Fayetteville families to get child care aid

FAYETTEVILLE — Child care providers welcome the city of Fayetteville’s plan to pay the cost of care for qualifying families, but warn they already face challenges with staff and space.

The city is using $2 million from its $17.9 million share of American Rescue Plan money to cover a year’s worth of child care costs for eligible families. Applicants must live, work or go to school in the city and meet certain income requirements.

The City Council created the program in December with $500,000, but quickly realized more money would be necessary. So far the city has received more than 100 applications and about 200 more requests for applications.

Of the 107 applications submitted, 70 are in the process of approval, and another 17 are pending further review because of missing paperwork, said Yolanda Fields, the city’s community resources director.

Twenty did not meet the criteria for eligibility, she said.

Households earning up to 80% of the median family income in the city as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are eligible. For instance, a family of four with an annual income of up to $66,950 would qualify.

The average dollar amount awarded per application is $12,000, or about $1,000 a month. If all 87 eligible applications are approved, the total would add up to more than $1 million, providing care to 110 children, Fields said.

The city is still accepting applications.

Fields said the high demand for the program fell in line with her expectation.

“I have been hearing for a long time, from individuals in the community and in meetings, that the huge challenge for a lot of our families with children and single moms is child care, because it is so expensive,” she said. “Trying to get back to work, or get training to get a better job — a lot of it is they don’t have the money for child care.”

BUSINESS WELCOMES HELP

Finding affordable child care was an issue for parents in Northwest Arkansas before the pandemic, according to the findings of a 2019 Walton Family Foundation report. For example, areas in Benton and Washington counties with the highest concentrations of working adults may have access to home-based care, but not nearby center-based care. Families without a stay-athome parent were more likely than those with a stay-at-home parent to use nonparental care for infants and toddlers, and for longer periods of time, at least 30 hours weekly.

Robin Slaton, chief executive officer of Kiddie Campus Child Care Center on Huntsville Road, said the average weekly rate per child at her facility is about $250. After the essential worker child care assistance program ended, many parents sought lower bills to keep their children enrolled in child care. Kiddie Campus has to charge what it does in order to pay its employees what they deserve and to keep programming high quality, Slaton said.

That’s why Slaton said she welcomed the city’s program. Providing the assistance directly to the service providers, and a month ahead of time, enables the business to better budget its finances, she said.

Slaton said so far about a dozen of her clients have applied to receive assistance through the city’s program. Kiddie Campus cares for nearly 60 children.

She praised the city’s program, but knows it only will last a year. She said she hopes the city will find a way to continue the program, or employers will fill the gap and cover child care for their employees.

“As a business owner, it makes you sit here and go, ‘OK, somebody else needs to step up, step in, see the problem and help us out,’” she said.