What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.

Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection. 

Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.

As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.

“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”

Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data. 

A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.

“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.

At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.

Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.

“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said. 

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free. 

There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.

“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”

Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.

“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”

Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.

Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.

The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.

Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.

“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.

“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”

Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.

Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.

“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”

Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.

“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.

It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.

Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.

“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said. 

Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”

“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.

She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how. 

Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time. 

“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.

She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.

Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.

She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.

It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.

“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”

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During the pandemic shutdown, daycare owner Roxana Contreras sold her house when her income evaporated overnight. Maria Teresa Manrique nearly lost her business, and her life, when a family brought Covid into her home daycare.

As an education reporter and editor in Boston during the pandemic, I was struck by the starkly disparate treatment of the state’s strongly unionized K-12 teacher workforce and the less-organized child care workforce, which includes Contreras and Manrique. Those caring for the youngest children frequently had no guaranteed income when their businesses closed; far less access to protective equipment and supplies, like air filtration devices and free, regular Covid testing; and they were pressed to return to in-person work — the kind of hands-on work where social distancing was impossible — many months before the first vaccines were available.

“We were asking those with very low pay … to do these extraordinary things,” Martha Christenson Lees, former director of the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education, told me at the time.

Nearly all of the half dozen women I interviewed for my 2021 story had been seriously debilitated by Covid in some way: financially, emotionally, medically. And this spring, three years later, with a new report from the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood showing that child care providers are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression, I decided to check in with this dedicated group of caregivers. Nationally, an estimated 1 million paid caregivers provide child care out of their homes to about 3 million children.

The two I reached, Contreras and Manrique, both immigrants living and working in the Boston area, have had mixed experiences trying to rebuild their businesses over the last four years. The women, who speak Spanish, were interviewed with the help of interpreter Iris Amador.

‘We have learned to value life’

For Contreras, business has slowly but steadily improved over the last three years. With no money coming in from families after mid-March 2020, she was forced to sell her house in Medford, Massachusetts, also home to her daycare, Gummy Bears, to support her family. She began rebuilding Gummy Bears from the basement of a nearby rental in the summer of 2020, yet struggled for over a year to recruit families reluctant to return to group care, and to hire assistants, many of whom, she says, switched in the pandemic to more highly paid jobs as nannies.

A turning point came in late 2021, when she and other Massachusetts child care providers started receiving monthly operations grants distributed by the state. Contreras used the money to increase pay for assistants, making it easier to hire them; and with the worst danger of the pandemic past, more families returned to group care.

Contreras had enough interest from families by early 2023 that she made plans to add a second site, Gummy Bears 2. It opened in another Medford rental space last September. Across the two locations, Gummy Bears serves 16 children. Although someday she hopes to be licensed for 20 across the two sites, “I am content and I am happy with the number we care for now, and I provide employment to other people who need it,” Contreras said. The continuation of the monthly grants since the fall of 2021 has been crucial to rebuilding and growth, she said.

Contreras has a new problem: turning away families. Gummy Bears’ current wait list stretches out to 2026, with families offering deposits on future spots. (Contreras doesn’t accept them.) There’s an increased demand from pre-pandemic days, possibly as a result of fewer child care spots overall, she said.

The pandemic’s major effect on Contreras was giving up home ownership; high interest rates and housing prices have put reclaiming that goal out of reach for now. But there have been gains, too. She is grateful every day for her health. “We have learned to value life,” she said. 

Elusive road to stability

For Maria Teresa Manrique, Covid’s devastating effects lingered, repeatedly upsetting her financial stability — and her health. She was hospitalized in late 2020 with a severe case of Covid and never fully regained her strength. “I am vulnerable now to infections in a way that I wasn’t before,” she said.

Manrique, a single mother of a teenage daughter, reopened in February 2021, spurred by financial duress. Twice since, she picked up Covid from a child or parent at her daycare. Most recently, in December, Manrique closed for a little over a week after contracting Covid. She not only ran out of the sick day allotment for providers who serve lower-income children on vouchers — meaning she got no pay for some of the time — but lost two students whose families were impatient about the closure. She now enrolls a total of five children.

“Whenever I achieve some balance, I am still behind,” she said. All of her income goes to cover rent and the family’s basic needs, Manrique added, making it impossible to fully pay off taxes she has owed for the last three years. Two months ago, one of her sisters, who also runs an in-home daycare, was diagnosed with a serious illness, and Manrique helps care for her.

She wanted to close the daycare to support her sister full time, but financially it was impossible.

The whole situation feels untenable — and intractable.

“This has been my work for 20 years and I am used to it,” she said. “It has allowed me to care for my own daughter, as I have been both Mom and Dad to her. But when you have been doing this work for 20 years, there is definitely some exhaustion. … There should be more consideration, I believe, for workers like us.”

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

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LAS VEGAS and RENO, Nev. — They exist in places like an airport, a resort, and a distribution center, tucked away from the public eye but close enough for easy access. They often emit laughter – and the sound of tumbling blocks, bouncing balls, and meandering tricycles.

They’re child care centers based at workplaces. And in the increasingly fraught American child care landscape, they are popping up more frequently.

Skyrocketing child care costs and staffing shortages have complicated arrangements for working parents. Some have left their jobs after struggling to find quality care. Employers, in turn, view their entry into the child care realm as both a competitive advantage and a workplace morale-booster.

“In the absence of government intervention and investment, a lot of businesses have been stepping up to make sure that their employees can access affordable child care,” said Samantha Melvin, an assistant research professor at the Erikson Institute, an independent graduate school for early childhood education.

Parents benefiting from child care at their work sites praise the model, given its convenience, affordability, and peace of mind. They can stop by to breastfeed or eat lunch with their little ones. And it doesn’t add time to their morning commutes.

Frances Ortiz, who works in accounting at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, can’t imagine a better option. She says her 3-year-old daughter has gained independence and language skills – with Mom not far away – at the property’s on-site child care center for employees.

“She runs in here,” Ms. Ortiz said. “She grabs my badge. She has to open the door for herself.”

In September, the Pittsburgh International Airport added its own on-site child care. The center, which is run by a child care operator, serves children of Allegheny County Airport Authority employees as well as those of select airport workers, such as food and beverage workers, ground handlers, and wheelchair attendants.

Airport officials say the idea stemmed from wanting to bring more women and people of color into the aviation workforce. Plus, the airport sits 17 miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh, making child care logistics challenging for employees. So far, it’s operating at about half capacity, with more enrollments expected over the next few months.

“It’s certainly an important proof point to our team that we mean it when we say that we’re invested in them and in what they need,” said Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, which operates the Pittsburgh airport.

An added bonus for the children: windows with views of planes taking off and landing.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

The average American family spends nearly a quarter (24 percent) of its household income on child care, according to a survey this year from Care.com. The cost can eclipse rent or mortgages, if parents can access care in the first place. Many find themselves on waitlists.

As employers contemplate entering the child care realm, Ms. Melvin encourages them to find out what their workers want. What hours do they most need care? Are they looking for center- or home-based care?

The Care.com survey suggested that 30 percent of parents would like to see their employers provide on-site day care, while others identified child care subsidies (28 percent), flexible spending accounts (22 percent), and backup care (21 percent) as desirable workplace benefits.

More public and private employers appear to be heeding the call, though how they assist runs the gamut. Some fully run their own centers. Others outsource the operations and management to providers.

The financial arrangements also differ. Many companies and organizations don’t disclose the exact discounts offered to employees, but they tend to be more affordable than or at least competitive with local rates.

Walmart, for instance, recently opened an on-site child care center at its massive Bentonville, Arkansas, campus. The Little Squiggles Children’s Enrichment Center chargesa monthly rate of $1,117 to $1,258, based on the child’s age, which company officials tell the Monitor in an email is “at market rate or below regional levels for comparable care.”

Related: ‘I can be mom and teacher’: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms

Another method gaining steam: employers providing subsidies for families to use toward child care options within their own communities.

KinderCare, a large child care operator with locations nationally, partners with more than 600 businesses and organizations to provide employee-sponsored child care, up from 400 in 2019, says Dan Figurski, president of KinderCare for Employers and Champions. Those employers represent the technology, medical, banking, academic, and public service industries, among others.

The amount of financial assistance they’re extending to employees varies, he says, with some covering up to 90% of child care costs.

Mr. Figurski expects more companies to view child care as a benefit for their employees, not unlike health care.

“I do think the future is some blended model of government-subsidized and employer-subsidized child care moving forward so that every child has access,” he says.

Experts who study child care, however, caution against an overreliance on businesses filling the void. Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, says doing so could undercut efforts to recognize child care as a public good.

“There’s a lot of well-intentioned people who are thinking this is a really good idea, and for those who would benefit from it, it could be,” he says. “Again, there are lots of downsides even in the short term.”

One of those potential pitfalls, he says, is instability if a parent suddenly loses their job and then has to find new child care and a new job.

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

In Nevada, The Venetian Resort’s child care center, run by KinderCare, sits in a back-of-house hallway steps away from the famous Las Vegas Boulevard.

All employees can enroll their children, as long as space allows, at a cost that’s generally 35% to 40% lower than KinderCare’s normal rate, says Matt Krystofiak, the Venetian’s chief human resources officer. The company also offers subsidies for employees who want to enroll their children in an off-site KinderCare closer to their homes.

“We’re doing this because this is what our team members want,” he says. “This is what our team members need.”

Businesses such as Patagonia, another longtime leader in the space, also view child care as a reflection of their company culture.

The clothing retailer’s foray into child care began organically in 1983 when some of the company’s original employees started having children. As Patagonia grew, so did its child care footprint. Nowadays, the clothing company operates three child care centers – two in Southern California and one in Reno, Nevada – serving roughly 200 children.

The company conducts research annually to determine the cost to employees in each location, which leaders describe as an “average market rate.” Subsidies are available based on household income, says Sheryl Shushan, Patagonia’s director of global family services. The child care teachers are employed by Patagonia, so they receive corporate benefits as well.

On a recent morning, a 16-month-old boy toddled up a small embankment to touch wind chimes hanging from trees. His teachers watched from a short distance away in the outdoor classroom at Patagonia’s distribution center in Reno.

“We believe that risk-taking builds character,” says Terry Randolph, program manager for the site. In this play-based environment, children spend hours outside, digging in sand, riding bikes, playing with water, or climbing natural and human-made objects.

Patagonia leaders say the benefits on their end are stronger employee retention, a can-do spirit in the workplace, and a greater sense of community.

“There’s an opportunity to see co-workers as parents instead of just employees,” she says. “It just creates connection and purpose beyond the project you’re working on.”

For Alyssa Oldham, a classroom manager in Reno, the job and child care benefit meant rethinking her family size. She and her husband originally envisioned being a one-child family, given child care costs.

Now she comes to work holding two tiny hands belonging to her 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

“Working here, I was like, ‘We could have another child,’” she says.

Jackie Valley is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

© 2024 The Christian Science Monitor

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Jolene Hunt-Fleming did not hesitate nearly 13 years ago when her daughter asked for help with her newborn baby son. She knew her daughter, a single parent, needed full-time child care to finish school and work.

Hunt-Fleming, who has worked for years as a mortgage funder and is certified in human services, also stepped in when the next three grandchildren – now ages 2, 6, and 9 – came along. My daughter “was very skeptical about other people watching her children,” said Hunt-Fleming, who lives in La Habra, California.

Although the work has been a personal joy, it’s also been a financial sacrifice. The grandmother learned quickly from the Children’s Home Society of California that the state offers subsidies for family caregivers, but the pay might well be below minimum wage. At one point, Hunt-Fleming — who cradled her 2-year-old granddaughter in her lap during most of our interview over Zoom — made only $1.79 an hour for the work. She currently earns about $2,800 each month from the state to watch the 2-year-old full time, and her siblings part-time. “If I wasn’t providing care for the children…I’m sure it would be substantially more that I would be bringing in,” she said.

Family, friend and neighbor caregivers, often referred to as “informal” care, are both underpaid and too often unable to access the money they are entitled to, according to a new policy brief from Early Edge California, which supports quality early learning opportunities for children from birth; the brief was produced in collaboration with several other groups. Between a third and a half of all children under the age of five receive informal care from a family member, friend or neighbor, making it the most common child care arrangement for this age group outside of parental care. Many of these caregivers are grandparents, like Hunt-Fleming.

In many states, informal caregivers are eligible for some form of funded support for their work, the most common being child care subsidies for children from low-income families. There are also state and locally-funded models for support. But nationally, less than 20 percent of the more than 4.5 million informal caregivers receive the subsidies or related payment, according to a 2022 report from the BUILD Initiative, which provides support to state leaders for early childhood programs. In California about one in four of informal caregivers go unpaid, the Early Edge report noted.

The California effort is just one example of growing momentum across the country to provide more resources and support for these caregivers, who have only become more essential after the pandemic contributed to a devastating loss in licensed child care spaces in many communities. In Colorado, a recent law makes it easier for immigrants and undocumented caregivers to access the subsidies, according to the BUILD Initiative report. Meanwhile, Louisiana has simplified the process for informal providers to become registered. And New Mexico took steps to provide them with significantly more public funding.

California is unusual in that informal caregivers can be part of the collective bargaining unit for home-based child care providers in the state, as long as the children in their care are eligible for subsidies. That said, they have historically been less organized and visible in policy debates than licensed home-based providers. “We saw the need to give them a voice,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Scores of California caregivers don’t receive the state subsidies they are entitled to for a variety of reasons. “Many times there are language barriers,” Lozano said. And some caregivers “are afraid that their immigration status will impact whether they can get subsidies.”

The policy brief described several of the key barriers, including: mistrust over interacting with the government; fear of losing access to other government benefits; challenges navigating the enrollment system; and a lack of awareness.

The state needs to let more people know that financial support is available, Hunt-Fleming said. “It could start in the doctor’s office or the schools.”

The policy brief also provided recommendations for change and ramped up outreach. Those could include making multilingual posters and brochures available at libraries, parks and recreation services; technical assistance in navigating digital applications; and tax guidance so the caregivers don’t have to worry about jeopardizing other forms of government aid to access the subsidies.

“It’s important to acknowledge them and make them part of the system,” Lozano said. In California there’s a real need to raise the reimbursement rates for all types of child care providers, including informal ones, who currently receive 70 percent of what licensed family child care providers get, she added. “We can raise everybody,” she said. “The bar is so low right now.”

Hunt-Fleming doesn’t think she could make it work financially without a husband who brings in regular income. Besides the low pay, the reimbursement process can be slow. The state never processes subsidies toward the end of the month, when most people have rent and other payments due, she said. “That’s hard because I have bills,” she said.

Hunt-Fleming spends whatever hours she can on advocacy work for her colleagues through a program called California Leading from Home. After more than a decade spending her days changing diapers, taking kids to doctor appointments and helping the older ones with homework, she wants others in her situation — and policy makers, too — to view the work as more than a gesture of love. She wants them to see it as a real job.

This story about informal child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Across the country, the story for families is virtually the same: Child care is unaffordable for many, hard to find for those who can pay, and financially precarious for day care operators and their employees.

The Biden administration and Congress tried to alleviate some of these problems when the pandemic crippled the child care industry. But as the record $52.5 billion in relief winds down, many states have stepped in with their own solutions.

States have expanded free preschool and early education and helped more families pay for child care, making it low-cost or even free for many. Recognizing that a federal solution is unlikely to materialize anytime soon, policymakers have come up with novel ways to pay for their plans, creating permanent funding sources that will make new programs sustainable.

New Mexico, for instance, has tapped into its petroleum revenue, Washington state put a new tax on investment profits, and Kentucky is incentivizing parents to become child care workers. 

And while the largest investments in child care have come from Democrats, Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing plans to support child care — citing the importance to the economy.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

After she gave birth, Marisshia Sigala put on hold plans to start her real estate career. She and her husband — a personal trainer — lived on one paycheck for about two years and realized the cost of child care would be out of reach even if both were working.

Then, in 2022, New Mexico made child care free for nearly all the state’s families, amending the constitution to fund early childhood initiatives with money from leasing state land to oil and gas companies. 

The change will bring in an estimated $150 million a year for the early education of children like Mateo. Sigala and her husband qualify because they earn less than 400 percent of the federal poverty rate of about $120,000 a year for a family of four. Mateo is one of more than 21,000 children now benefitting from the subsidies. 

Now Sigala, 32, is back at work while Mateo attends Koala Children’s Academy, which specializes in bilingual education. 

“Being entrepreneurs, it’s a lot more challenging, and we have to rely on ourselves. We don’t have a paycheck coming in every week,” Sigala said. “It’s been a blessing for us.”

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

Expanding free child care for families is “making a difference for families in such a profound way,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s early childhood education secretary. And, she said, it’s helping the people who care for and educate young kids, too.

Groginsky and other state leaders are hoping the massive investment will help blunt the effects of poverty.

“It’s just a really incredible opportunity we have here,” she said. 

Washington state is aiming to offer free preschool to all low-income families, and child care vouchers to all low- and moderate-income families by the end of the decade, along with high-quality care for infants and toddlers with developmental concerns.

The state is expanding its programs with help from a new 7 percent tax on profits made from residents’ financial investments — a levy intended to fall on wealthier people.

When Zaneta Billyzone-Jatta’s daughter Zakiah was born prematurely in 2021, her mother hired a nanny to watch the baby three days a week. A clinical manager for a hospital network, Billyzone-Jatta, 42, had to work while keeping an eye on her daughter the other two days. She felt like she couldn’t give her toddler enough attention, much less address the girl’s developmental concerns like a professional could. 

Through a state program for low-income families and kids with challenges like Zakiah, she now sends her daughter to a child care center near her Seattle-area home, free of cost. There, three teachers supervise seven children in Zakiah’s class and diligently document her progress. Occupational and speech therapists see Zakiah at the school and work closely with the teachers.

Related: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms

Billyzone-Jatta said Zakiah has made huge strides at the school. She talks about her days in detail and refers to classmates by name. She has learned to interact with other students, drink from an open cup and share. 

“Being a working mother and being able to know that you’re bringing your child to an environment where they’re loved and cared for gives you so much peace,” she said.

But the program helping infants and toddlers like Zakiah is still small, serving fewer than 200 kids statewide. And in November, Washington voters will have a chance to weigh in on the tax in a referendum that could lead to its repeal, endangering the progress the state has made.

“It would be catastrophic,” said Jon Gould, of Akin, the nonprofit that operates Zakiah’s state-supported child care center.

Rilee Monn, 24, was working at Baptist Health Child Development Center in Lexington when she had her second child, doubling what she paid for her children to attend the same center. 

She thought about quitting and getting a night-shift job so she could stay home and care for her children during the day.

“All of my paycheck was going to child care,” Monn said.

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Then, in 2023, Kentucky started a program to cover or reduce the cost of day care for parents who work in the child care industry. The program was meant to tackle two challenges at once. Policymakers hoped it would draw more workers into the child care industry, addressing a shortage. And they wanted to provide more low-cost child care for all families.

Now, more than a dozen states are considering or have already adopted policies modeled after the one in Kentucky, according to EdSurge, a publication that focuses on education.

The program has helped the state’s child care industry recruit workers who might otherwise be working in service jobs.

Delaney Griffin, 30, was working in a pizza restaurant last year and pondering her next move with her young family. Her child care costs consumed all but $100 of her biweekly check. 

After learning about the child care benefit, she took a job in December with Baptist Health Child Development Center. She now pays about $5 a week. Her older child is in a preschool program.

“The free child care part was like the biggest reason that I actually got to start in child care,” Griffin said. 

This series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions — is produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, including AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post & Courier, and The Seattle Times.

The post Congress hasn’t helped families with day care costs. So states are stepping in appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Christina Zimmerman returned to teaching last year after maternity leave, she grappled with postpartum depression that she says could have led to quitting her job. 

But her school’s onsite day care made all the difference, as she knew her daughter was just a few classrooms away.

“I can be mom and teacher in the same breath,” said Zimmerman, who teaches fourth grade at Endeavor Elementary in Nampa, Idaho. “I’ve dreamed of teaching since second grade. Truthfully, it’s all I’ve wanted to do, but I also want to be there for my child.”

In states such as Idaho and Texas, where funding for early childhood education is limited, some schools are spearheading initiatives to provide quality, affordable child care. It’s a teacher retention tool as much as it is a way to ensure youngsters are prepared when they enter kindergarten. 

Some districts are transforming donated spaces — a former recycling center or house — into day cares for staff and, in some cases, for first responders in the area as well. Others are incorporating child care on their campuses. 

The schools hope parenting teachers don’t have to choose between career and motherhood, as the education workforce remains predominantly female.

Women are more likely than men to leave their careers to care for children, data shows. On top of that, teachers’ salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, according to the National Education Association, even as child care costs have become more untenable. 

Dropping out of the workforce can be an attractive option for educators with young children, which adds to retention challenges already facing schools. 

“If we’re going to support our community, … we need the very best teachers in the classroom,” said Tabitha Branum, superintendent of Richardson schools, north of Dallas. Her district runs two day cares, with goals of opening more. 

“This is one of the strategies that we have in place to attract and retain the very best of the best,” Branum said.

In 2022, district leaders nationwide reported increased staff vacancies; most administrators — 63 percent — cited the pandemic as a cause. Last school year, nearly 1 in 4 teachers said they were likely to quit their job due to stress, disillusionment, low salaries and heavy workloads, according to a RAND survey.

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

School-sponsored child care can mitigate that stress.

The devastating feeling of dropping off her three-month-old daughter, Gracee, with a caregiver each day still haunts Heather Yarbrough, even 14 years later.

She cried every day for weeks, but didn’t have the option to quit her job as an elementary reading specialist in Nampa.

Yarbrough and her husband, both educators, needed two incomes to get by financially. Over time, she realized having a career was healthy for her and her family. 

That brought her to a eureka moment: “Why do we have to choose? There’s got to be a better way,” she said.

Now Endeavor’s principal, she spearheaded an on-campus day care. Funded through a combination of grants and parent fees, the program is in its fourth year. It’s become a recruitment and retention tool for the district, which doesn’t pay teachers as much as neighboring districts. 

A dozen of the school’s 30 teachers use the day care. 

Child care for school employees has trickle-down benefits for students, said Van-Kim Lin, an early childhood development researcher at nonprofit Child Trends.

The kids can build stronger relationships with educators, counselors or other staff members because turnover is minimized and children are on campus at younger ages.

“This is a great strategy by which you can … support both children, families and then also on the flip side, districts and their workforce,” she said.

As Molly Hillier, an instructional coach at Endeavor and mother of a child in the day care, put it: “It benefits students because if you have happier teachers, … they can pour that into the kids.” 

The school’s teaching staff is predominantly young and female, and it had become routine for teachers to drop out of the workforce to care for their infants or to move on to less stressful or higher-paying jobs. In Nampa, teachers start out earning about $44,000 and top out at about $69,000, compared with a range of about $47,000 to $86,000 in the nearby Boise School District.

But now, “Nampa School District right now can offer me something nobody else can,” Zimmerman said. “That time with my child is invaluable — it’s worth its weight in gold.” 

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

When Texas school counselor Kelly Mountjoy decided she wanted to start a family, she wondered if she could handle working and being a mother.

Three children later, she and her husband considered expanding their family by one more. However, the costs would add up: She was already paying more than $1,200 a month to send one of her kids to day care. So they hesitated.

“It’s just so impossible to pay child care with that many kiddos,” said Mountjoy, who works at Parkhill Junior High in Richardson.

Texas school officials, frustrated with failed legislative attempts to fund teachers raises, recently began unfolding strategies to recruit and retain teachers. Large districts with bigger budgets offered higher pay, while others experimented with four-day school weeks or other benefits to sweeten the job.

“We may not be able to pay every teacher what we should be able to,” said Branum, the Richardson superintendent. “But what if we could create a compensation package that took a little stress off of them?”

Richardson has a starting salary of $60,000 — above the state average of about $53,300 — but is also in the highly competitive Dallas-area market. So now RISD offers employees a health clinic for acute care with a $10 copay, no insurance required, and free counseling — plus the help with child care.

The district runs two child learning academies, Little Eagles and Little Mustangs, that serve more than 120 children starting at 6 weeks old until age 3, when they become eligible for the district’s pre-K program. 

With more than 134 children on the district’s wait list as of the end of April, Branum said they’re considering at least one more center that could open as soon as next year.

Mountjoy said the perk gives her peace of mind because she knows her children receive high-quality attention.

“I know that my kids are taken care of really well,” Mountjoy said. “They know the kids individually and know their strengths and where they struggle.”

This story was written by Carly Flandro of Idaho Education News and Valeria Olivares of the Dallas Morning News. Idaho Education News data analyst Randy Schrader contributed to the story.

This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post ‘I can be mom and teacher’: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — Last summer, Derrika Richard felt stuck. She didn’t have enough money to afford child care for her three youngest children, ages 1, 2 and 3. Yet the demands of caring for them on a daily basis made it impossible for Richard, who cuts and styles hair from her home, to work. One child care assistance program rejected her because she wasn’t working enough. It felt like an unsolvable quandary: Without care, she couldn’t work; and without work, she couldn’t afford care. 

But Richard’s life changed in the fall, when, by way of a new city-funded program for low-income families called City Seats, she enrolled the three children at Clara’s Little Lambs, a child care center in the Westbank neighborhood of New Orleans. For the first time, she’s earning enough to pay her bills and afford online classes.   

“It actually paved the way for me to go to school,” Richard said on a spring morning after walking her three children to their classrooms. It’s “changed my life.” 

Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 child care seats for children from low-income families after voters approved a historic property tax increase in 2022. The referendum raised the budget of the program seven-fold — from $3 million to $21 million a year for 20 years. Because Louisiana’s early childhood fund matches money raised locally for child care, the city gets an additional $21 million to help families find care.

New Orleans is part of a growing trend of local communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million for child care and children’s mental health to the county’s annual budget. A marijuana sales tax approved by voters in Anchorage, Alaska last year will generate more than $5 million for early childhood programs, including child care.

The state of Texas has taken a somewhat different tack. In November, voters there approved a state constitutional amendment that allows property tax relief for qualifying child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties can choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or some of its property taxes. Dallas was among the first city-and-county combo in Texas to provide the tax break at both levels. A handful of other cities, including Austin and Houston, as well as counties encompassing swaths of the state, have passed the proposal.

The recent local funding initiatives across the country are focused on younger children — namely infants and toddlers — more than ever before, said Diane Girouard, a senior state policy analyst with Child Care Aware, a nonprofit group that researches and advocates for child care access and funding.

“In the past, we saw more of these local or state driven initiatives focusing on pre-K, but over the last three years, we’ve seen voters approve ballot measures to invest in child care and early learning across a handful of states, cities, counties,” she said.

Part of that trend stems from the impact the lack of child care had on the economy during the pandemic, said Olivia Allen, a co-founder and vice president of the Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that researches and supports local efforts to fund early childhood programs.

“The value of child care and other parts of the care economy became abundantly clear to a lot of business leaders in a painful way during Covid,” Allen said.

The recent efforts also come during a time of reckoning in the U.S. over limited child care funding — and limited seats — that impacts families in myriad ways, including, for untold numbers, the ability to hold down jobs and advance in their careers. The number of parents who reported missing work because of child care surged in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak; it has yet to recede to pre-pandemic levels.

In Louisiana, a 2022 poll of over 3,000 parents by the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children found that more than half adjusted their work or school schedule to take care of children in the months preceding the survey. About 75 percent said they had to take at least one day off of work in the preceding three months because of a child care closure.

Part of the crisis facing many families and child care centers is that care for young children is expensive. The cost is even higher when parents want to send their kids to a high quality center.

In New Orleans, a city with a large population of workers in the service industry and other low-wage jobs, the City Seats funding has been transformative for parents struggling to hold down demanding, mostly non-unionized jobs. The program has also been a boon for the child care centers themselves.

Richard had struggled to find affordable child care off-and-on since dropping out of college when her oldest son, now 12, was born. That’s in spite of the fact that she immediately put her name down for a spot at child care centers when she discovered she was pregnant. “Literally when you see the positive line, you fill out an application,” she said.

Now that she can think about building a career again, Richard has set her sights on finishing her college degree. Her dream is to have a career in forensics.

Another parent, Mike Gavion, who has two children enrolled through City Seats at Early Partners in the Garden District, said the subsidized care allowed his wife to finish school and get a nursing job at a local hospital. Before the program was available, Gavion’s wife had to care for the children, now 2 and 4, at home, and could only make slow progress through the coursework she needed to qualify for a job. 

“It really gave us an opportunity,” Gavion said. “If we had to pay for two kids, I don’t think she would have been able to do nursing school.”

Families in New Orleans who have children from newborn to age 3 and who earn within 200 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for City Seats. But many don’t immediately get a spot: As of April, City Seats had 821 students on its waitlist, according to Agenda for Children, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group that administers the program.

About 70 percent of the City Seats budget pays for children to attend centers that are ranked as high quality on the state’s rating system. The cut-off for income eligibility on City Seats is higher than in other programs to allow more families access to free child care; at Early Head Start centers, for instance, most families have to be within 100 percent of the poverty level ($31,200 for a family of four).

The rest of City Seats budget goes to improving quality: Child care providers have access to a team that includes a speech pathologist, a pediatrician, and social workers. (Those services are only available for children who attend centers through City Seats, however.) The programs are required to pay their staff at least $15 an hour — on average, Louisiana child care workers made $9.77 an hour in 2020 — and abide by strict teacher-to-child ratios and class sizes, as well as receive professional development from early learning experts, according to Agenda for Children.

Funding from City Seats has allowed Wilcox Academy’s three centers in the city’s North Broad, Central City and Uptown neighborhoods to raise average staff pay to $18 an hour. The Academy’s goal is to raise it even higher — to $25 an hour.

“Teachers deserve it. They deserve to go on vacation, they deserve to buy a home, they deserve to buy a car … This is not a luxury,” said Rochelle Wilcox, the Academy’s founder and director. 

At Sea Academy, a child care center in New Orleans East, every family qualifies for some level of assistance. Without it, families would pay $300 a week for toddlers and $325 for infants to attend the center. City Seats funds 90 of Sea Academy’s 175 — soon to be 250 — child care slots, and pays $1,000 per child per month.

The money from City Seats has helped centers like Sea Academy stay open and even expand. 

“We wouldn’t exist without City Seats because we couldn’t have a business that was sustainable,” said Ariann Sentino, the program’s director. “And if we did, it certainly wouldn’t be high quality.”

Valeria Olivares from the Dallas Morning News contributed reporting.

This story about child care tax was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter

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More than a decade ago, Celia Sims sat in a room with parents whose precious children had died while at day care. Most had been neglected by their caregivers. Some died from injuries, others in their sleep. 

Most of the children attended licensed facilities, and at the time, their parents believed that licensing meant providers were safe, that unqualified workers were screened out. But they weren’t. 

In the early 2010s, there was no federal requirement that child care providers undergo background checks. Fewer than a dozen states required a comprehensive check of criminal, child abuse and sex offender registries — most of the others only checked one, if that. Once these children died, police investigations revealed that providers at their care centers had past convictions for crimes like manslaughter and sexual abuse, Sims said. These people, the parents said, should not have been working in child care, period. 

The parents were outraged—and rightly so, Sims remembers thinking. It seemed so unnecessary. So preventable. 

“After that, you can’t just close your eyes and walk away,” said Sims, who was then a senior staffer for former Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. She got to work. 

Burr and then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, worked with members of the child care advocacy community to draft bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time, establish national safety standards for child care. It would ultimately make its way into the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the national funding mechanism. States use the money they receive from the grant to reduce the cost of care for low-income children and improve that care by implementing safety and licensing requirements. But to get the money — at least in theory — states must abide by CCDBG rules.

And those rules would be stricter than ever. The reauthorization introduced eight background check requirements that state agencies must run on child care job applicants: two federal checks, of the FBI fingerprint and sex offender registries. Three state ones, of the criminal history, sex offender and child abuse registries. And three more interstate checks of the same state registries in any state where a provider lived during the previous five years. All of these checks were meant to screen out people with a history of crimes like child abuse, assault or endangerment. As part of the new CCDBG rules, states would also be required to post inspection reports online and collect data on serious incidents. It was a statement of values: The government was saying that this was the nation’s standard for child care, no matter where a program was located. 

States had until 2018 to come into compliance.

But 10 years after the law took effect, many states are still failing to uphold at least one of its components. 

According to a 2022 report to Congress analyzing the issue, at that time 27 states failed to conduct at least some, if not all, of the checks and hiring practices required by the law. Nineteen allowed staff to start working with children before background checks were completed. Nearly all of the states had been hampered by old technology systems, state bureaucracy and databases that range from incomplete to downright inaccurate.

It’s unclear where states stand today. The federal Office of Child Care, the regulatory agency that is meant to oversee states’ progress on fixing these problems, told The 19th that only three states had updated some of their policies since the report was published (New Hampshire, for example, no longer allows staff to start work before checks clear), but all 27 remain out of compliance because they do not yet conduct every required check. Yet several states disputed the agency’s determination and provided detailed documentation on their background check procedures, opening the possibility that even the regulatory agency can’t say for certain where states are falling short. 

The winding, chaotic path towards fixing these issues has baffled child care advocates. “I have not been able to understand why, in some states, this hasn’t been a big deal,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency.

But it is a big deal.

Background checks are a critical safety requirement in most jobs, but especially when it comes to safeguarding small children who may not be able to express when something has gone wrong. Yet the haphazard enforcement of these rules means that, in some states, barriers to child care jobs are too high, while in others they are not high enough. States with the most stringent requirements have made it more difficult for day care providers to hire workers, and for people to join a workforce of much-needed caregivers. That’s creating additional barriers for in-home care providers, who are disproportionately women of color and are often the most accessible caregivers in low-income communities.

In states where the systems to run the checks are still not meeting federal standards, difficult questions remain about whether the screening mechanism meant to shield kids from injury, abuse and even death is functioning as it should.

A decade later, no one can yet quite say what the right balance is between protecting children and protecting the child care sector.

“You never want a child to be hurt on your dime — it is a terrible, terrible thing. If we didn’t do everything possible to protect every child, we have fallen down on our job,” said child care expert Danielle Ewen. “If you don’t have the systems in place to keep kids safe, who are you actually protecting and who are you hurting?”

At the root of this snarl is the reality that while the federal government made the rule, 50 different states have to carry it out. Each does it in their own way, with procedures that are often incompatible.

For example, in 2014, interstate checks were added as a commonsense safeguard. Policymakers wanted to ensure caregivers didn’t hop from job to job in different states, evading screening along the way, particularly in areas like Washington D.C. and Virginia, where workers may live in one state but work in another. But over time, those checks have come to illustrate why the system itself is broken. 

Eleven states didn’t run interstate checks at all, the 2022 report found. Nine didn’t respond to other states’ requests. Some checks can’t be run because of simple — and mystifying — bureaucratic reasons: One state accepts credit card payments and the other doesn’t, for example. 

States also have differing laws about what information they can share across state lines, and with what agencies. After a request is submitted, states can decide whether to provide all the records they hold on a person, only conviction information, or simply to give a “yes” or “no” determination as to whether that person is eligible to work in child care based on their local laws. 

That matters because states have different thresholds for what constitutes an offense that would prohibit someone from working with children. For example, a teenager who gets arrested for urinating in public might be considered a sex offender in one state, but not another. When that teenager applies for a job in a new state, their background check might indicate that yes, they have been arrested for a sex offense — but not give any context about what it was.

Tribes are also subject to the requirements of CCDBG, but none of them were given legal authority through the 2014 law — or any other, for that matter — to independently run federal background checks. To get around that, some tribes have had to ask states to submit requests on their behalf, creating the same problem: Child care workers may be disqualified based on state rules instead of tribe rules. 

Much of the information in the abuse registries is also incomplete or unreliable. The 2022 report to Congress, which was put together by an interagency task force, found that some states include unsubstantiated abuse cases as well as substantiated ones. That means people could be disqualified from working even if the allegations against them were found to have had no merit. 

Domestic violence survivors have particularly suffered as a result. In some states, they show up in registries not because they caused the abuse, but because an investigator determined that they failed to protect a child from the perpetrator or from witnessing the violence.

“Consequently, victims of domestic violence can remain on [abuse] registries for years, regardless of whether the individual themselves would be unsafe to provide care in a child care program,” the report found. 

Experts have also questioned the racial and economic biases of the registry system, especially when it comes to flagging child neglect. About 75 percent of all child welfare cases are the result of neglect, not violence, and about half of states define neglect as a failure to provide basic needs. Caregivers living in poverty, the majority of whom are people of color, may get flagged simply because they’re unable to find affordable housing, for example. 

“How much do we trust the gatekeeping mechanism to be fair and equitable?” asks Gina Adams, a child care expert at the Urban Institute who has studied the racial disparities inherent in background checks for child care. “The challenge is that, to the extent that it finds true situations of child abuse or child risk, it is an important mechanism to protect children — so I strongly support that.”  

“However,” Adams continued. “I worry that because of inequitable policing, it may be also keeping out a whole bunch of people who should not be kept out.”

These inefficiencies have put a heavy burden on child care providers, who have seen how time consuming and burdensome it can be to run background checks, and how the wait can mean they lose staff to other employers. And they’ve also wondered: How much are the background checks keeping out people who want to — and should — work in care? How often are they letting the wrong people through?

Just last year in New York City, a 1-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose at a day care that was a front for a drug operation. The providers had passed background checks. Reports also revealed the city had a backlog of 140 child care background checks at the time. 

In Washington state, provider Susan Brown has been wrestling with this question after 35 years in the child care business. As part of the federal law, prospective staff who pass a fingerprint check — either of the federal FBI registry or the state criminal history registry — are allowed to start working while their other checks are being completed. But Washington is more restrictive: Nobody can work until they pass the five federal and state checks. For Brown’s employees, the drive to just get their fingerprints taken can take hours roundtrip. The entire background check process can take up to a month, she said. Why would a worker wait that long when they can get a job tomorrow at a fast food restaurant and get paid about the same wages?

“Child care providers can’t afford to pay them until they’re in the classroom,” said Brown, the president and CEO of Kids Co., a chain that provides child care services across Seattle. And she pointed to another problem: Day cares have been short-staffed since the pandemic, and that’s limiting how many classrooms can be open and how many students can be enrolled. “Now with the crisis being what it is, because no one has any extra staff, you can’t even enroll kids to cover the wages of the person.”

Brown also questions why so many requirements have been imposed on child care providers, and not people in similar professions, like teachers. “We’ve had, over the years, the situation where we tried to hire public school teachers and they didn’t pass the background check,” Brown said. (In Washington, teachers need to only pass two checks — an FBI check and a state patrol check.)

The racial disparity is undeniable, Brown said. Women of color are overrepresented in the child care workforce and also face more scrutiny to enter jobs that are among the lowest paid in the country. Meanwhile, the majority of the teaching workforce is White women. 

In a January letter to the state, signed by more than 300 child care providers, Brown wrote: “This disparity is not only unjust, but perpetuates systemic racism within our regulatory framework. Washington State’s current background check process magnifies the inequity by removing the possibility of beginning supervised work after completing a fingerprint background check, as outlined in federal requirements.” 

In Washington, the state performs the five federal and in-state background checks together. Changing the process to do just the fingerprint checks first, so workers can start sooner, “would take a lot of resources and time to develop,” because all the results are currently submitted as one package, said a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. “We made the decision to comply with federal regulations by requiring the completion of all background check components for this reason.” It takes about eight days on average to complete the checks once fingerprints are submitted, according to Washington state’s most recent 2024 data. 

Home-based providers feel the inequity of these checks most directly, because not only do these workers need to be background checked, but so does every adult who lives in the home. 

In-home child care is for many low-income families the only viable option, and it’s often run by women of color — women whose families are more likely to live intergenerationally and to come into contact with the criminal justice system or the immigration system. 

“It deters folks from becoming licensed,” said Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, which works to improve home-based child care. “They perceive risk.” 

But what happens when states are also too accommodating? The risk is that children could be put in the care of harmful or negligent people — the exact situations the federal requirements were designed to eradicate.

That was the problem the Congressional task force was meant to help solve. Previous reports from 2022 and 2021 had concluded that numerous states fell short of requirements. But the task force’s version, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, was the first to try to quantify which states were out of compliance, and why. The Office of Child Care then took on studying each state’s individual challenges and creating a plan to fix them. 

Some states do seem to be lagging. Mississippi, for example, doesn’t check the national sex offender registry, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health told The 19th. Still, the state refutes the 2022 report, which noted that Mississippi did not have policies in place to conduct any of the checks as required by the 2014 law. The Mississippi spokesperson said that the information was dated.

When The 19th asked the Office of Child Care whether any of the information in the 2022 report was outdated, it listed only three states as having made improvements since the report was published, though it considers all 27 to still be out of compliance. Mississippi was not on the list. (The states were New Hampshire, Alabama and Washington.)

In fact, several states disputed the Office of Child Care’s determinations. The 19th reached out to officials in five states that had significant issues flagged in the 2022 report, and which the federal agency still considers to be out of compliance. Many said those issues had either been partially or completely rectified.

For example, according to the report, West Virginia only runs one of eight required checks. But Whitney Wetzel, a spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Human Services, told The 19th that determination “should not be considered current.” 

Wetzel said the department “is confident that it is compliant with all statutory and regulatory background check requirements,” and provided a list of the checks performed, including the FBI fingerprint check and national sex offender check, as well as the in-state criminal, sex offender and abuse registries. 

New Jersey was flagged in the report for failing to run checks on a sub-group of providers, those who are license-exempt, but a spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services confirmed to The 19th that it has been running checks on those providers since mid-2021.

Other states are in more of a gray area. According to the agency, Alabama only recently created policies to run in-state, federal and interstate checks, and remains out of compliance with other aspects of the background check law. However, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Human Services told The 19th: “All checks required under the Child Care and Development Fund rules are performed,” and the discrepancy is only in how the federal office would like the state to structure the process. Alabama is in the process of updating its background check procedures, but the current system “still covers all the required checks,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Vermont was the only state flagged in the 2022 report for allowing staff to start working with children unsupervised before fingerprint background checks were cleared. But the deputy commissioner for the state’s child development division, Janet McLaughlin, told The 19th that while the state does allow new staff to start working before those checks are finalized, that work is supervised. That is, however, still out of compliance with the federal rule.

The Office of Child Care did not respond to The 19th’s requests to clarify the discrepancies between its records and the states’ assertions. But an official from the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the agency, told The 19th that the agency worked with state child care agencies and their partners to create plans to identify what staffing, technology and infrastructure investments they’d need to come into compliance. 

The agency went through an intensive process to document each state’s background check policies, the official said, and that study revealed gaps. 

But now, because of the disagreements between states and the agency,  it is hard to say how close each has come to filling them.

All of this begs the question: If the regulatory agency that oversees the states could be wrong, how will the problem ever get fixed?

The more time that goes by, and the longer states have been out of compliance, the more states have also started to question whether what is being asked of them is even doable, Ewen said. She was the director of the Child Care and Early Education team at the Center for Law and Social Policy when the CCDBG rules were being crafted. 

“If you have a system where people start to believe that you can’t achieve the end goals, they are not incentivized to try. They’re more incentivized to try and go to Congress and say, ‘This doesn’t work’ instead of going to their state leaders and saying, ‘We’re gonna get dinged for this in an audit,’” Ewen said. 

Linda Smith, the former executive director of Child Care Aware, the advocacy organization whose research was critical to the creation of the safety standards, said the federal government has long been too lenient with the states. In her view, it’s past time that the issue be resolved.

“These are some of these things that if you want to do it — you do it,” Smith said. “I don’t think there was ever any excuse for not doing them. We are talking about the basic safety of children who can’t talk.”  

Yet the 2022 report — and the fact that the Office of Child Care has not credited any state with coming into full compliance since it was issued — pointed out some uncomfortable truths. Yes, some states have delayed compliance. And yes, some tried but faced truly significant challenges. It’s also clear by now, a decade later, Sims said, that “we got some things wrong in the statute.” 

The abuse registries were a “mess,” she said. And some of the things that seemed commonsense, like interstate background checks, turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had realized. 

Grace Reef, then the chief of policy at Child Care Aware who conducted the initial research on the issues with background checks, said the intention behind the law was sound: “to help protect kids and give parents some peace of mind,” she said. 

But they were operating with limited information about the quality of the data in the registries and the state laws that would make it difficult, in practice, to conduct all the checks they felt were important. “We had trouble trying to figure out how to structure language,” she recalled. “You do the best you can.” 

Advocates insist there has to be a middle ground. And changes are coming. 

This year, for the first time, states will be required to answer detailed questions in their state child care plans regarding the remaining obstacles they face with background checks. Each state needs to submit their plan, a roughly 300-page document that outlines how its system works, by July 1. 

At the state level, advocates like Lorena Garcia, the CEO of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, are working to ensure that her state narrows the list of offenses that would disqualify someone from working. Garcia works with what are known as family, friend and neighbor providers: registered but unlicensed in-home providers who also need to undergo checks, but might be hesitant to do so because they live with people who have some kind of criminal record or because they are in mixed immigration status households. She wants to make sure only offenses that would affect the safety of children are counted. 

To address the interstate checks, Cindy Mall, the senior program director of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, sees the National Fingerprint File (NFF) as the most obvious solution. Twenty-four states participate in the FBI-maintained fingerprint database, which makes performing interstate checks a relatively simple experience. If all states were a part of it, more could come into compliance, Mall said — including California, which the report currently lists as out of compliance on performing the national sex offender registry check and the three interstate checks.  

For her, the issue comes down to a question of resources. It’s not enough to say something is a priority without the support to make it happen. In 2022, President Joe Biden tried to pass a $400 billion child care plan that would have given states funding they could have used to improve their systems and increase staffing. But that effort ultimately failed after Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, withdrew support from the package saying it was too costly and expansive.

The task force that studied the background checks came to a similar conclusion. Even if the states followed every recommendation the group laid out, they wrote, “full implementation of the current array of checks is unlikely without major additional fiscal investment and changes to state laws not addressed in this report.” 

“It comes down to money,” Mall said. “Money is staffing, money is resources, money is databases.” 

It also comes down to political will. Burr and Mirkulski have since left the Senate and few champions remain. But the problems linger. Since the pandemic, child care as an industry has been on life support, kept alive through a one-time federal investment that allowed states and programs to get the resources they needed to improve their systems. 

But that money was temporary — the needs aren’t. Safety remains as important as ever.

“Ten years into this,” Reef said, “we ought to have sufficient information in a bipartisan way, not to make it a partisan issue, but to make sure the law works as intended by commonsense approaches. I think that’s what’s needed.” 

This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.

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