“Crisis” isn’t a word you throw around loosely, but folks, I think we have a childcare crisis. The cost of childcare is growing for the average worker, childcare workers still aren’t getting paid adequately and its growing increasingly difficult for high quality day care centers to serve low income children.
The “good news” is that the State Joint Finance Committee recently amended the governor’s budget by $70.2M to increase the amounts of money for Wisconsin Shares. Wisconsin Shares is a program that helps working families pay for childcare. This program has been cut for the last two years and this amendment does nothing to restore those cuts.
The bad news is that they eliminated all other initiatives in the child care area, including the local matching grants for child care the the City of Madison relied on. These Local Child Care Initiatives were federal pass through dollars and funded several City of Madison child care programs. Locally, the following programs are at risk:
1. A half-time child care specialist position. Currently this is the City’s lead person on afterschool child care.($36,776)
2. Direct grants to child care centers to help them achieve and maintain quality programs.($28,530)
3. The following Community programs ($64,398):
- Rainbow Project $23,483 to provide training and support for centers that serve children with emotional and behavioral issues
- 4Cs $26,985 for training and support groups for potential Hispanic family child care providers
- Satellite Child Care $13,930 for Hispanic Family Child Care recruitment and accreditation
In addition, the City of Madison will lose $6,827 in administrative support money that has helped the City send staff to training programs and build a database.
This, piled on top of all of the other recent changes like:
- changing the Dane County formula that determined how much assistance people on Wisconsin Shares received;
- reduction in reimbursement co-pays for poor families (extra $18 co-pay per week for families);
- ending the $50 annual registration fee reimbursement for families;
- childcare must be 35 hours per week (as opposed to 30-34) to qualify for full-time reimbursement;
- if families quit a daycare program without adequate notice, the they have to pay additional fees, the state will not reimburse them; and
- there was no a cost of living increase in the reimbursement rate for 2007.
I’m not an expert in this area, so I’m certain I’ve missed other recent changes that are exacerbating the situation. However, I don’t need to be an expert in this area to see the stress this is adding to the working families in Madison and Dane County or the day care centers that are trying to serve these children. Something has got to change.
