So said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has just published its examining state-funded preschools. 

“That’s the story this year — that the race is highly uneven,” said Barnett. “Even as some states are racing toward the finish line, more states are moving in the wrong direction. A few states never entered the race. They’re not running.”

The research center has been publishing the State of Preschool Yearbook since 2003, measuring state-funded preschool programs against a set of quality standards and tracking programs’ enrollment and funding. For the first time, six states hit all 10 of NIEER’s , which measure factors such as teacher credentials, staff professional development, curriculum supports, class sizes and staff-to-child ratios. One of those states, Georgia, became the first with a universal preschool program to meet all 10 quality indicators — a feat that NIEER is touting widely and which Barnett said made the Peach State a “symbol” for everyone else. 

“You don’t have to choose between serving all the kids and building a high-quality program,” he said. “Georgia shows you can do it and not break the bank.”

In the 2024-25 school year, state-funded preschools saw record high enrollment and funding, though the pace slowed considerably from the prior year, according to NIEER’s findings. 

State-supported preschool programs now serve a combined 1.8 million children nationally, including 37% of 4-year-olds and 9% of 3-year-olds. The states that contributed most to the enrollment gains are California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri, adding more than 52,000 new preschool seats.

Federal, state and local governments spent a combined $17.7 billion on preschool, with more than $14 billion of that amount coming from states. More than half of states increased their funding for preschool, including Michigan and New Jersey, which increased spending by more than $100 million each. Meanwhile, 17 states spent less, with Arizona, North Carolina and Texas among those seeing the biggest declines. Another six states do not have a state-funded preschool program, as defined by NIEER: Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Thus, the high-stakes race metaphor. 

“You have states moving ahead,” Barnett reiterated. “But you have states faltering, states that didn’t make much progress.”

Part of the explanation for the faltering states, he said, is that they have less federal funding to prop up these programs than they used to. But that’s not the full story, since even in some states with budget deficits, , they managed to increase funding for pre-K. “It is about how you set your priorities,” Barnett said. 

This report found that enrollment for 3-year-olds in public pre-K is at an all-time-high, though Allison Friedman-Krauss, lead author of the report, clarified that it’s only marginally higher than it was the previous year and that it still lags far behind enrollment for 4-year-olds. 

Several states have pledged to serve all 3-year-olds, including less populous ones like Vermont and New Mexico and more populous ones such as Illinois and New Jersey. 

It takes time to build those programs, though, Friedman-Krauss and Barnett said, so the progress on serving 3-year-olds is expected to be slow and incremental. 

As for Georgia, it joins an elite group of states that are lauded by NIEER for quality, including Alabama, Hawaii, Mississippi, Michigan and Rhode Island.  

Each of the 10 quality benchmarks represents an improvement in preschool quality that can be felt by children and families, Barnett said. 

“Children’s experiences can be tremendously different between programs that have all of this in place and programs that have little in place,” he said. 

For example, he added, “one of the keys to good early childhood education is the teacher-child relationship.” It is much more likely for that relationship to be strong and for children to get individualized support for their learning and development when a teacher has fewer children in her care.  

And better-prepared teachers, he said, are going to have more realistic expectations about what the job entails and will be more likely to stay in their positions for longer. That matters for young children, who benefit from consistent, stable caregivers and teachers. 

To meet all 10 benchmarks, Georgia its staff-to-child ratios and maximum classroom sizes, said Susan Adams, deputy commissioner for pre-K and instructional support at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.

As of fall 2024, Georgia has reduced maximum preschool class sizes to 20 and set ratios at one adult to 10 children, Adams said. The state has also achieved salary parity for preschool teachers, so that they now align with the earnings of K-12 teachers, she added. 

What sets Georgia’s preschool program apart is that it is maintaining a high-quality learning environment while serving more than 70,000 children per year across Georgia’s 159 counties. 

The changes to ratios and maximum classroom sizes did reduce the number of preschool slots statewide, but the state is midway through a four-year effort to build back that capacity, by adding 100 new classrooms each year, Adams said. 

NIEER is tracking a number of other states that, with just a few changes, could join Georgia in providing universal access to high-quality pre-K, including New Mexico, which will be on par with Georgia once it meets the benchmark that requires all lead teachers to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. 

While Barnett believes NIEER’s close tracking of state-funded preschool programs helps with accountability, he clarified that Georgia and other states are not improving their programs just so they can check another box in a report. 

“The rationale for the leadership is not to get the acclaim or recognition from us,” he said. “Their rationale, really, is we need to provide a better program for kids.”

To a child in their care, their roles may be indistinguishable. Both teachers play with them, read to them, sing to them and guide them throughout the day. 

But each pair consists of a lead teacher — the senior professional in the classroom — and an assistant teacher, who may serve in more of a supporting role but, in many programs, acts as a co-teacher. 

Assistant teachers, despite their status as the junior educator, are “an integral part of the teaching team,” said GG Weisenfeld, associate director of technical assistance at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). They are participating in children’s brain-building, actively contributing to their learning and development, she said. 

Yet in most early care and education settings, and in most states, the policies and pay for assistant teachers do not align with that reality. 

When it comes to teacher qualifications, NIEER recommends that, at minimum, assistant teachers hold a Child Development Association (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for entry-level early childhood educators, or have equivalent preparation from at least nine credits of coursework. This benchmark for teacher qualifications is accepted by other leading organizations in the field. 

Often the first credential in an early educator’s career, the CDA introduces teachers to foundational child development concepts, the conditions of a safe learning environment, how to establish healthy relationships with families and more. 

“Having that basis,” Weisenfeld said, “allows that person some comfort and knowledge to be able to” serve confidently in an early learning setting.

But only one-third of state-funded preschool programs have policies in place that require these minimum qualifications for assistant teachers, NIEER found in a . 

Weisenfeld, who authored the report on assistant teachers, said the findings were “troubling,” noting that having low or no qualifications can justify low wages and trap teachers in a cycle where they can’t afford the education needed to advance in their careers. 

It’s critical to have skilled teachers working with young children, Weisenfeld added. “If we want the child outcomes … they need to be qualified and then they need to be supported once in the classroom.”

The report also found that only 30% of state-funded preschool programs met NIEER’s minimum standard for professional development of at least 15 hours of in-service training for assistant teachers. 

In a field where low wages and scant benefits affect early childhood educators in every role, assistant teachers fare worst of all, earning an average of $11.88 per hour as of 2022, according to . 

That financial reality makes it difficult for states to set higher standards for assistant teachers. Instead, it’s becoming increasingly common, Weisenfeld noted, for states to see that they aren’t filling open positions for early childhood educators and to respond by — allowing teenagers to fill teaching positions, instituting higher adult-to-child ratios and loosening training and licensing requirements.

“Cutting qualifications so you can justify inadequate salaries is not a good thing,” Weisenfeld said. 

She added: “To me, the strategy should be to help people raise their qualifications, help support people getting the qualifications, and ensure they are adequately compensated for their work.”

It’s not the norm, but a few states are pursuing that strategy. New Mexico is one of them. 

Assistant teachers in New Mexico’s state-funded pre-K classrooms are required to have an associate degree in early childhood education (or be actively enrolled in a program to earn one). If they have an associate degree in another field, they must earn 12 college credits in early childhood education, said Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Care and Education Department. 

To work in one of the state-funded pre-K classrooms, assistant teachers must also complete 44 hours of mandatory foundational training and an additional 24 hours of training annually. 

Lead teachers in these classrooms, in contrast, must hold a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and complete additional hours of professional development. They also earn more money, as is typical for more seniority across professions. 

“The important thing,” Groginsky said, “is they are both considered teachers and are both bringing a full set of knowledge and skills to advance the education of young children.”

Across early care and education settings in New Mexico, assistant teachers must earn a minimum wage of $18 an hour (about $37,000 per year for a full-time teacher), the secretary shared. Assistant teachers in state-funded, community-based pre-K classrooms are also eligible for the , which ensures that teachers with an associate degree and up to three years of experience earn $45,000 and teachers with an associate degree and more than three years of experience earn $50,000.

“The idea is we’re moving up the compensation to reflect the level of education and the skills that both the lead teacher and the assistant teacher bring to the classroom,” Groginsky said. 

Alabama is another state that meets NIEER’s benchmarks for assistant teacher qualifications and professional development and that Weisenfeld praised for its “brilliant” approach to building a pipeline of assistant teachers in high school.

Assistant teachers in Alabama’s First Class Pre-K Program are required to have a CDA credential or equivalent coursework in child development, and complete at least 20 hours of professional development each year. 

A number of K-12 schools in Alabama offer a pathway for high school students to pursue and complete their CDA, qualifying them for assistant teaching positions in the state’s preschool program upon graduation, said Milanda Dean, director of workforce development at the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. From there, teachers can participate in Alabama’s to earn their associate degree and even bachelor’s degree.

“We’re helping them earn their credentials,” Dean said, “and growing our workforce.”

Although the exact roles and responsibilities of assistant teachers do vary from program to program, it is important that these educators are recognized for the strengths and skills they bring to the classroom, said Ami Brooks, secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. Assistant teachers are not there just to wipe the tables, walk kids to the bathroom or put the cots out for naptime, she said. 

“We want to honor the early childhood development knowledge he or she is coming in with,” said Brooks, “and use that to partner with the lead teacher so they can work together to help the children develop.”

Throughout her career, Ross said she has seen a number of incremental pay bumps, including an increase after she earned an associate degree in 2021. That year, her salary was about $47,000. But the most significant change in her income came in 2022, she said, when Washington began implementing the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in an effort to boost wages in the child care sector. The initiative provided funds to make early educators’ salaries equivalent to K-12 public school educators. 

Ross received an additional $14,000 that year and her pay has continued to increase. Today, she makes around $67,000. The additional income has allowed her to buy a home and enroll her children in after school activities like boxing and gymnastics. 

The Pay Equity Fund — the first program of its kind in the United States — has been as a model for improving early educator retention, creating stability for a workforce largely made up of women, , in an industry with one of the in the country. 

But despite its popularity with educators and advocates, the fund has faced instability over the years and now it’s on the chopping block. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday, April 10 that included a to the Pay Equity Fund, which would eliminate the wage supplements that provided the city’s early childhood teachers with higher salaries. 

Bowser that what she hears most from families is that they want more opportunities for child care and they want it to be less expensive. But the Pay Equity Fund is “not a child care affordability fund, it’s more of an income support fund for child care workers,” she said. “It does not respond to what people are saying.”

Ross is one of more than in D.C., who would be drastically impacted by this change. Without the extra dollars she receives through the program, her salary would drop precariously, to the point that making the commute to work in D.C. wouldn’t make much economic or logistical sense. She lives over an hour away by car, and with her experience, education and credentials, she could likely find a job in the public school system where she lives in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. A job like that would bring benefits and a stable salary, she said. 

“Yes, everyone loves the Gan,” she said, referring to the early childhood center where she works. “It’s a special place. But everyone has to live in the real world. They have to pick between the love for their job or their income. Without pay equity, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ross said. Her partner has encouraged her to think about the long term, but she said she’s having a hard time asking herself,“If they cut the money for me, what is the plan?”

The Struggle for Consistent Funding

Created through the District’s budget and administered by the , the Pay Equity Fund initially delivered direct payments to eligible educators. During its first year, early childhood teachers received a one-time payment of , depending on their role and employment status. In 2023, the fund offered teachers up to four quarterly payments of up to $3,500 each. Then , the model shifted: instead of educators applying individually and receiving direct payments, licensed child care programs that met the requirements could opt in and receive funding through a payroll formula. 

The voluntary program was designed to help providers recruit and retain staff by offering more competitive wages, and its reach has been substantial. was distributed to over 4,000 home- and center-based child care providers during the initiative’s first two years, and went to 365 child care facilities in 2024.

This isn’t the first time the program has faced instability. In April 2024, Bowser suggested fter a , the D.C. Council , but advocates warned that with the increase in participation, more money was needed. That same year, to make budget recommendations for the program, which led to the Early Childhood Educator Pay Scales Amendment Act of 2025, a measure that for early educators. 

Some centers in the city, including the Gan, absorbed the cuts so that the teachers’ paychecks would be unchanged, said Noah Hichenberg, director of Gan HaYeled. 

To be fully funded in fiscal year 2027, the Pay Equity Fund , said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The program has grown more expensive because of its success, she noted. While the program had lower participation in its first few years, it has since grown in popularity. from Mathematica shows that after the first two years of implementation, there was an in D.C., about 7% higher than the estimated levels in the absence of the program. 

Gunderson said more teachers have enrolled in the program, stayed in their positions and gone back to school to pursue an associate or bachelor degree, with the goal of being able to earn a higher income upon graduation. 

“The fact that we’re able to increase utilization is a good thing,” said Gunderson. “Normally this would be something that would be celebrated.” Instead, it has resulted in a more expensive program, limiting the number of educators who are able to take part. 

LaVonda Butler-Means, an assistant teacher at Gan YaHeled, is one of the teachers who was motivated to pursue a higher level of education. The first year of Pay Equity her salary jumped from $43,000 to over $50,000. Encouraged, she enrolled in an accelerated program to get an associate degree, for which she estimated cost her around $26,000 out of pocket. Her goal was to become a lead teacher at the Gan after graduating in May, a move that would bring her a $10,000 raise. If the fund is eliminated and the increase doesn’t come through, she said she will have to look for another job.

“There is no way I can go back to make what I was making and sustain life,” Butler-Means said.  

One of the challenges of building a sustainable funding pathway for the Pay Equity Fund, explained Jamal Berry, president of Educare DC, an early learning program, is that it takes time to see the impact. that access to high-quality child care is a worthwhile investment, but the success of programs are often realized across a child’s education, which do not always translate into an immediate win. 

But leaders at programs participating in the Pay Equity Fund do report benefits, including lower staff turnover. 

Hichenberg credits the Pay Equity Fund with elevating the quality of care and stabilizing the workforce at his program. Of the 27 educators who work at the Gan, 23 have been there for more than three years since the Pay Equity Fund began. He anticipates it will be much harder to hire people at a lower salary level if the program gets cut. “Its’ not just a burden or headache, it’s a more volatile experience for our youngest learners,” he said.  

Staff turnover at Educare DC has also fallen since the Pay Equity Fund was implemented, and more staff are receiving additional education credentials, said Ronnell Nathaniel, the program’s vice president. Like at the Gan, her staff has benefited from the pay increase. Some teachers have shared that they’re purchasing their first home, she said, though the fact that the funding is in jeopardy has worked to undercut the staff’s sense of security and stability. “The inconsistency is every year,” she said. “You have to be concerned about that.”

Gunderson anticipates that the impact of gutting the Pay Equity Fund would be felt most keenly in programs serving infants and toddlers, which are the most expensive to maintain because of high staffing ratios. “They’re the first to go,” she said. Without a dedicated funding stream for the Pay Equity Fund, each budget cycle poses tough choices about which programs to fund and which to cut.  

“We’ve scored a touchdown and now we’re fumbling the ball,” said Berry. “States like New Mexico and New York are moving in this direction,” he gestured forward with his hands, “and we are moving backwards.”

Advocates Prepare to Push Back

Advocates are gearing up for a fight to save the program. Ahead of the budget release, educators and supporters turned out in protest at the John A. Wilson building in downtown D.C., where the local government is headquartered, as part of a . The national is slated for May 11, and advocates are encouraging child care providers to close or operate on a reduced schedule to show the impact of their services. 

But as compared to 2024, when the program first came under fire, it’s been harder to galvanize support for saving the program. LaDon Love works at Spaces in Action, a grassroots advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that played a significant role in the 2024 effort to save the Pay Equity Fund and is involved again this year. Love said that when she goes and speaks to early childhood educators, they think the major fight is behind them. “We won, right?” she said. Many do not realize their salaries are on the line again.  

When asked if the parents feel some outrage at the cuts and how it could impact the teachers who look after their children, Butler-Means shrugs. “Some take it really seriously,” she said. “Others it doesn’t matter to them as long as their kids have somewhere to go.” 

There are a few options that advocates and policymakers are exploring to keep the fund intact. One route involves creating a dedicated funding stream for it, similar to what has done in shoring up their own early childhood infrastructure. Another solution is to develop a new for Washington, D.C., which would increase revenue by adding a broad-based value-added tax to businesses. Experts believe this tax could raise as much as $500 million, and could be routed to social services programs that are on the chopping block, like the Pay Equity Fund. But, a tax like this would likely require a phase-in or implementation lag of a year, meaning that programs that could be funded by it would face a shortfall in the interim. An indefinite pay cut may loom too large for Ross and Butler-Means, pushing them out of their current roles, even with the possibility of a more stable funding source in the future. 

But there is something positive to have come from all of this, said Hichenberg, the Gan’s director. “The Pay Equity Fund has given all of us a gift of what is possible when pay is raised, and that has been beautiful to see,” he said. 

“It’s a stabilized workforce, more content teachers, more robust work-life balance and vacations,” he added. “It has allowed our core group of educators to stay stable for a number of years and allowed us to move forward as a school, improving quality in the classroom and smoother transitions for the parents. These have always been our goals. But the Pay Equity Fund has been the element of stability that has allowed for it.”

More recently, though, the preschool decided to establish protocols for another kind of emergency: the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the area. 

Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, when immigration enforcement activity across the country intensified, staff and families have experienced extreme stress and anxiety about the possibility of masked agents apprehending children at their own schools, said Leah Cates, executive director of Second Street Youth Center. (Previously, education settings like Second Street would’ve been protected from immigration raids under the so-called sensitive locations policy, but the administration that designation in January 2025.)  

Cates is glad she put that new lockdown protocol in place, she said, because they’ve had to activate it twice already. 

One of those times, a teacher heard a young boy at the school yell, “Pistola! Pistola!” — Spanish for “gun” — after he saw, through a window, an ICE agent with his weapon drawn, trying to detain someone on the street right outside the school.

“We had to pull our children off the playground, bring them in and immediately go into lockdown,” Cates said. 

Some children go on walks in the community with teachers throughout the day, she added. During lockdowns, the staff use radios to communicate about the presence of ICE and determine whether groups on walks should return to the school or go to a nearby church or the fire department to seek immediate shelter. 

Their fears are not unfounded. So far, five of the 210 children enrolled in the state-funded preschool, which serves ages 3 to 5, have experienced a parent or primary caregiver detained by ICE, said Cates, who is keeping track of the impact on her school community. Many other students have relatives who have been detained, deported or otherwise apprehended by the federal agents. More than 80% of the students are from immigrant families, she added, and most are from South and Central American countries. 

Second Street offers just one example of the terror echoing through homes and early childhood programs across the country, in red and blue states, in rural and urban communities, and in documented and undocumented families. 

Researchers at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national, anti-poverty nonprofit, have been examining the impact this administration’s immigration agenda is having on young children and their caregivers.

Between June and December 2025, CLASP staff held focus groups with 56 “at-risk” immigrant parents and primary caregivers of 74 children ages 6 and under. They also interviewed nearly 70 individuals who provide services to these families — many of them as early care and education providers, but also some home visitors, health care workers and others. Their findings, which anonymize the participants, are detailed in a pair of reports — centered on the experiences of young children and their immigrant families, and focused on early care and education providers in their communities.

The interviews were conducted in seven states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. In those states, immigrant families with young children range from 13% of the population in Michigan to 41% in New Jersey, according to from the Urban Institute, which combines from 2022 and 2023. Nationally, about 24% of children ages 5 and under have at least one immigrant parent. 

What emerged from the research is a clear picture of communities that are experiencing toxic stress and trauma, said Kaelin Rapport, policy analyst at CLASP and an author of both reports. 

“People are really scared, and they’re struggling immensely,” Rapport said. “Care providers are not feeling secure. Parents are struggling to feel safe themselves. Children are internalizing these stressors and these pressures.”

The concern that many immigrant adults feel, Rapport added, is preventing some of them from leaving their homes, whether it’s to go to the grocery store or to work. 

“It’s confining the entire family inside this emotional pressure cooker,” Rapport said.

Many parents attempt to shield their young children by avoiding conversations about immigration enforcement, yet their fears and anxieties still permeate the household.

“It was very clear that children are feeling the trickle-down effects of stress,” said Suma Setty, senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at CLASP and an author of the two reports. 

During an interview, the director of a child care center near Dallas shared with Setty that, before 2025, children in the program used to be so curious about visitors who came to the center. Now, when they see new faces, they hide behind the teachers’ legs. “That’s been a marked change she has observed,” Setty said. 

Cates, who was interviewed for the CLASP reports and shared details about the experiences of her preschool community with �鶹��Ʒ, has seen the way information about immigration enforcement reaches children at Second Street — and how they respond. 

It’s a regular practice at the preschool for staff to ask children how they’re feeling each day, she shared. One day, a little girl said she was scared. Her teacher told her she is safe at Second Street. But the girl said, “No, ICE can get me,” then started to cry, Cates recalled. 

“The child knows,” she said. “They may not understand everything, but they know someone was taken in their families. They see the upset of parents, the upset of family members.”

Then, she added, they take what they learned and tell their friends. Cates and other staff have overheard children talking about ICE on the playground, she said. 

“We think we’re doing a great job of shielding children, but little children have big ears. They put their listening ears on, and they hear everything,” she said. “We’re not doing as good a job as we think. Those 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds are hearing, and being affected by, the trauma.”

In interviews for the CLASP report, Rapport said, several families and early care and education providers described children as “clingy” now. Some children who had been sleeping independently through the night are now insisting on sleeping in bed with their parents. Others, he heard, are less friendly, more emotionally reactive, more frightened of strangers and less adaptable to changes in routine. 

As for the caregiving staff he interviewed, Rapport said a word that comes to mind to describe their predicament is “desperation.” They are stressed and traumatized from the past 15 months too. They’re also depressed, burned out and dealing with compassion fatigue. 

“People who work in child care and early education do it because they love children and want children to succeed in life. They want children to have a healthy upbringing,” Rapport said. “They pour so much of themselves into that work. They’re pouring from that well, and sometimes that well runs dry … for themselves and their families.”

Most early care and education providers are underpaid, working in under-resourced programs, and in some cases are immigrants themselves or have immigrant family members to think of, the researchers said. Yet, as they write in the report focused on providers, “ECE service providers are being asked to do more than the work that they trained for; they are asked to be immigration law experts, administrative law experts, second parents, and even work for free.”

That certainly rings true at Second Street Youth Center. 

In addition to the new lockdown protocols, the preschool has made changes to other procedures. 

The program has implemented “very stringent rules” around access into the building. “If we don’t recognize who you are, we aren’t letting you into the first doorway,” Cates said. The maintenance staff, as part of their duties, now regularly walk a two-block radius around the building to scan for ICE activity. Families know to text school staff about any ICE activity they’ve seen or heard about in the area, and staff then distribute the message to all families so they can make alternative pick-up arrangements for their children. 

On top of that, Second Street has held events to educate parents about their rights. The school partnered with an immigration attorney who volunteered to help families make a plan for their children in the event something happens to them. 

The work is taking a toll on staff, she said, noting that staff are increasingly asking for a day off here and there because “it’s just all too much.” 

“But my staff … understand the No. 1 concern is the health, safety and well-being of children,” Cates emphasized. “Before we do anything else, our job is to keep children safe.”

The child care closure at UNO is reflective of a concerning trend: Across the country, universities, school districts and hospitals are shutting down affiliated child care programs at an alarming rate as the cracks in America’s child care system begin to widen into fissures.

Since the beginning of 2025, a growing number of institutions have closed or put forth plans to close on-site child care programs that serve employees and, in the case of universities, student parents. These include universities such as , , and the , along in Washington, Arizona, and Kentucky. During the same time, public K-12 districts — including in Michigan, in Missouri and in Colorado — have announced similar closures, as have hospital systems in , and .

In almost every case, administrators are pointing to rising costs as a key culprit. Indeed, absent public funding, large institutions cannot run a sustainable child care business, particularly as most institutionally-affiliated programs offer tuition discounts to employees. In the case of Baptist Health, a nonprofit health care organization in Arkansas, the system said it $2 million a year operating two of its child care centers.

While there may have been a time when such losses were manageable, these institutions are being buffeted by other headwinds. Many colleges, universities and school districts are dealing with declining enrollment numbers that have . A key federal funding program that helps colleges and universities subsidize child care for student parents — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — has been held flat, which is a functional decrease in the face of inflation and rapidly rising child care costs.

Meanwhile, hospital systems are struggling with Medicaid cuts, rising labor costs, and tariffs increasing the costs of imported medicines and supplies; The American Hospital Association a “perfect storm of financial pressures.” 

The rash of institutional closures should be a stark warning about the future of employer-sponsored child care. That term usually conjures the concept of private companies offering on-site centers or subsidies for child care as a workplace perk. But in practice, these institutions function similarly: They operate on-site child care for their community members, such as staff, students or patients — and in many cases, the programs have been around for decades. In a sense, we might consider institutionally-affiliated child care programs the best-case version of employer-supported care. The institutions are often anchored in public missions, subject to greater accountability and backed by generally reliable funding streams. Yet, even these programs are disappearing.

If institutions designed to serve the public can’t sustain employer-linked child care, it raises a larger question about how realistic it is to . 

It seems clear that, reluctant as the decision may be, child care quickly finds itself on the chopping block when budgets tighten. Often, it is viewed as a nice-to-have for institutions, even while it’s a must-have for families. When programs close and families lose subsidized care, they’re often forced into a wild scramble for a spot among scarce options. With the aforementioned headwinds only projected to worsen, more closures are, unfortunately, likely on the way. 

To be clear, the closures don’t signal that on-site child care is inherently flawed. In fact, the passionate reaction of families and providers show just how valued these programs are. The question is, how should such programs be funded? A model that relies on institutions themselves bearing the cost seems to be breaking down. Similarly, depending on a single funding stream, like CCAMPIS, is clearly risky, as it keeps programs in a constant state of vulnerability — just one unfavorable grant cycle away from collapse.

What’s needed, instead, is a way to wrap institutionally-affiliated child care into a broader publicly-funded system, as is done in nations like and . 

The child care sector may well be entering a phase where Band-Aids like incentivizing employers to offer child care benefits like on-site programs or stipends can no longer hold back the bleeding. If universities and hospital systems — to say nothing of Fortune 500 companies like and — are increasingly unable or unwilling to maintain their child care programs despite evidence of their positive impacts, then a course correction is needed. 

Policymakers are rushing to incentivize employer-sponsored child care at a moment when the American economy is slowing down and financial headwinds are picking up. If there’s any good news, it’s that about five thousand years ago humans invented a way to pool individual resources and redistribute them for collective benefit. In other words, the antidote to institutional child care closures is the same as the antidote to mom and pop child care closures: tax dollars. 

What gets discussed far less often is that this pattern rarely begins in third or fifth grade, when participation gaps become easier to see. It begins in children’s first classroom experiences, where they learn whether speaking feels safe, whether mistakes are survivable and whether the classroom has room for the way they enter language.

The problem is not simply that some children talk more than others. It is that schools often mistake fast, public participation for understanding and then build opportunity around that mistake. A child who speaks quickly and often is usually read as engaged, confident and capable. A child who hesitates, watches or offers little is more likely to be read as uncertain, underprepared or less able.

Yet speaking in front of others is not a simple measure of understanding. It requires children to process a question, organize language quickly, tolerate public attention and respond while everyone is listening. For multilingual learners, it may also mean searching across languages while monitoring pronunciation and trying not to make a visible mistake.

What can look like “just talking” is often thinking under pressure.

When schools confuse reduced public response with reduced competence, they begin shaping a trajectory. That trajectory is rarely built through cruelty or obvious exclusion. More often, it emerges through small instructional decisions that seem reasonable on the surface. When participation in whole-group discussion decreases, teachers—often out of care—may call on certain students less, simplify questions or stop asking for elaboration. Meanwhile, other students are invited to explain, justify, extend and defend their thinking.

Each decision appears minor, but over time they accumulate. Opportunities to demonstrate complexity expand for some students and quietly contract for others. This is how underestimation takes root in schools — not through overt exclusion, but through a subtle redistribution of opportunity.

The problem deepens when educators collapse many different experiences into the single category of “quiet.” From the outside, quiet students can look similar, but the reasons beneath the silence are not. Some are fluent and expressive in low-pressure settings but constricted in public ones. Others understand directions in two languages and still shut down the moment speaking becomes public.

In everyday classroom moments — during snack, in play, or beside one trusted peer — these same children often become animated and engaged. Expression can expand quickly when pressure is lowered, home language is welcomed, or an adult creates space for response.

In one kindergarten classroom, a child who rarely spoke during group instruction began, almost invisibly, by moving his chair a few inches closer to the circle each day. The teacher noticed and named the shift without demanding more than he was ready to offer. “You came closer today,” she told him, and later, “I see you’re staying with us.”

Within days, he began whispering answers to a partner, and within weeks he was participating in small-group discussion. His language had not suddenly changed. The environment had. That is the point schools too often miss: Participation begins before speech.

In early classrooms, many children participate long before they do so in polished verbal form. They move closer to the group, track the teacher’s face, point instead of answering, imitate actions, sort materials, whisper to peers or respond through gesture and gaze. These are not lesser forms of participation. They are participation in its earliest form.

Yet schools often reward only the most visible and verbally fluent version of engagement, while everything that comes before it is treated as secondary. For multilingual learners and other cautious children, this creates a profound mismatch: their bodies are already engaged while the classroom waits for a kind of public speech they are not yet ready to produce.

If schools want to turn this around, they do not need an expensive new program. They need to stop treating the fastest and most exposed form of response as the clearest proof of understanding.

That shift begins with classroom routines. Before asking for a public answer, teachers can build in real “think time” —10 or 15 seconds that give students a chance to process before the quickest voices take over. They can let students rehearse with a partner before whole-group discussion, so the first public response is not also the first act of language formation.

They can ask students to point to evidence, sketch an idea, jot a sentence or sort materials before speaking aloud. They can return to a child after another voice has entered the conversation, instead of treating one missed moment as closure. And they can widen what counts as participation so that gesture, writing, peer explanation, and home-language processing are recognized as evidence of thought.

Teachers can also lower the social risk built into participation by slowing the pace when questions become more demanding, avoiding rapid-fire questioning that rewards only the quickest responders, and making hesitation less punishing. “Take a second and think” invites participation differently than “Come on, you know this.” “Show me first” opens a door that “Use your words” can close.

Just as important, teachers can look for patterns instead of drawing conclusions from isolated moments. A student who is silent in whole-group discussion but expressive in play, writing, small groups or in another language is not showing an absence of understanding. That variability is information: It shows that expression is conditional, not fixed, and that classroom conditions shape what becomes visible.

These moves do not lower rigor — they make it more accurate. Rigor is not how fast a child can speak in front of others. It is whether a classroom can recognize thought before it arrives in its most polished, public form.

When silence is misinterpreted early, the consequences extend far beyond one discussion. Expectations drift downward. Opportunities narrow. Referrals increase. Children acquire identities they did not choose: hesitant, low, disengaged, behind. What begins as a participation gap becomes an opportunity gap, and over time the system names what it helped create.

The student who lowers her hand is not always unsure, unmotivated or disengaged. She may be calculating whether the room is safe enough for the way she speaks, whether there is time to find language without being rushed, and whether what she is about to say will be met with patience or correction. If schools want more students to participate, they should stop treating voice as something children either have or do not.

Participation is not a trait — it is a condition. Quiet students do not need louder prompts. They need safer entry points. If schools understood that earlier, they might stop asking why some students do not raise their hands and start asking the more important question: What have we taught them participation will cost?

After struggling for months to sustain her child care business at home, Minerva Caba Toribio thought she would have to close due to rent increases and high costs. But now, she’s able to operate out of a classroom located on Granite Street in Worcester at the Guild of St. Agnes, the largest early education and care agency in Central Massachusetts. Caba Toribio has space for 10 children, with five currently enrolled and three others that will soon be joining.

“We serve Brazilian families, Latin American families, immigrant families,” she said. “They feel comfortable to see that we can speak the same language and we have the same traditions.”

Caba Toribio will be able to use the space rent-free for two years. By saving on rent, utilities, meals, and other expenses, she hopes to restart her home-based child care service once the time is up.

It’s all part of a pilot program called the , formed in partnership by the Guild of St. Agnes – which serves almost 2,000 children across roughly 150 child care establishments — and the Worcester-based Seven Hills Foundation — which provides supportive services to children, adults, and seniors with disabilities and other life challenges. Their new family child care incubator — only the third of its kind in the nation — provides two classroom spaces that were empty due to a lack of staffing to two licensed educators to operate their child care businesses while they prepare to later offer the service in their homes. The program is meant to provide more child care slots in an area where demand is high but supply is low, while also making it easier for family child care entrepreneurs to get their start.

“In addition to expanding care to more children and families by using classrooms that were otherwise empty, we are able to share services such as transportation, healthy meals, and business support to the resident educators as they establish their new businesses,” said Sharon MacDonald, president and CEO of the Guild of St. Agnes.

The program, which can accommodate up to 20 children, was modeled after in Boston, which was the first of its kind in the Commonwealth and provides short-term program space, resources, and training for newly licensed family child care entrepreneurs. The other incubator program in San Francisco in 2019 and has trained and established more than 100 new child care businesses, creating over 800 new child care slots.

“I was thinking about closing my business, so when I heard about the incubator, I thought, ‘That can’t be possible. I will have a space where I can keep working with the same families that I had at my home?’” Caba Toribio said.

The other resident educator, Eva Fajardo Marroquín, is a newly licensed provider who will lead the second classroom with 10 children.

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

Granite Street is in the heart of one of Worcester’s child care , according to Leslie Baker, program director for the Seven Hills Foundation’s Center for Childcare Careers.

The children’s tuition is covered by state subsidies, meaning the Guild of St. Agnes and the Seven Hills Foundation are not responsible for the educators’ salaries. A $1 million grant from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts allows them to pay for the building, the classroom equipment and supplies, and a full-time project coordinator who provides case management, business training, and professional development support for the two educators. (The foundation also provides grant funding to CommonWealth Beacon.) The educators will soon establish savings accounts so the coordinator can document their progress towards their long-term business goals.

Cost isn’t the only barrier that aspiring educators face in trying to open family child care businesses. Many, including Caba Toribio, face landlord resistance and struggle to find homes or apartments that allow family child care to operate. Others struggle with navigating the licensing process with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

Many of the families served by the Guild’s child care programs qualify for (CCFA) vouchers from the state. But that system remains underfunded even after the Legislature approved Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to change the income eligibility threshold from 50 percent of the state median income to 85 percent last year. That move added 4,000 low and moderate-income families to the program, but more than 30,000 children were on the statewide waitlist for the program at the end of 2025.

“It’s opportunities like this that are making sure we are creating pathways for early educators, because the more classrooms we can fill with great educators, the more slots that will become available for the littlest learners in our community,” said Sen. Robyn Kennedy, a Democrat representing Worcester, at the pilot program’s ribbon-cutting event on Monday.

The Commonwealth’s early child care system continues to suffer from a due to low earnings, a lack of employee benefits, and subsequently high turnover.

Among family child care program owners and employees, just over 40 percent receive paid time off, around 25 percent receive paid sick leave, around five percent receive discounted child care, and less than 8 percent receive dental insurance and retirements benefits, according to a 2025 published by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Just 4 percent of employees receive health insurance compared to 15 percent of owners.

“I don’t think we often think of childcare as a business,” said Sen. Michael Moore, a Millbury Democrat who represents Worcester. “You can’t be successful if you can’t operate it, put the business model together, and be able to afford it.”

Caba Toribio said many families prefer home-based family child care over center-based child care because it is often less expensive, more flexible, and tightly knit.

“We have a small group. Some parents prefer that. The children have the opportunity to feel like they are part of a family,” she said. “Here in the center, I keep the same concept. Because it’s a small group, they feel safe.”

Baker and MacDonald want to ensure that the program is sustained after the educators move out in two years.

“As they eventually launch their business, part of the project is to backfill it and continue this on,” MacDonald said. “One of the questions, obviously, is: What does it cost to do that without the grant funding?”

They are confident that eventually, other cities and programs across the state will pursue their own incubator projects.

“We’re trying to develop a model that could be replicable by other family child care systems,” Baker said. “We’d like to be that resource for other systems that are interested in developing this.”

This article is part of CommonWealth Beacon’s ongoing coverage of early childhood education issues and is funded, in part, by the .

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Child care during nontraditional hours — including early mornings, evenings, nights and weekends — is a growing need for American families. Flexible care with variable hours from week to week is also in demand.

In many homes across the country, work happens outside of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The best available data, drawn from the past decade, suggest that in some states live with a parent who works nonstandard hours, and that accommodate those schedules — though these figures rely on data collected before the pandemic. These data also indicate that work outside traditional hours is common in families that have lower incomes. 

Expanding access to equitable child care options requires careful attention to the diverse child care needs of working families. For a parent who starts a shift as a nursing assistant at 7 a.m., works overnight as a hotel receptionist or drives for a ride share service as a second job on the weekend, , as many licensed child care programs follow a more conventional schedule. Challenges also exist for parents who work jobs with rotating shifts, who not only require care outside of normal business hours, but also need the hours to be flexible. 

To ensure that working families can thrive, the child care sector needs more public investment in child care settings that offer care during nontraditional hours and increased support for the workforce needed to deliver it. When designing a universal child care system, policymakers must consider the growing population of parents working outside traditional business hours and should incorporate the following three principles.

Include home-based child care providers in policy design. Right now, most child care during nontraditional hours is , rather than by licensed child care providers. In other words, by people families trust who care for children in ways that resemble parental care. This type of arrangement — known as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care — is in the U.S. child care system. This trend points to both a preference and a gap: Families rely on familiar, home-based care during these hours, yet the supply of licensed child care that is open during these hours simply isn’t there. Building a universal child care system that is responsive to families’ needs will require recruiting and investing in licensed family child care providers and FFN caregivers who operate outside of child care licensing systems. Building policies that include the full range of home-based providers will require creative solutions, such as community-based peer support groups and access to resources and materials related to caring for children. 

Create fair working conditions and compensation for providers who offer care during nontraditional hours. Increasing child care access for working families must prioritize investment in the workforce caring for children during . These providers face some of the in an already strained sector: low pay, unpredictable schedules, on-call demands for families that need last minute child care or need to change hours without notice, and the strain of balancing their own family responsibilities with offering child care. Many FFN caregivers provide child care for their families . Expanding child care options that meet the needs of families working nontraditional hours requires intentional strategies that ensure a livable wage for paid child care workers and compensation for FFN caregivers — many of whom indicate for their work. These approaches must also reflect that the cost of care varies by time of day. 

Right-size standards and regulations to reflect the realities of providers caring for babies and children during nonstandard hours. Finally, quality and regulatory frameworks must evolve to recognize that care at 10 p.m. does not look like care at 10 a.m. Children’s development during nontraditional hours is shaped by like shared meals, bedtime stories and quiet, unstructured time. Systems that measure quality solely through daytime standards risk missing — such as healthy sleep practices and creating calm and comfortable environments — while placing unnecessary burdens on providers. Universal child care systems should offer tailored professional development that reflects the realities of care at night and on weekends — focused less on building lesson plans and more on developing routines, relationships and supporting children through transitions like bedtime or early wake-ups.

As states and cities build universal child care programs, ensuring access to child care beyond standard work hours must be a central goal. By embracing a mixed-delivery system that values all types of care, investing in compensation and professional development, and developing appropriate standards, early adopters of universal child care initiatives can provide an example of how to create policies that meet the needs of all working families.

The national nonprofit plans to the occasion with an “intentional year of celebration, reflection and doing what we’ve always done — center the voices of educators,” said CEO Michelle Kang. 

A century is a long time for any organization to exist. It is a long time — period. Thus, NAEYC’s centennial presents an opportunity for longtime early childhood educators and leaders to recognize the progress the field has made, and to consider why, 100 years later, some systemic issues remain unchanged. 

Founded in 1926 and first known as the National Association for Nursery Education, NAEYC has a long history of promoting high-quality education for children from birth to age 8, advocating for improved working conditions in the field, and helping families and the general public understand the value of early childhood education. Today, it is the largest early childhood education association in the country, with affiliates in nearly every state, reaching hundreds of thousands of educators through its research, advocacy and membership network.

Over the past century, NAEYC has been involved with a number of the profession’s major . The organization participated in the creation and expansion of , a federal program that provides high-quality early care and education to children from low-income families; collaborated on the development of the (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for the field’s educators; and built the first national to demonstrate quality in early learning programs.

But at the same time, the field has been defined by stagnation in critical areas, such as low compensation, insufficient public funding and a lack of professional recognition. 

“It’s a lot of ‘two steps forward, one step back,’” said Marcy Whitebook, who co-founded the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) in 1999. “It’s not that we haven’t made progress. It’s that these problems we’ve had for a long time endure.”

Whitebook, a septuagenarian, recalled meeting with other child care workers in the 1970s and 1980s to campaign for better working conditions. At that time, these teachers felt their contributions to society were underpaid and undervalued. 

“People who did the work had no rights, raises and respect,” Whitebook said, referencing the of a campaign from that era. “That’s still true.”

Few would dispute that. Early childhood educators today make an average of to care for and teach the nation’s youngest children, according to the CSCCE 2024 Workforce Index — despite a growing body of research and increased awareness among the public that the early years are foundational for learning and development, and deeply connected to a person’s eventual success. 

In a of the early childhood workforce, released by NAEYC in February, educators reported high levels of burnout and increasingly unstable personal financial circumstances. One teacher in California said, “I’m constantly worried about making rent and affording groceries, which distracts me during the day.” 

Many teachers are also dealing with the consequences of working in understaffed programs. Teacher turnover remains high and recruitment challenging, largely because many educators leave the field for better-paying jobs elsewhere. 

What would most help them stay in the field, the survey respondents said, is better pay and more employee benefits. Instead, many providers are experiencing stagnant federal funding and a perceived reduction in public support. 

Carol Brunson Day, who became a NAEYC member in 1969 and later served as the organization’s president, believes that wages and compensation remain the biggest issue facing the field. 

“That problem was there when I entered, and it’s still there,” she said. “We’re working on it, but we don’t seem to be getting the kind of traction we should be.”

Day added: “Until we solve that problem, we are still going to have high turnover, which is not just not good for teachers, it’s not good for young children.”

Day also spent 20 years as president of the Council for Professional Recognition, a nonprofit that NAEYC helped form in the 1980s to oversee the administration of the CDA credential. 

That credential, she said, has not only helped “produce competent caregivers,” but has also created a pathway for a racially, culturally and linguistically diverse workforce — primarily women — to advance their careers in early childhood education. As a result of getting many community colleges to recognize the CDA and award credits toward an associate degree, some early educators have been able to use their CDA as a springboard to earn four-year degrees and beyond. “It’s not perfect yet,” Day said, “but it’s there.”

Kang called the credential “one of the best first steps into the field of early learning,” noting that at her own son’s high school, students can pursue coursework to earn their CDA before graduation. 

“It has represented the path for so many people who would not otherwise have been able to be part of the field,” Kang said.

Even still, it’s not a solution to the lack of professionalization that early childhood educators face. There is still, among much of the public, a perception that adults who care for babies and toddlers are not teaching, but “babysitting.”

“We have not gotten to a place where we fully understand, as a community and a country, that these are professionals doing this work,” Kang acknowledged. “We push back against the narrative that anybody who loves children can do this work.”

That misconception likely perpetuates the low compensation in the field and the limited federal investment it receives. If the public and policymakers recognized the importance of the early years, they would, theoretically, want to pay the professionals who work with young children a living wage while also investing public dollars to boost quality and accessibility. 

“The entire system depends, basically, on very underpaid people doing the work,” said Whitebook. “The whole thing has been operating on cutting corners with the people who do it.”

Indeed, the current structure of the system is unsustainable, said Kang, resulting in a “” of early care and education. And yet she finds herself thinking back to at least one point in the field’s history when that was perhaps not the case.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in early care and education allowed the field not only to survive the disaster, but to come out of it, in some respects, stronger than before. That was also a time when many families and government leaders referred to early childhood education as “essential,” though Kang said she hasn’t heard that sentiment expressed for several years now. 

“There is very little about COVID that I would say we want to go back to,” Kang said, “but I do want to go back to that moment where policymakers on all sides of the political spectrum, families, community leaders recognized the importance of early childhood education and the investment needed to have it work well.”

It proved that it is possible for public dollars to buoy early childhood education and to raise the stature of the professionals who work in the field, she noted. 

“I don’t want to see us have another global calamity to get there,” Kang said. But when she reflects on NAEYC’s 100 years and the narrative around high-quality early learning, she said one thing is clear: “We need to support the professionals who are doing this work … so children can get everything they need to become the citizens we want them to be.”

For Emily Knox and her wife, Forever Young Child Care Learning Center in Manchester was a dependable cornerstone of their daily routine for more than two years. But on March 5, her wife arrived to pick up their son and found the center’s staff in tears. It would be, they abruptly learned, the center’s final day, as staff members rushed about, packing up children’s art projects and medical paperwork to give to parents.

“It was surreal, honestly,” Knox said. She was aware of the pressures that the early childhood education industry faced in Connecticut, from a lack of available spots to an underpaid workforce, but watching her son’s own facility suddenly shutter, seemingly without warning, was “an eye-opening experience.” 

The closure of Forever Young hits as vanishing federal aid and runaway Medicaid costs threaten an ambitious new initiative to expand affordable child care.

The Early Childhood Education Endowment, as a vehicle to create thousands of new affordable child care program slots by the early 2030s, is projected to receive $30 million from the budget surplus after Connecticut’s fiscal year ends June 30 — less than a tenth of what lawmakers pledged last June.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration said Monday it’s unclear whether the fiscal bleeding has stopped.

“It is too early to speculate,” Lamont’s budget spokesman, Chris Collibee, said Monday, adding that while global economic instability is a concern, the administration remains committed to supporting affordable child care.

“Gov. Lamont has taken a leading role both locally and nationally to increase investment in early childhood education,” Collibee said. “He’s fully dedicated to making sure that we deliver on that vision and promise.”

“I think we are all committed to the vision that we’ve set forth, and we stand ready to take the action that we need to take based upon the funding that is available to us,” added Elena Trueworthy, commissioner of Office of Early Childhood Education.

The state already opened 1,000 Early Start program slots in January and has earmarked nearly  from the endowment for various expenditures, including grants for local school districts to expand their preschools, increasing the rate that providers are paid and a planned study that will assess the need for a health insurance subsidy for employees.

Eva Bermúdez Zimmerman, executive director of Child Care For CT, said that the Manchester closure reflects broader pressures eroding the existing care infrastructure.

“The system is interconnected,” and the network’s financial needs are greater than even the hoped-for deposit in the hundreds of millions, she said. “I really do hope that elected leaders understand that you can’t build up a system and ignore the pressure that’s gotten us to here.” 

CT still forecasting big surpluses – but not for child care

Lamont responded to the child care crisis with a big step 13 months ago, proposing that Connecticut dedicate a portion of the massive budget surplus it generates annually toward early childhood education.

But much of that surplus is already accounted for. Using a series of aggressive caps set in 2017, Connecticut has since left an average of $1.9 billion unspent each year, which represents 8% to 9% of the General Fund.

About three-quarters of that, roughly $1.4 billion, involves certain income and business tax receipts lawmakers cannot spend easily. These protected dollars are immediately stripped from the budget and used chiefly to whittle down Connecticut’s pension debt, a that ranks among the largest, per capita, in the nation.

The remaining tax and fee receipts, federal grants and other revenues flow into the budget, where additional spending controls typically force hundreds of millions in additional savings each year.

And — with an initial investment of $300 million — they and Lamont stipulated much of this second-tier savings would be dedicated to the child care initiative each year.

that would translate into a $309 million deposit in the summer of 2026 and almost $560 million 12 months after that.

Medicaid spending plagues CT finances for 3^rd year in a row

But while the program that saves funds to reduce pension debt continues to save big dollars, the second-tier savings effort is in jeopardy. And some of the problems that shrank this year’s estimated payment to the child care program could get much worse.

One big obstacle is Medicaid, a federal health care program run in partnership with states. Medicaid demand has remained greater than pre-pandemic levels, even though enhanced federal aid ordered in response to COVID expired in 2023.

the state Department of Social Services will overspend its $3.7 billion Medicaid line item by $85 million this fiscal year. The department overspent on Medicaid by  last year and almost  two fiscal years ago.

Congress last July ordered cuts to Medicaid and other programs worth more than $1 trillion by 2034 to help finance big federal tax cuts aimed chiefly at high-earning households.

The Lamont administration hasn’t projected yet what Connecticut could lose next fiscal year. But , a New Haven-based policy group, estimated in January that federal Medicaid grants and aid sent directly to households — such as health care-related tax credits — would be down about $579 million in the next state budget cycle.

That federal tax relief also has softened state tax revenues.

Connecticut links its corporate tax system to the federal code, as do several other states. So, when Congress extended federal corporate tax breaks set to expire, Connecticut lost hundreds of millions in expected revenues from big business.

CT has options to bolster child care services

But this doesn’t mean Connecticut lacks options to bolster funding for child care.

Analysts estimate the state program that forces lawmakers to save a portion of income and business tax receipts will have a banner year, grabbing to pay down pension debt.

Lamont already has proposed scaling back these savings rules — albeit just once — to return $500 million to 2.2 million Connecticut residents in the form of a $200-per-person state tax rebate.

The checks would be sent in late October, just days before the gubernatorial election, and some Republicans have charged the Democratic governor’s proposal is merely a political stunt to help him win reelection to a third term.

But many of Lamont’s fellow Democrats in the House and Senate majorities have said those savings rules should be rolled back somewhat to permit greater investments year after year in child care and other core services, including health care, education and municipal aid.

Legislators from both parties have advocated big ongoing tax cuts this year, which also would necessitate saving less to reduce the state’s pension debt.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, a proponent of the Early Childhood Education Endowment, has said a modest amount of tax relief could be considered, but said nothing should be allowed to jeopardize a program that could benefit thousands of children from low- and middle-income households.

“It’s a reminder we’re going to have to prioritize at some point,” he said. “I personally think that, before we start implementing new tax changes to the tax code, we ought to be very mindful of how important this child care endowment could be in the long term.”

But House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, who also supports greater state investment in affordable child care, said Lamont and the General Assembly aren’t doing enough to trim spending in other areas.

Republican lawmakers have said Connecticut should look to tighten raises for state workers, cut Medicaid programs for undocumented residents and seek greater efficiencies at public colleges and universities.

“Democrats were more interested [last year] in a press release than creating a sustainable early childhood program,” Candelora said.

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In doing so, it will become the latest in a wave of states that have established standalone departments for early care and education in recent years, joining the ranks of , and .

The shift toward unified governance structures comes at a time when the sector is getting more attention and, in some states, more investment. That, plus an effort to improve families’ experiences in accessing public programs for them and their young children, seems to be driving this trend.

Whether a state’s governance structure can make a meaningful difference in how its system of early childhood education functions, though, is a question worth asking — and it’s one many early childhood policy leaders are trying to answer.

. . . . . 

Every state has a unique organizational framework, but historically, programs and services for young children and their families have been housed across several common agencies, such as an education department, a department of health, and a department of welfare and social services.

That was the case in Colorado before it launched its Department of Early Childhood in 2022, explained executive director Lisa Roy, and it made for a disjointed experience. 

“Having things scattered across different agencies just makes things confusing for families,” Roy said. 

And that is the case in Illinois now, said Teresa Ramos, secretary of the new department that is slated to on July 1. 

“What excites me, over time, is building a system that can more seamlessly serve parents and providers,” Ramos said. She wants to lift “some of that burden” off of families and educators who have to keep track of “which 12 people to call” and ultimately simplify their experience of engaging with government services. 

The other consequence of programs being spread across different departments is that it creates a leadership vacuum in early care and education, said Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer who has studied early childhood governance and recently wrote a on the topic.

“It’s a complicated ecosystem,” Regenstein said. “When oversight of that ecosystem is splintered across multiple agencies, with none as their primary expertise, it shows.”

Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University, which , used the pandemic as an example. During that time, a state education secretary’s focus was likely on reopening K-12 schools, even though their department also oversaw Head Start and pre-K programs, while the health secretary was probably thinking primarily about hospitals and health care, not child care licensing and quality. 

“What you had in early childhood was a system entirely run by middle managers,” Regenstein said. “Halfway up the org chart, they may or may not be empowered to interact with the legislature. Their orientation was to run a grant program, rather than think systemically about how those pieces fit together.”

He added: “That’s not a knock on those people. But when it was literally nobody’s job to think about the system as a whole, it just made everybody’s job harder.”

The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center has identified 13 states that have established standalone departments or offices of early care and education. In those 13 states, there is a senior leader whose entire job is to think about, organize and prioritize issues affecting early childhood. That change is both symbolic and actual — or it can be, when managed thoughtfully. 

Another dozen or so states — while not going as far as creating a new department — have made meaningful changes around early childhood governance and leadership, Regenstein added. 

“The question I’d ask,” he said, “is has a state taken action to elevate leadership in early childhood and done something to unify oversight? Even if they haven’t gotten all the way there, I want to give credit for progress.”

Of course, the formation of a new government agency, and the appointment of a senior official to lead it, is not in itself a victory. Only once those pieces are in place does the hard work begin. 

“Early childhood programs are historically under-resourced. Putting them all together doesn’t give you some kind of economy of scale — ‘oh, good, we’re all here and we’re all under-resourced,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, acknowledging the challenge these departments face. 

She added: “We’ve focused on building a system of programs and services that are well connected and aligned. We’ve done a really good job. We still have much work to do.”

. . . . . 

One thing all of these states seem to have in common is a governor who is willing to prioritize young children and families and make early childhood education a signature part of their platform. 

Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico all ran campaigns that emphasized early childhood education and later stewarded the creation of a standalone department. That is no coincidence, Osborne of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center said. 

For this organizing structure to be successful, she said, “it has to come from the governor.”

Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, made a similar point. “What matters more than any org chart or structure is leadership. Full stop,” said Stebbins. “When you have a strong governor, it is like wind in the sails.”

That significance doesn’t evaporate once the department has launched. These governors appoint cabinet-level officials, such as Roy in Colorado and Groginsky in New Mexico, to lead the new agency and work alongside them as they make decisions that are relevant to early care and education providers, children and families. 

In practice, these states end up with a dedicated early childhood advocate attending cabinet meetings with the governor and other department heads.   

“It’s not just symbolic. It’s really important,” said Osborne. “The secretary of early childhood is sitting side-by-side with the secretaries of … education and health. They can make decisions at that level, think about how to work together and leverage resources, in real-time.” 

That’s an enormous improvement over the “middle manager” dynamic that Regenstein described.

“It is much more likely that you’re going to be able to get the resources that you need,” Osborne added. 

In Colorado, that has had a real impact, Polis shared. 

“It certainly elevated the discussion about early childhood education in our state,” Polis said. “Dr. Roy attends every cabinet meeting. We talk about early childhood education every week. Before, no one owned it in the state.”

That access has given Roy opportunities to communicate directly with the governor about nuances in the field and to get a broader perspective of his competing priorities, she said. 

“The governor is a partner with me in thinking through these things,” Roy said, adding that “having that access and having his ear has been so important.”  

That kind of centralized leadership and governor’s support have been essential in enabling New Mexico to make groundbreaking progress on early care and education in the last several years, according to Groginsky. 

“There’s no way this kind of rapid, system-building growth could’ve happened with three different agencies, middle-level managers and staff working cross-departmental,” she said, referring to the recent transformation of early childhood education in the state, including the launch of the first statewide universal free child care initiative in the U.S. 

It is much more efficient and effective, she added, to channel all that time, energy and resources “in one direction, under one leader.” 

. . . . . 

This recent burst of activity in the development of early childhood education departments has precedent. In the early 2000s, a trio of states — Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington — each created a new agency to focus on early childhood. 

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, , is considered to have been the first state-level early childhood education department, said Amy M. Jacobs, the agency’s commissioner since 2014. She said her office has received numerous requests and questions from leaders in other states who are now trying to stand up a similar governance structure (which she describes as a “one-stop shop” for families). 

To those leaders, she typically tries to impart a few key lessons. 

One, she said, is to take their time. It’s OK to go slowly, especially if it means getting it right. Georgia’s department underwent many iterations before the final pieces were in place in 2017 — a full 13 years after it launched. 

Another, Jacobs said, is to create a system that makes sense in the context of their state. “There’s no ‘right’ way to create your agency. There are no ‘right’ set of programs,” she explained. “Every state is going to have their own pathway.”

In practice, that means that New Mexico’s department may have more programs and services under its umbrella than Colorado’s, and that shouldn’t be a critique of either agency. 

Finally, Jacobs said, it’s important to understand that anyone involved in this work may need patience if they want to see ideas about the field of early care and education meaningfully change. 

“Culture change will take longer than you ever think it will,” Jacobs said, noting that after more than two decades, she believes that the perception of early childhood educators as “babysitters” has changed and that the field is now highly valued by Georgia state leaders and policymakers. “It’s been a long process. … It just takes a lot of time to change that mindset.”

The formation of these departments is in itself momentous, many policy experts said, because it signals that early childhood is an issue that’s so important it deserves — literally — a seat at the governor’s table. But their existence does not guarantee their long-term success. 

Many of these agencies are still very new, having been ushered in by the sitting governor. One of the major tests is whether they can withstand leadership change — a new governor, perhaps from an opposing party, who maybe isn’t as keen on putting early care and education toward the top of their platform, said Regenstein. Some states, like Georgia and Massachusetts, have survived that type of leadership transition. 

“We still cannot answer the question to states, ‘Is this something we should do?’” said Osborne. “But we think there are models of these new departments that really can make it so you’re prioritizing early childhood, so you can use funds more efficiently, and decisions can be made that will enhance programs.”

In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words.

Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as they worked through the lesson. One young boy caught her attention.

“This student had struggled significantly the year before and often avoided reading tasks,” she said. “This time, I watched him carefully tap out each phoneme, blend the sounds and read a multi-syllable word independently.”

What stood out wasn’t just that he read the word correctly – it was how he approached it.

“He didn’t guess. He didn’t look to the teacher for the answer. He applied a strategy he had been explicitly taught,” Williams said.

She has observed several meaningful changes in students over the past year.

“Students are approaching unfamiliar words with greater confidence,” she said. “Instead of guessing, they are using strategies and applying phonics patterns they’ve been explicitly taught. You can hear the difference – they are sounding out words more accurately and blending more smoothly.”

The breakthrough she observed is part of a broader effort across rural central Missouri. Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP work directly with teachers in Phelps County schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Coordinated locally through the Phelps County Community Foundation, coaches visit classrooms regularly throughout the school year. They observe instruction, model lessons and provide feedback, strengthening foundational reading instruction for kindergarten and early elementary students.

The effort is taking place at a time when reading proficiency remains a challenge across Missouri and the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level, while 42 percent scored below the basic level.

Education leaders say improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success.

Before the collaborative began, the biggest challenges for K–1 teachers in St. James R-I centered on consistency, skill gaps and limited structured support.

“Teachers were using a variety of reading strategies, programs and materials,” Williams said. “While many approaches had strengths, there was not a cohesive, research-aligned framework guiding K–1 reading instruction across classrooms. This sometimes led to uneven student outcomes and confusion when students moved between grades.”

Some students entered kindergarten with limited literacy exposure, and teachers needed clearer tools to systematically build phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding skills. Identifying and addressing skill gaps early was challenging without a unified approach.

“From my perspective as principal, the most significant change since TNTP coaches began working with our teachers has been the shift to consistently structured, research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading,” she said.

Instead of learning strategies in isolation, teachers now receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice.

“I have seen a significant shift in teacher confidence, collaboration and mindset around early literacy instruction,” Williams said. “Teachers understand how students learn to read, have a stronger grasp of foundational skills — especially phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding – and can clearly articulate the ‘why’ behind their decisions.”

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

“Early literacy is no longer just an initiative,” she said. “It’s a unified commitment supported by knowledge, collaboration and confidence.”

A first-year teacher finds support

For Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Newburg, the coaching model provided unexpected support.

“You see so many posts online telling new teachers to run from the profession,” she said. “But when you have a support system – coaching, small groups, someone to talk through what’s working and what’s not – it makes you want to stay. It takes away that feeling that if a student struggles, it’s all your fault.”

Wood said the approach reduces “teacher guilt” – the feeling that struggling students are solely the teacher’s responsibility.

Her literacy coach, Kelly, follows a predictable rhythm each month: a Zoom planning meeting before a visit, in-person classroom observation, immediate feedback afterward and ongoing email check-ins.

“It definitely makes you feel like you are not alone,” Wood said. “As a new teacher, there are so many moments where you wonder if you’re doing it right. Having someone come in, observe and then talk it through with you – it changes everything.”

At the beginning of the year, some students did not yet recognize their starter letters – A, M, S and T – or the sounds they make.

“Now almost every single one of them knows capital, lowercase and sound,” she said. “That growth has been huge. Kindergarten is such a growth year. They come in barely recognizing letters, and by the end they’re reading.”

Wood admitted feeling nervous before Christmas break, wondering whether students would retain their skills.

“I sent home decodable passages because I thought, ‘They’re going to forget everything.’ But they came back after break and every single one of them just took off. It was like something clicked,” she said.

The improvements teachers are seeing in classrooms are reflected in early assessment data from participating districts.

In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94 percent of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began. In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5 percent in the fall to 89.4 percent by the spring.

At Newburg Elementary School, 100 percent of kindergarten and first-grade students demonstrated growth in reading assessments, with gains that more than doubled typical annual progress.

From classroom change to district strategy

For April Williams, assistant superintendent in the St. James R-I School District, the impact is most visible during classroom visits.

“As an administrative team, we met every Wednesday morning and did literacy walks,” she said. “We wanted to be grounded in the work, too – not just supporting teachers but really understanding what effective literacy instruction should look like.”

Those visits give district leaders a firsthand view of how instruction – and students – are changing.

“Just last week I was in a kindergarten classroom, and the words students were decoding and understanding – for February – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Seeing that difference in students’ abilities has been incredible.”

What began as a local effort in rural Phelps County is now expanding across Missouri.

Through the state’s Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant, the coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide, including 40 K–5 schools and 20 middle and high schools. Literacy coaches trained in the same model used in Phelps County now support teachers across multiple regions of the state.

Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers.

For Williams, the goal is simple: ensure the work continues long after the original grant funding ends.

“Probably what changed the most is we renewed our commitment to literacy district-wide,” she said. “It wasn’t just something happening in elementary anymore – we started asking how the entire district supports literacy and keeps it at the forefront of everything we do.”

She added: “The goal is for this model to live beyond the grant — and beyond all of us. So that it simply becomes what we do.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

States including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have garnered attention in the media for offering lessons other states can learn from — a February New York Times opinion piece heralded the trio as “.”

Yet the Southern surge narrative has, so far, largely ignored another commonality among those states: tremendous improvements in early childhood education.

The most commonly cited reasons behind the trend relate to , specifically a commitment to phonics-based pedagogy, and a willingness to who are not reading on grade level. Importantly, this did not happen overnight, and it didn’t occur in isolation: Rachel Canter, who led a Mississippi education policy and advocacy group that was instrumental in shaping the state’s approach, the New York Times that the “Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” but added that “people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

Indeed, in the same 2013 legislative session in which Mississippi passed the , which codified many of its reforms, the legislature also passed its first state pre-K bill, the (ELCA). The ELCA was a state-funded initiative that established voluntary, free or low-cost, high-quality pre-K programs that operated through partnerships between private pre-K providers, school districts and, in some cases, Head Start programs. These collaboratives had to meet all put forth by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Over the years, enrollment in the Collaboratives has : When they were launched in 2014, the Collaboratives served 1,774 children and by the 2022-23 school year, student enrollment in pre-K had reached 6,800.

In on how the ELCA came about, Canter explained that with major early childhood and K-3 reforms both passing at the same time, the policies were designed to align. For instance, the pre-K legislation required participating providers to administer a school readiness assessment that lined up with the one students would be asked to take in Kindergarten. Substantial funds were invested in instructional coaches for pre-K teachers, and in providing pre-K teachers with access to literacy professional development opportunities comparable to what the state’s K-3 teachers were being offered.

Around the same time, neighboring states were engaged in their own reform efforts. In 2012, the , commonly referred to as Act 3. This unified early childhood governance within the Louisiana Department of Education and set the stage for broad reforms. Over the next few years, Louisiana required every child care program that received a dollar of public money to participate in the state’s accountability system, which included getting a minimum of two quality-focused inspections per year. The bar was also raised for teacher qualifications, requiring all lead teachers in publicly funded early learning settings to have at least an , a state-based professional credential.

The efforts paid off. Researchers that from 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood education programs in Louisiana that scored proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) rating scale — a commonly-used measure of teacher-child interactions — rose from 62% to 85%. For child care programs specifically, excluding state pre-K and Head Start classrooms, the percentage of programs scoring proficient or above increased even more impressively, from 40% in 2016 to 73% in 2019. The kids in those classrooms, of course, are many of the same kids who later on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ fourth grade literacy exam.

Alabama, meanwhile, has long been a leader in pre-K. In 2001, the state launched First Class Pre-K, an initiative that funds full-day pre-K across a variety of school- and community-based settings. With a focus on quality, the system has been since 2006 as part of the organization’s . However, funding constraints kept the program small. In the mid-2010s, though, First Class Pre-K began to scale. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of participating 4-year-olds from about 3,600 to more than 24,000. Around the same time, the state made a major investment in coaching for pre-K teachers, and its coaching model grew from serving around 200 teachers in 2012 to nearly 1,500 as of 2024. When Alabama began leaning fully into the science of reading with its , pre-K teachers in public schools also started getting on the subject.

Connecting early care and education reform to the Southern surge is, of course, an exercise in correlation and not causation. As Canter pointed out with regard to the science of reading, this is a multifaceted story and assigning too much credit to any one factor is unwise. Moreover, other states that have made major investments to their early childhood education systems — such as California and its universal transitional kindergarten program — have not to date seen the same types of literacy gains. What does seem fair is speculating that in a counterfactual world where Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama make the same reforms to K-3 but ignore early education entirely, the Southern surge would have been blunted. 

These states, then, offer important lessons for both early childhood and K-12 stakeholders around the importance of tightly and thoughtfully aligning both systems — in both directions — and ensuring there are enough resources present to support educators. Leaders don’t have to look far: groups like the have been developing alignment frameworks and tools for years. What’s needed is a renewed commitment, particularly among state and district leaders, to seeing early care and education not as a nice-to-have, a wholly separate enterprise, or even worse, a competitor — but as a core part of ensuring all children are reading on grade level. That might not be a miracle, but it would sure be an accomplishment.

When she recently separated from her partner, it became critical that she get a job. She was hired for a position with a nonprofit last summer, and shortly after that, she went online and applied to get a subsidy so she could afford child care for her three children, ages 2, 4 and 8 years old.

Two months went by before she got a response, she said, only to be told that she had been put on a waitlist. It gave her “a moment of panic,” she recalled. “I need my bills to be paid but I also need somebody to watch my children.” There was no way she could afford the out-of-pocket cost of child care on her pay. It costs a year, on average, for center-based care for a toddler in Virginia.

A growing number of parents have been confronted recently with a situation similar to Moyer’s. Strapped for child care funding, have started waitlists for child care subsidies — or lengthened existing ones — putting new applicants in limbo when they need immediate help paying for care. Virginia is one of 14 states that have recently instituted or expanded waitlists, according to Child Care Aware of America. 

Moyer ended up asking neighbors and friends to watch her children, “people that I normally wouldn’t have asked to watch my kids,” she said. She installed some cameras in her house to make herself feel more secure. But “I wasn’t as comfortable as I would have been had they been in a licensed, insured day care,” she noted, adding that she had to work around the schedules of the people who agreed to watch her children, even though she wasn’t able to control her own schedule at work. There were some days when the person she had arranged to watch her kids canceled at the last minute, sending her scrambling to find someone else.

“It was very, very emotionally stressful, because I had never been away from my kids up until this moment and suddenly I’m leaving them at home with other people,” she recalled.

Moyer had to wait four months to get off Virginia’s waitlist, she said. Then, when she was finally taken off, she had to fill out all the paperwork again, which required getting documents from her employer and finding a child care center that she could enroll her children in. It took her another two weeks before she was actually getting help, she said. 

Waiting lists for child care subsidies are not new. “It has been true for a long time that there are not enough resources to provide subsidies to every eligible family,” said Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy & research at Child Care Aware of America. “We’re not meeting families’ needs with our current subsidy system.” In 2021, were eligible for subsidies under state rules, but just 1.8 million received them, or less than a quarter of those who qualified. 

But the child care sector has, in the past five years, received more funding that it typically does. It received in federal COVID relief funding meant to prop the sector up, which some states to eliminate waitlists, among other changes. The Child Care and Development Block Grant, which mostly funds state subsidies, received a increase in funding in 2023 and then another increase in 2024. Some states, for their part, also devoted some of their own dollars to the sector.

Now with the billions in COVID relief funding gone, and with big state budget cuts looming due to to Medicaid and other safety net programs passed by Republicans in Congress, many states have searched for ways to reduce spending. Waiting lists have become a common tool. States are “not able to serve all eligible families, and they’re having to do things like institute waitlists that limit families who are coming in,” Hedgepeth said. 

Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia have recently started putting at least some parents on waiting lists for child care subsidies or have significantly expanded the number of parents on their lists, according to Child Care Aware of America. Missouri also   a waitlist starting March 1. 

The number of states with waitlists has nearly doubled since early 2022, according to Child Care Aware of America. “Many on this list did not have waitlists when there were additional dollars available,” Hedgepeth said, and “were able to serve all of the families that were applying.”

This situation “does tell us that the funding amount that was flowing to states during the pandemic was an amount that better reflected the total need in the system,” Hedgepeth said. The increase in states using waitlists as an approach to cut costs is bad on its own, but it’s also a canary in the coal mine, she said, signaling deeper troubles in the child care system.

“A single state may not be able to replace federal funding,” she noted, but if it’s only spending the bare minimum without dedicating general funds “that’s a real opportunity for state policymakers.” , for example, has instituted waitlists without investing any additional funding for the sector. 

For parents like Moyer, the impact of state waitlists can be devastating, Hedgepeth said. Many families don’t bother to go through the steps to get a subsidy or might not even know that they’re eligible in the first place. For those who actually fill out the paperwork and submit it, “which is often no easy task,” she said, finding out that they won’t get any help for a number of months or, possibly, indefinitely “can be really disheartening.” Parents likely face impossible choices about how to make sure their children are cared for while they work. “This is not something they have time to wait for,” she said. “They need care today for their kids.” That’s especially true for mothers, as women’s labor force participation has , and many parents child care problems are keeping them from work. 

Providers, meanwhile, often suffer as well. In Indiana, for instance, the freeze in new subsidies left some providers who were counting on enrolling new infants with empty infant classrooms. The freeze, along with deep reimbursement cuts, has put them in a difficult financial position. “Your highest rates of pay comes from your infants,” Dionne Miller, who runs Room to Bloom Learning Academy in Indianapolis, previously told �鶹��Ʒ. “We no longer have that stream of income coming in.” More than 100 providers closed last September and October after the state’s changes were put in place.

On top of the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, ongoing federal funding has become increasingly unstable. In December, the Trump administration announced that, after resurfacing fraud allegations in Minnesota’s child care and other public programs, it was freezing all child care funding to the state and reinstituting a Defend the Spend requirement for the Child Care Development Fund, which provides key funding for state subsidies across the country. With the change, all states now have to provide justification, including receipts and photo evidence, in order to draw down the money that was already appropriated by Congress. 

The administration also sought to completely freeze CCDF and other federal funding to five states, although that action has been by a judge. And the administration rescinded Biden-era rules that paid child care providers in a more stable way. 

Given all of this, Hedgepeth said, “I would not be surprised to see more states institute waitlists.” 

“We are in some ways back to the pre-pandemic conversation of the way in which child care and early learning are situated in our priorities,” she added. It’s “not receiving the full support that it needs despite what we know about its critical importance to families and economies.”