCTC is long overdue for reform. Child care stakeholders would do well to spend some time getting acquainted with the different plans so they can fully engage in the upcoming debates.

Disclosure: Elliot Haspel is a senior fellow at Capita.

The sector in discussion is child care, and the discussion focuses on what can happen if private equity firms take over a larger share of the child care market. Slaughter was speaking on a panel at a day-long event in Washington D.C. to mark the by the National Women’s Law Center and Open Markets Institute: “Children Before Profits: Constraining Private Equity Profiteering to Advance Child Care as a Public Good.” 

The concerns about private equity’s influence are well founded. by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers result in significant job losses. These firms reduce wages, benefits and staffing at firms they acquire – with devastating consequences to thousands of workers, their families and their entire communities. Private equity funds also should their tactics to maximize profits fail. And for a business like child care, primed to receive a possible influx of federal and state investment, private equity’s interest in the sector is likely to increase.

“The report isn’t anti-private equity, it’s pro-child care,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center and one of the authors of the report. Boteach and her co-author, Audrey Stienon from Open Markets Institute, advocate that child care should be understood as a public good that’s in need of sustained government investment. The report lays out a vision of how a robust child care system would provide universal access to high quality child care with appropriately compensated providers. The goal, says Boteach, is that if private equity firms, or other outside investors, are going to enter the child-care market, they should do so in a way that upholds this vision.

The timing of this report coincides with several states — including , and — instituting record levels of government investment in child care. from the First Five Years Fund also shows strong bipartisan voter support for more child care funding, with 93 percent of voters believing it’s important for working parents of young children to have access to affordable quality child care programs.

Private equity has a history of chasing after industries that receive sustained sources of federal funding. Eileen Applebaum, co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an , who also served as a panelist at the event, detailed the way in which private equity firms began investing in a substantial share of hospice care services. Much of hospice care is funded by Medicare, which pays a fixed amount to the hospice agency for each day an eligible Medicare beneficiary is enrolled, regardless of whether the patient receives actual services on a particular day.

Other tactics from the private equity “playbook” as Applebaum discussed, include myriad anti-competitive behaviors, including consolidation, creating higher debt burdens, cutting labor costs and staff benefits, and enacting policies that maximize short-term profits to the private equity fund while passing on the liabilities and burdens to the individual companies they’d invested in. Applebaum points to the wide discrepancies in profits and patient care for hospice services: profit margins for a nonprofit hospice provider were around 4-5%, and for those owned by private equity firms, it was 19 percent. Nonprofits are more likely to use funds to invest in staffing and the business, debt-financed acquisitions to restructure these companies to maximize their profit margins, and try to sell them to the highest bidder within three to five years.

In the case of hospice, Applebaum that private equity hospice providers have higher rates of neglect, low staffing and are more likely to pass on the higher costs to patients and families.

Child care is in a unique position of being primarily a small business industry, with low profit margins yet with high demand because it is a necessity for many Americans to go to work and for the economy to function. “A textbook example of a broken market” is how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin in the United States. Yet if a child care center is forced to declare bankruptcy, the private equity company may still see a high return on the investment, even though the individual businesses may have shuttered, and the communities that rely on such child care centers may no longer have a viable option.

Boteach emphasized that the presence of private equity and the private sector itself is not problematic – and that the existence of more child care options with high quality care can be a profitable industry if sufficient government funding is provided. Often the individual child care centers are owned by women, many of them Black and brown, with strong ties to the communities they serve. Making such industries profitable so that they can pay their employees a living wage is a noble goal, she said. “The problem,” Boteach explains, “is that private equity firms have a traditional playbook, whereby the firms collect the profits and pass the risk and liabilities back to the companies they’ve taken over. And with the influx of possible public funding, external investors should have guardrails in place to protect the child care industry and the families they serve.”

The report is coming out at a moment in which private equity is poised to enter the child care market, but it is “not yet entrenched,” said Audrey Stienon of Open Markets Institute, and the report’s co-author. “It is possible to get ahead of the problem and change patterns.”

Experts encouraged action to counter the threats of private equity takeover. This can be done at both the state and federal level, though guardrails surrounding government funding.��Examples cited included to create standards and restrict profit for for-profit preschools that receive state funding. In Massachusetts, efforts are underway to limit the amount of state funding any larger company can receive. And for an industry like child care, which many families rely on for their own work, there is potential for real momentum in organizing parents to insist on such accountability measures for the involvement of outside investment groups like private equity. And as Rebecca Slaughter told the group, they need to bring such examples of poor conduct to the attention of the FTC. “I can’t solve a problem if I don’t know about it,” she said.

Child care may have a constituency that is primed to be vocal proponents. “Parents of children are a really good group of people to organize,” said Eileen Applebaum.�� “You have to let them know that they are not alone.”

There’s a reason why women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them and that if they don’t hold everything together Macgyver-like with pluck, grit, duct tape and dental floss, their worlds could fall apart.

The reason is because it’s true. Maybe not the part about the duct tape, but the reason so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving is that the United States doesn’t have a robust social safety net the way many other industrialized countries do. We have no federal child care infrastructure and no federal paid family leave plan. We’ve skipped over the safety net chapter on how to run a country and instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack.

Calarco, who works as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, made headlines in November 2020 when her quote: “Other countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women” went viral. It resonated while still getting to the heart of what makes being a caregiver in this country so incredibly frustrating: it’s hard, it’s time-consuming and women are expected to do it while being given no support, financial or otherwise. It also served as the basis for Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco spoke with Early Learning Nation about everything from the outdated Supermom myth to the role humor plays in perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes.

A lightly edited and condensed Q+A is below.

Rebecca Gale: Your book talks about the United States’ insistence on maintaining the illusion of a DIY society — that each of us should make our own decisions and take care of our problems without help from anyone else. But given that people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives, why do you think this illusion has endured for such a long time? 

Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don’t need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems – child care, health care – they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations, which is threatening to people as it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us: exploitation. They have an interest in maintaining the illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.

RG: Really?

JC: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s, then was imported to the U.S. for manufacturers to use to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the U.S. and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.

RG: So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care and why women are expected to make up the difference? 

JC: Part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don’t have a social safety net like universal child care and universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it’s not ever going to work within our profit-based economic system, without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.

We have pushed the labor-intensive work disproportionately onto women. You can see that in industries like child care, home health care, services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable: women, prisoners and immigrants. We have an interest in this DIY model: the more we create conditions where people are forced to take the job reinforces the perception that this job must be less valuable.

Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as the moral or emotional benefit that must make up for what is not paid. So, you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.

RG: One framework you discuss in the book is that low-income women are unable to say no as they need the work, especially those in caregiving roles, so they say yes, even to situations that may be untenable to them.��

JC: Yes, we see this especially for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, who have nowhere to turn for support. It is a two-way trap. I give the example of a woman named Patricia in the book. She’s a low-income Black mother who has a number of young children, also working a full-time job. She is carrying the burden on that front. She decides to cut back to working four days instead of five. Once her extended family finds out she has the day off, she winds up driving folks to the grocery store and doctors’ appointments. She wants to find a way to say no, but says “I’m their only hope.”

We have decimated communities so they have so few resources to go around. They know the people they love have nowhere else to turn. Patricia worries, ‘what if I need help one day?’ She ended up divorcing her partner, had five young kids at home, including newborn twins, and when she was home recovering from a c-section, she ended up needing that support from her network. She was glad she had not pushed them away at that moment and opted instead to help the other people around her as well.

RG: You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of “Good Choices Won’t Save Us.” I know that ties into the neoliberalism you mentioned earlier, but let’s unpack that further. Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they’d never have a need for a social safety net?

JC: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don’t have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. This has been fully debunked – a social safety net does protect people.

People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It’s not that choices don’t matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.

RG: What about childbirth? That’s a pretty binary viewpoint. Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes.��

JC: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can’t manage. Whether it’s childbirth or environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can’t manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people. They should be able to figure out what the choices are and how to protect themselves from risk.

We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it’s your fault if you didn’t figure it out and make it.

RG: Let’s talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you’ve posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?

JC: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives, they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.

I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They’re told: ‘Stop being a nag. Can’t you lighten up?’

Sexist humor seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society they’re part of.

RG: Can you give an example?

JC: Andrew Tate is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter turned YouTuber who is banned from a number of different public platforms for his misognystic messaging, like ‘Women should be men’s property in marriage.’ One of the problems with that is that if he is able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying ‘at least I don’t believe the extreme version of it.’

RG: My favorite chapter in your book is the one that concentrates on the Supermom Myth. Why do you think this myth persists, even as so much research and general wisdom seems to contradict that idea that women should be doing it all?

JC: We tell women in our society that they are the best protectors for children. If all else fails, it is their responsibility to make sure children are safe. In a society with a lot of risk, there’s a lot to protect them from.

This kind of messaging—where women are supposed to view motherhood as the top protector from the threats of the world—is that it primes them for fearmongering. It can persuade women that they need to go above and beyond. Some are cloaked in religious messaging like Critical Race Theory, or transgender kids and public schooling, or similar fear mongering along those lines.

It can take more secular forms too, like the fear of downward mobility; the idea that if you don’t get into the right college your life will be a disaster, or if you don’t have that investment banking job, your life will be ruined.

These fears can lead mothers to sacrifice themselves. Even if they have the resources for full-time child care, these fears can lead them to decide to stay home full time, believing that is the way to protect the child.

RG: But why are mothers the ones to shoulder this burden?

JC: We have these twisted ideas about biology because women have historically done that work, as opposed to recognizing the socialization influences. For example, girls are trained to be mothers from the time they can hold a baby doll. All the evidence suggests that young girls are pushed into these responsibilities at a young level.

With early socialization, these roles get more ingrained and it becomes easier for women to do that work. In the Supermom Myth, if moms have the most experience managing the responsibility, it can feel threatening if dad isn’t doing it as well. One of the saddest things we found about the pandemic research was the way angry dads were exacerbating the situations at home.

We did a big national survey in September 2020, and asked how often are you yelling at your kids? For college-educated white fathers, the numbers were off the chart. Those are the dads that were able to work remotely during the pandemic. In couples where both parents could work remotely part of the time, dads didn’t have the experience of working for pay while caring for children, which led to high levels of frustration. In one example from the book, on the days a dad was home he was angry, yelling at the kids. He didn’t have that kind of experience to navigate the challenges, so the mom was deeply worried and took on all the child care herself.

RG: When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what’s your takeaway?

JC: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us that the system works, which makes it incredibly hard to create the safety net that we need and deserve.

People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others.��We need to be up front about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives – even as it reduces some of the inequalities between us.

My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help people see where this DIY model comes from and how it’s hurting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.

Early Learning Nation spoke to six 2023-24 fellows to discover their stories and their strategies for systemic change. As fellow Lara Kyriakou says, “We don’t have yet, but this is our moment, and this fellowship is a springboard for so much of our work going forward.”

Learning from Each Other

Binal Patel, chief program officer at , previously helped launch and then ran an early childhood program for infants, toddlers and preschoolers in Watertown, Massachusetts. “That was the most rewarding, incredible, exhausting four years of my life,” she recalls. “I started that director job a month into my maternity leave, with a 2-year-old toddler as well.”

Patel describes the model at Neighborhood Villages as “pilot, iterate and then scale with government.” That final step is what drew her to the Bank Street fellowship, creating the right circumstances for public investment and systemic improvement beyond a neighborhood pilot. “I’ve learned so much from the people in the cohort,” she says, “from what they do in their own states and the different contexts we all work in, but with the same goal of an equitable early childhood system.”

She adds, “Being in rooms with such strong leaders and women of color in the early childhood space at Bank Street inspires me.” This directly relates to the Registered Apprenticeship Program she launched last year, which is the focus of her capstone project in the fellowship. “Massachusetts doesn’t have a lot of diversity in early childhood leadership roles,” she notes, “and we need to create and support those pathways for educators to continue to advance in their careers.”

Adaptive Leadership

In the wake of a life-threatening illness, Aruna Gilbert, chief program and policy officer at the  pivoted from journalism and economics to early education. “I started thinking about how it influences people’s way of experiencing the world,” she says, adding, “And children were suffering.”

, a philosophy pioneered by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ronald Heifetz, has been Gilbert’s “bible,” as she taps into her agility and emotional intelligence. “When you’re leading and it’s ‘easy,’ it’s often because you’re telling people what to do. Figuring out community voice and leading from where they’re sitting” she explains, “is another thing altogether.”

Gilbert praises the Bank Street faculty, saying, “They’re amazing, individually and collectively. They keep in touch to make sure that we are having the best experience possible.”

The Consultative Stance

Kassandra Gonzales, program coordinator for the  Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation, began her career as an early childhood educator and then shifted to play therapy and behavior management, supporting early childhood programs and public school teachers.

In some of New Mexico’s border towns, she explains, basic needs like running water are scarce. Child care providers in border towns deal with markedly different mental health challenges than from those in, say, Albuquerque. “Their struggles are real and their experiences are valid,” she states. Imagine the trauma, she continues, of border checks within the state, where officials require you to state your citizenship status.

“This work is really important for me,” Gonzales says, “not only as a native New Mexican but also as the mother of a 3-year-old.”

The Bank Street Fellowship is supporting her quest to build up her state’s mental health infrastructure for providers. Her approach is rooted in the , a discipline developed by Kadija Johnston and Charles Brinamen that emphasizes “strengthening relationships among early learning and care providers, families, children and representatives of the community.”

Worthy Wages

Suzette Espinoza-Cruz currently works on quality and policy for Seattle’s and this practice is rooted in her classroom work dating back to the early 1990s. “I was really fortunate to be connected with Marcy Whitebook and the activist group,” she says, remembering a colleague who couldn’t afford Bay Area rents and who was living in her car despite a full-time job teaching preschool and two part-time jobs.

Though a lot has changed, she notes that the majority of the people making decisions about the workforce have no background or any lived experience in early childhood education. “We’re still putting a lot of funding toward meeting outcomes for children and exacting what are essentially unfunded mandates around professional development for teachers,” she says, adding that she conducts advocacy work in partnership with the .

“I went from being terrified to get on an airplane, to flying out to D.C. annually to advocate for funding to support early learning nationwide,” she says.

The mother of two (one in college and one in high school), Espinoza-Cruz is also the guardian of a six-year-old grandniece and four-year-old grandnephew. In addition to the lectures and formal learning experiences of the fellowship, she appreciates the “casual connections with brilliant women of color who are grappling with some pretty big questions in their community around early learning.” She singles out Denise Bermudez of , saying, “She is also a Latina, so she understands the cultural nuances of having to navigate systems that were not made for us.”

That’s My People

, says Lara Kyriakou, associate director of Early Childhood Policy & Advocacy, always leads with a focus on racial and economic equity for all students, and specializes in data-informed and data-driven policy recommendations. It largely runs its early childhood work through the . One of its signature efforts is a comprehensive created to guide systemic change for children, families and providers.

“Too many families lack the opportunity to access high-quality programs,” she says, “And if we recognize the true cost of high-quality care, we’ll make better-informed policy and funding decisions.”

A related problem, she adds, is that society fails to see infants and toddlers for the brilliant little people that they are. “This fellowship really values that truth. That’s my people, that’s where I fit.”

Kyriakou appreciates the insights she has gained from lectures by Kerry-Ann Escayg, associate professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and coauthor of “;” as well as Mark Salinas and Erik Fermín from the , founders of the discipline known as .

Two Generations Coming Together

“My heart is working with families and kids,” says Payal Seth, senior vice president of programming at , and improving compensation for child care workers is a top priority for her. “BIPOC women make up a majority of the sector,” she says. “The challenge is raising pay in a way that both honors those that have been in the work while not gentrifying the profession.”

Her organization disrupts generational poverty in nine cities by supporting single mothers in their quest for economic mobility. “They want better jobs but can’t go back to school,” Seth says. “They can’t get child care assistance without being in school or having a job, but they can’t take those steps without child care.” Her job encompasses programming for mothers and for the children, too.

Seth, whose career started in Ypsilanti, Mich., working with multilingual learners and children with special needs, credits Sherri Killins Stewart of the , the coach assigned to her through the Bank Street fellowship, for helping her think through policy solutions. “She asks me, ‘What is the small P towards the big P?’ That is, what are the small policy changes we can make soon that might lead to bigger policy changes down the road?”