The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Child care on table for Harris visit
Gov. Ned Lamont will announce plans to make more families eligible for state-subsidized child care and increase state support for child care providers at an event in New Haven with Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday.
Harris is expected to speak about new federal funding to support child care and the enhanced child tax credit in the New Haven area with U.S. Rep. Rosa Delauro, D-3. The visit on Friday will be her first to the state
since becoming the nation’s first female vice president.
A part of Harris’s national “Help is Here” tour, the elected officials will celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill signed into law this month/
With millions in federal funding for child care flowing to the state, Lamont is expected to announce expanded eligibilities for parents to access state-subsidized child care programs, sources said. It’s believed Lamont will also say Connecticut will now pay some child care providers higher reimbursement rates for state-subsidized care, sources said, because the already fragile industry has struggled to stay open and offer care when parents needed it during the pandemic.
At the New Haven event, the governor will discuss the average grant size a child care provider will receive from a $277 million federal allocation for Connecticut child care included in the American Rescue Plan and $70 million in child care funds included in Congress’s December relief bill, state Office of Early Childhood Commissioner Beth Bye said Wednesday.
“We are managing 111 percent more funds than we were in 2018,” Bye said. “If we can’t make structural change and improve our system now, it will be hard to do it ever. It used to be a 2 percent increase [when] we were thinking about how to do that.”
Last week, the governor said Connecticut will also use some of the money to eliminate any all child care fees for parents of lowincome children who already receive partially state-subsidized care from April to September. That could eliminate up to a $400 per week charge for some families, Bye said.
At times during the pandemic, less than one in four child care providers in Connecticut were open, a crisis that challenged working parents, increased unemployment and imperiled a struggling industry.
When child care centers and schools were closing their doors last spring, Connecticut used state funding and a $4 million donation from the Dalio Foundation to ensure that some child care centers remained open to serve the children of hospital employees and other frontline workers.
But with many people out of work and other children home from school, demand for child care dropped too, meaning child care providers that tried to stay open often had vacant spots in their classrooms.
Cathie Vanicky, director and owner of Honeybear Learning Center in Stratford, said her child care center closed from March to July 16 and offered some online education. When they did reopen, infants and toddlers returned to the classrooms slowly.
“We came back at very low enrollment,” Vanicky said. “Same staff, lower enrollment. Meaning more expense, less revenue.”
As of last week, 76.6 percent of child care slots available before the pandemic in Connecticut were serving kids, according data collected by Connecticut United Way 211. Over 70 percent of open child care providers also said they had vacant spots.
Child care has long wrestled with what most in the industry agree is an untenable business model. Child care providers face high costs due to the staff-to-child ratios they must maintain and other costs. The average wage of a child care worker in Connecticut is $12.74, about half the average wage for all U.S. occupations, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkley.
And yet the cost of child care for parents is frequently painfully high, as much as rent or a a mortgage payment. Providers skate by with some state subsidies and by maintaining full classrooms and long waiting lists, while employee turnover is high and parents struggle to find an affordable spot for their child.
Merrill Gay, executive director of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, said he knew of at least one child care provider in the state that had to hold a fundraiser to give its employees a temporary 25 cents per hour wage increase during the pandemic.
“It just shows how fragile the system is and we really need to shift the way we pay for child care in this country and recognize it for the public good that it is rather than needing it as personal service,” Gay said.
The state provides some subsidies to child care providers and some parents – especially when low-income families are involved. But Gay said state subsidies are currently well below market rate for the cost of care: he said the state pays at the 50th percentile of market rate for infant/toddler care and 25th percentile for preschool care. Lamont’s announcement Friday is expected to change that.
The forthcoming Millions of dollars in federal child care money will be distributed by the state in grants to child care providers with all providers receiving a base grant, plus bonuses depending on whether they serve low-income children or have advanced accreditation. Early childhood commissioners in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine have been working together for two months to develop a formula to distribute the funds, Bye said – a level of collaboration she said “never happened before the pandemic.”
Child care providers are excited about the influx of new funds expected over the next two years. Vanicky said she’d like to offer her 12 employees raises, but worry what will happen when the federal money is gone.
“There just can’t be a two-year band-aid. The long term vision is stabilization for our industry,” she said. “The pandemic really made it obvious that the pandemic really is a very vital industry.”
Previously, Connecticut used $78 million in state money to continue to pay child care providers their typical per-child subsidies from March to June last year, even if the enrolled children were not currently attending the program. They made other investments to ensure child care remained available for frontline workers and hospital employees. They set new guidelines on how child care providers could continue to care for children with reduced child-to-staff ratios, masks and other safeguards so child care providers could stay open if they chose.
They also helped child care providers access assistance with applying for federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.
Child care providers were also prioritized for vaccines in Connecticut, alongside teachers.