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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valeria Olivares from the Dallas Morning News contributed reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

States had until 2018 to come into compliance.

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

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

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

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

But it is a big deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post States are required to background check child care workers. Many are falling short appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

AUBURN, Washington – After a series of low-paying jobs, Nicole Slemp finally landed one she loved. She was a secretary for Washington’s child services department, a job that came with her own cubicle, and she had a knack for working with families in difficult situations.

Slemp expected to return to work after having her son in August. But then she and her husband started looking for child care – and doing the math. The best option would cost about $2,000 a month, with a long wait list, and even the least expensive option around $1,600, still eating up most of Slemp’s salary. Her husband earns about $35 an hour at a hose distribution company. Between them, they earned too much to qualify for government help.

“I really didn’t want to quit my job,” says Slemp, 33, who lives in a Seattle suburb. But, she says, she felt like she had no choice. 

The dilemma is common in the United States, where high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and daycare openings are sometimes hard to find at all. In 2022, more than 1 in 10 young children had a parent who had to quit, turn down or drastically change a job in the previous year because of child care problems. And that burden falls most on mothers, who shoulder more child-rearing responsibilities and are far more likely to leave a job to care for kids.

Even so, women’s participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023. But that masks a lingering crisis among women like Slemp who lack a college degree: The gap in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don’t has only grown. 

For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay. They are less likely to have paid leave. And when they face an interruption in child care arrangements – whether their child is at a relative’s home, a preschool or a daycare center – an adult in the family is far more likely to take unpaid time off or to be forced to leave a job altogether, according to an analysis of Census survey data by the Education Reporting Collaborative. 

Related: Free child care exists in America – if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

In interviews, mothers across the country shared how the seemingly endless search for child care, and its expense, left them feeling defeated. It pushed them off career tracks, robbed them of a sense of purpose, and put them in financial distress. 

Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said. 

Her own research indicates three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in households with incomes less than $50,000, and half have household incomes of less than $25,000.

Still, the high cost of child care has upended the careers of even those with college degrees.

When Jane Roberts gave birth in November, she and her husband, both teachers, quickly realized sending baby Dennis to day care was out of the question. It was too costly, and they worried about finding a quality provider in their hometown of Pocatello, Idaho.

The school district has no paid medical or parental leave, so Roberts exhausted her sick leave and personal days to stay home with Dennis. In March, she returned to work and husband Mike took leave. By the end of the school year, they’ll have missed out on a combined nine weeks of pay. To make ends meet, they’ve borrowed money against Jane’s life insurance policy.

In the fall, Roberts won’t return to teaching. The decision was wrenching. “I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this profession,” she said.

For low- and middle-income women who do find child care, the expense can become overwhelming. The Department of Health and Human Services has defined “affordable” child care as an arrangement that costs no more than 7 percent of a household budget. But a Labor Department study found fewer than 50 American counties where a family earning the median household income could obtain child care at an “affordable” price. 

There’s also a connection between the cost of child care and the number of mothers working: a 10 percent increase in the median price of child care was associated with a 1 percent drop in the maternal workforce, the Labor Department found.

Related: Inside Canada’s 50-year fight for national child care

In Birmingham, Alabama, single mother Adriane Burnett takes home about $2,800 a month as a customer service representative for a manufacturing company. She spends more than a third of that on care for her 3-year-old.  

In October, that child aged out of a program that qualified the family of three for child care subsidies. So she took on more work, delivering food for DoorDash and Uber Eats. To make the deliveries possible, her 14-year-old has to babysit.

Even so, Burnett had to file for bankruptcy and forfeit her car because she was behind on payments. She is borrowing her father’s car to continue her delivery gigs. The financial stress and guilt over missing time with her kids have affected her health, Burnett said. She has had panic attacks and has fainted at work.

“My kids need me,” Burnett said, “but I also have to work.”

Even for parents who can afford child care, searching for it — and paying for it — consumes reams of time and energy. 

When Daizha Rioland was five months pregnant with her first child, she posted in a Facebook group for Dallas moms that she was looking for child care. Several warned she was already behind if she wasn’t on any wait lists. Rioland, who has a degree and works in communications for a nonprofit, wanted a racially diverse program with a strong curriculum. 

While her daughter remained on wait lists, Rioland’s parents stepped in to care for her. Finally, her daughter reached the top of a waiting list — at 18 months old. The tuition was so high she could only attend part-time. Rioland got her second daughter on waiting lists long before she was born, and she now attends a center Rioland trusts.

“I’ve grown up in Dallas. I see what happens when you’re not afforded the luxury of high-quality education,” said Rioland, who is Black. “For my daughters, that’s not going to be the case.”

Slemp still sometimes wonders how she ended up staying at home with her son – time she cherishes but also finds disorienting. She thought she was doing well. After stints at a water park and a call center, her state job seemed like a step toward financial stability. How could it be so hard to maintain her career, when everything seemed to be going right?

“Our country is doing nothing to try to help fill that gap,” Slemp said. As a parent, “we’re supposed to keep the population going, and they’re not giving us a chance to provide for our kids to be able to do that.”

This story was written by Moriah Balingit and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press and Daniel Beekman of The Seattle Times. Balingit reported from Washington, D.C., and Lurye from New Orleans. Carly Flandro of Idaho Education News, Valeria Olivares of The Dallas Morning News and Alaina Bookman of AL.com contributed reporting.

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JERSEY CITY, N.J. — When Keischa Taylor sees fellow student-parents around her campus, she pulls them aside and gives them a hug.

“I tell them, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got this. You didn’t come this far to stop. You’re not going to give up on yourself.’ ”

Taylor is exceedingly well qualified to offer this advice. She began her college education in her early 20s, balancing it with raising two sons and working retail jobs. And she just finished her bachelor’s degree last semester — at 53.

It’s a rare success story. Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than four in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared to more than six in 10 other students.

Many have long had to rely on themselves and each other, as Taylor did, to make it through.

Now, however, student-parents are beginning to get new attention. A rule that took effect in California in July, for example, gives priority course registration at public universities and colleges to student-parents, who often need more scheduling flexibility than their classmates. New York State in September expanded the capacity of child care centers at community colleges by 200 spots; its campus child care facilities previously handled a total of 4,500 children, though most of those slots — as at many institutions with child care on campus, nationwide — went to faculty and staff.

Taylor put her sons in a Salvation Army daycare center when they were younger. “It’s a matter of paying for college, paying for the babysitter or sneaking them into class,” Taylor recalled, at Hudson County Community College, or HCCC, where she went before moving on to Rutgers University. Even though the community college is among the few that have improved their services for student-parents, she remembered asking herself, “How am I going to do this?”

Parents with children comprise a huge potential market for colleges and universities looking for ways to make up for the plummeting number of 18- to 24-year-olds and states’ growing need for workers to fill jobs requiring a college education. Many of these parents already have some college credits. More than a third of the 40.4 million adults who have gone to college but never finished have children under age 18, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, or IWPR.

“If you want to serve adult learners, which colleges see as their solution to enrollment decline, you have to serve student-parents,” said Su Jin Jez, CEO of California Competes, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on education and workforce policies.

Another reason student-parents are more visible now: The Covid-19 pandemic reminded Americans how hard it is to be a parent generally, never mind one who is juggling school on top of work and children.

Related: The hidden financial aid hurdle derailing college students

“A lot of the current energy has come from the focus on child care crises,” said Theresa Anderson, a principal research associate at the nonprofit research organization the Urban Institute. “Student-parents are at the intersection of that.”

There’s also new attention to the benefits for children of having parents who go to college.

“The greatest impact on a child’s likelihood to be successful is the education of their parents,” said Teresa Eckrich Sommer, a research professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research.

Lori Barr dropped out of college when she got pregnant at 19, but went back as a mother and ultimately got a master’s degree. With her son, Minnesota Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr, she later co-founded a scholarship organization for single student-parents in California and Minnesota called Raise The Barr.

“Whatever we’re doing to support the parent directly impacts the child,” Barr said. “A parent can’t be well if the child’s not well, and vice versa.”

The effect works two ways, Sommer said. In a study she co-authored of an unusual program that gives college scholarships to both high school students and their parents in Toledo, Ohio, the Institute for Policy Research found that students and parents alike performed at or above average, despite what Sommer noted were financial challenges and limited academic preparation.

“Call it mutual motivation. The children helped the parents with technical issues. The parents helped the children with time management,” she said. “We think of kids as a barrier to student success. We have to turn that on its head. Kids are a primary motivator to student success.”

Tayla Easterla was enrolled at a community college near Sacramento, California, when her daughter was born prematurely four years ago; she took her midterms and finals in the neonatal intensive care unit. “I just found that motherly drive somewhere deep inside,” said Easterla, 27, who now is majoring in business administration at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Krystle Pale is about to get her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz. When she looks at her children who live with her, who are 5, 7, 12 and 13, “I want better for them. I just want them to have a better life,” said Pale, choking up.

Sydney Riester, of Rochester, Minnesota, who is about to earn her dental assistant associate degree, also said her children — ages 3, 6 and 7 — were foremost in her planning. “These kids need me, and I need to get this done for them,” Riester said.

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

There’s a surprising lack of information about whether students in college have dependent children. Most institutions never ask. That is also slowly changing. California, Michigan, Oregon and Illinois have passed legislation since 2020 requiring that public colleges and universities track whether their students are also parents. A similar federal measure is pending in Congress.

“Ask community college presidents what percentage of their students are parents, and they’ll say, ‘That’s a really good question. I’ll get back to you,’ ” said Marjorie Sims, managing director of Ascend at the Aspen Institute, one of a growing number of research, policy and advocacy organizations focusing on student-parents.

Nearly one in four undergraduate and nearly one in three graduate students, or more than 5.4 million people, are parents, the Urban Institute estimates. More than half have children under age 6, according to the IWPR.

Seventy percent of student-parents are women. Fifty-one percent are Black, Hispanic or Native American. Student mothers are more likely to be single, while student fathers are more likely to be married.

Among student-parents who go to college but drop out, cost and conflicts with work are the most-stated reasons, various research shows; 70 percent have trouble affording food and housing, according to the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University.

Student financial aid is based on an estimated cost of attendance that includes tuition, fees, books, supplies, transportation and living expenses, but not expenses related to raising a child. The out-of-pocket cost of attending a public university or college for a low-income parent can be two to five times higher than for a low-income student without children, according to the advocacy group The Education Trust.

A student-parent would have to work 52 hours a week, on average, to cover both child care and tuition at a public university or college, EdTrust says. A separate analysis by California Competes found that students in that state who have children pay $7,592 per child a year more for their educations and related expenses than their classmates who don’t have kids.

But “when they apply for financial aid, they get financial aid packages as if they don’t have children. It’s ludicrous,” said Jez, at California Competes.

Forty-five percent of student-parents who dropped out cited their need to provide child care as a significant cause, a survey released in February found. Yet the number of colleges and universities with on-campus child care has been dropping steadily, from 1,115 in 2012 to 824 today, federal data shows. That’s a decline of 291 institutions, or 26 percent.

Fewer than four in 10 public and fewer than one in 10 private, nonprofit colleges and universities have on-campus child care for students, an analysis by the think tank New America found. Ninety-five percent of those campus child care centers that existed in 2016 — the most recent year for which data is available — had waiting lists, and the number of children on the average waiting list was 82, according to the IWPR. Other students couldn’t afford the cost.

Related: When a Hawaii college sets up shop in Las Vegas: Universities chase students wherever they are

“Colleges and universities that enroll student-parents should be committed to serving their needs,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director at EdTrust-West and himself the son of a student-mother who ultimately dropped out and enlisted in the military, finding it was easier to be a parent there than at a community college. “It’s almost willful neglect to be accepting their tuition dollars and financial aid dollars and not helping them succeed.”

Even where child care is available and spots are open, it’s often too expensive for students to manage. More than two-thirds of student-parents in Washington State said they couldn’t afford child care, a state survey last year found. About half of student-parents nationwide rely entirely on relatives for child care.

Hannah Allen, who goes to HCCC, gets up at 5 a.m. to get her three kids ready for the day — first the 4-year-old, then the 6-year-old, then the 8-year-old. “I go down the line,” she said. Her schedule is so tight, she has a calendar on her refrigerator and another on the wall.

She can’t drop off her children at school or daycare earlier than 8:30 or pick them up later than 5. “When my kids are in school is when I do as much as I can.” She calls her school days “first shift,” while her time at home at night is “second shift.”

“First you put your kids, then you put your jobs, then you put your school and last you put yourself,” said Allen. “You have to push yourself,” she said, starting to cry softly. “Sometimes you think, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

There is a little-noticed federal grant program to help low-income student-parents pay for child care: Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS. Last year CCAMPIS was allocated about $84 million; the Government Accountability Office found that student-parents who got CCAMPIS’s subsidies were more likely to stay in school than students generally. But there were more students on the waiting list for it than received aid. A Democratic proposal in the Senate to significantly increase funding for the program has gone nowhere.

The Association of Community College Trustees, or ACCT, is pressing member colleges to make cheap or free space available for Head Start centers on their campuses in the next five years. Fewer than 100 of the nation’s 1,303 two-year colleges — where more than 40 percent of student-parents go — have them now, the ACCT says.

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

These things are a start, but much more is needed, said Chastity Lord, president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, which provides students who are single mothers with coaching, child care and housing. “When your child is sick, what are you going to do with them? It becomes insurmountable. Imagine if we had emergency funding for backup child care.”

Jen Charles struggled with child care as she tried to earn a degree and become a social worker from the time she was 19, when she had a son who was born with disabilities. He was followed by a daughter. Charles was also working, as an administrative assistant and, later, a paralegal.

“When things were going smoothly, I would enroll for one class and say, ‘I’m going to get through this,’ ” she said. But it proved too much. And even though Charles, now 49, got an information technology certification last year through the continuing education arm of HCCC, earning a full-fledged degree “became kind of an extinguished dream.”

As important as an education was to her, she said, “your priority becomes being able to sustain your family — their well-being, their needs being met, a roof, food. All of these other things take precedence. And where in there do you fit your papers that are due, or studying for your quiz? Is that at 10 o’clock at night, when you’re exhausted?”

Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, HCCC has steadily added programs to support the parents among its 20,000 students. It has set aside “family-friendly” spaces in libraries and lounges and holds events for parents with kids, including movie nights, barbecues, trick-or-treating and a holiday tree-lighting ceremony. There’s a food pantry with meals prepared by the students in the college’s culinary program.

Student-parents get to register first for courses. College staff help with applications to public benefit programs. Lactation rooms are planned. And there are longer-range conversations about putting a child care center in a new 11-story campus building scheduled to open in 2026.

The college’s 20,000 students are largely poor and the first in their families to go to college, said Christopher Reber, HCCC’s president, and many are not native English speakers. Ninety-four percent qualify for financial aid. Having children, Reber said, “adds insurmountable challenges to that list of insurmountable challenges.”

There’s an even more immediate motivation for the two-year college to support its student-parents. It graduates only 17 percent of students, even within three years, which is among the lowest proportions in the state.

“If a student doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from, it doesn’t matter how much academic support you offer — the student is not going to succeed,” said Reber, in his office overlooking downtown Jersey City.

Related: One college finds a way to get students to degrees more quickly, simply and cheaply

With a grant it got in January from the Aspen Institute’s Ascend, HCCC is expanding its work with the housing authority in Jersey City to help student-parents there enroll in and complete job-focused certificate programs in fields such as bookkeeping and data analytics, hiring a coordinator to work with them and appointing an advisory committee made up of student-parents.

It can be hard to win the trust of student-parents, said Lori Margolin, HCCC’s associate vice president for continuing education and workforce development. “Either they’ve tried before and it didn’t work out, so they’re reluctant to go back, or it’s too much of an unknown. ‘Do they care that I have children and I’m not going to be able to take classes at these times?’ ”

Like other schools, HCCC had what Reber called “Neanderthal” rules for student-parents. They weren’t allowed to bring their kids to campus, for example.

“I remember one student, a single mother, relying on parents and friends to watch her baby. The only time she could study was late at night [in the library], but the library said no.”

That rule was dropped, with more changes planned. A new program will reward student-parents with financial stipends for doing things such as registering early and researching child care options, said Lisa Dougherty, senior vice president for student affairs and enrollment at HCCC.

A few other colleges and universities have programs designed for student-parents. Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania provides free housing for up to four years for up to 18 single mothers, who also get academic support and tutoring, priority for on-campus jobs and access to a children’s library and sports facilities.

At Wilson College in Pennsylvania, up to 12 single parents annually are awarded grants for on-campus housing and for child care, and their children can eat in the campus dining hall for free.

St. Catherine University in Minnesota subsidizes child care for eligible student-parents and has child-friendly study rooms.

And Howard Community College in Maryland, whose president was once a student-parent, provides mentorship, peer support, career counseling, financial assistance and a family study room in the library.

“That may not seem like a big deal, but those are the messages that say, ‘You belong here, too,’ ” Lord said.

These efforts have so far helped a small number of students. Forty single mothers have graduated from the Misericordia program since it was launched more than 20 years ago, for instance.

Some of the obstacles for student-parents are hard to measure, said Jessica Pelton, who finished community college after having a daughter at age 20 and ultimately graduated from the University of Michigan, where her husband also was enrolled.

“You’re typically isolated and alone,” said Pelton. “I just kind of stuck to myself.”

She would often miss out on nighttime study groups with classmates who lived on campus. “Their priorities are not to go home, make dinner and put their kid to bed. We don’t have the option to go party. We’re not here on our parents’ money. We’re paying our own way.”

Some faculty offered to let her bring her daughter to class, she said. “It really meant a lot to me, because it made me feel like a part of campus.”

Finding fellow student-parents helps, too, said Omonie Richardson, 22, who is going to college online to become a midwife while raising her 1-year-old son and working as a chiropractic assistant 35 hours a week in Fargo, North Dakota.

“I felt very isolated before I found a group of other single moms,” she said. “If we had the understanding and support in place, a lot more parents would be ready to pursue their educations and not feel like it’s unattainable.”

This story about student-parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Last week the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a child care bill that would significantly expand state investment in child care. 

Less publicized: The bill also includes provisions that could make it harder for private equity-owned child care providers to expand significantly in the state.

Specifically, the bill takes steps to ensure that any given for-profit provider operating more than 10 programs in the state consumes no more than 1 percent of the $475 millions in grants being proposed.

Investor-backed chains now manage an estimated one in 10 child care centers in the country. That figure is likely to grow, according to several child care researchers, as states — and potentially the federal government — put new funding into the area, attracting investors interested in low start-up costs and access to public money.

As a result, advocates and experts are pushing for more extensive and widespread regulations of the kind that are moving forward in Massachusetts. “We need to make sure there are real guardrails,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president overseeing child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. Along with colleagues, she plans this June to release a report outlining recommended regulations and safeguards.

In making the push, Boteach and others cite private equity’s troubling record in managing other government-backed social services, including nursing homes and autism services. “Private equity’s track record in other sectors supported by public dollars – including home care, hospice care, and housing – foreshadows challenges the child care sector could face,” Boteach wrote in an email. In child care, profit-driven companies will take “money out rather than using that public funding to pay child care providers and teachers a living wage, upgrading facilities, [and] expanding into under-served communities,” she said.

In a written statement, Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S., offered a very different take, calling it “our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education.”

“We have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment,” he added.

The proposed regulations in Massachusetts follow a couple other related state efforts. Vermont recently put ownership disclosure requirements into its package expanding funding for child care, and also capped tuition hikes by providers. New Jersey limits for-profit programs that participate in its public pre-K system to a 2.5 percent profit margin.

But Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, who has been tracking private equity expansion in child care closely, described the proposed Massachusetts measures as “the most targeted guardrails we’ve seen to date” against investor-backed companies consuming the lion’s share of new public investment. 

Haspel points out that there’s been similar momentum internationally, with British Columbia specifying that priority for public funding goes to public and nonprofit programs, and Australia requiring larger providers that manage more than 25 sites to submit more extensive financial reports.

The U.S. has historically spent very little on child care compared to other wealthy nations. Partly as a result, investor-backed, for-profit chains in the U.S. operate predominantly in middle-income and wealthier neighborhoods and communities, where they can often charge substantial tuition. That could change if more public funds flow into child care, leading to significantly increased government subsidies for lower-income children.   

Last year, President Biden’s administration pushed for greater transparency and accountability in nursing home ownership after research showed that private-equity owned facilities on average had worse outcomes, including more patient deaths. But there’s not much information that compares the quality of for-profit and nonprofit child care programs, which could hinder efforts to put restrictions and regulations on the companies.

Haspel said “the first step for the federal government is trying to get a lot more information” in a landscape where the quality can vary dramatically within all ownership types — investor backed or not. That said, he added that there’s no reason not to take such steps as ensuring a certain percentage of public funding is used to pay educators and requiring centers to disclose financial and ownership information.

“Some of the potential guardrails are common-sense,” he said.

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

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When we’re young, playing and learning are inseparable.

Simple games like peekaboo and hide-and-seek help us learn crucial lessons about time, anticipation and cause and effect. We discover words, numbers, colors and sounds through toys, puzzles, storybooks and cartoons. Everywhere we turn, there’s something fun to do and something new to learn.

Then, somewhere around early elementary school, learning and play officially become separated for life.

Suddenly, learning becomes a task that only takes place in proper classrooms with the help of textbooks, homework and tests. Meanwhile, play becomes a distraction that we’re only allowed to indulge in during our free time, often by earning it as a reward for studying. As a result, students tend to grow up feeling as if learning is a stressful chore while playing is a reward.

Related: Want resilient and well-adjusted kids? Let them play

But in recent years, educators have begun to rethink this separation. Some are even taking concrete steps to reverse it by reintroducing play into their lessons, expanding learning to include spaces outside the classroom and incorporating practical learning opportunities within playful pastimes. The root of this change can be traced back to the concept of play theory, the idea that play and learning are fundamentally intertwined and that children benefit from a healthy balance of both.

Psychologists such as Jean Piaget, a pioneer in play theory, observed that play is vital to a child’s cognitive and language development and advised that opportunities and environments for play should evolve as a child matures. Pediatricians such as Hillary Burdette and Robert Whitaker believe that unstructured active outdoor play is more beneficial for children’s physical, social and emotional health than indoor play. And Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed that imaginative play is fundamental to children’s ability to become responsible and self-regulate.

And now, innovative city planners are beginning to adopt play theory, and the results are helping transform America’s cities into fun, engaging, life-size learning opportunities for the whole family.

For example, when a West Philadelphia bus stop added new features such as a hopscotch grid, a puzzle with movable pieces and artwork with hidden images, families began to interact with the space — and each other — much more often, and the community worked together to keep the area clean and approachable. Similar interactive learning experiences are popping up in urban areas from California to the East Coast, with equally promising results: art, games and music are being incorporated into green spaces, public parks, transportation stations, laundromats and more.

Related: In elementary classrooms, demand grows for play-based learning

Pittsburgh is about to celebrate the inherent potential of play theory as a design feature with its new Let’s Play, PGH! initiative, which has invited 27 municipal and educational organizations in southwest Pennsylvania to plan, pitch and implement play-focused urban elements. In partnership with Playful Pittsburgh Collaborative, the nonprofit Remake Learning, where I serve as executive director, is granting $1.5 million to participating organizations to brainstorm, develop and install their interactive features around the greater Pittsburgh area. The work, which is supported by the Grable and Henry L. Hillman foundations, will be guided by 10 local advisers with years of experience in play theory, learning science and urban design.

Adding time and space for play throughout the rhythm of the day sends a powerful reminder that it’s okay to play and that learning happens everywhere. Play is natural, which is something children inherently know — and a lesson that parents, educators and city planners would benefit greatly from remembering.

Tyler Samstag is the executive director of Remake Learning.

This op-ed about play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — On a bright fall morning last year, a shimmering, human-sized Hershey’s Kiss with bright blue eyes greeted delighted children and their parents outside of the first early childhood education center launched by the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning.

Inside the new nearly 51,000-square-foot facility, built to accommodate 150 students, children funneled into their bright, well-stocked classrooms. They were welcomed by teachers who had spent 12 months in paid professional development, unusual in a field where teacher training varies greatly. The young students, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 5 years, went about their day in well-stocked, spacious classrooms, playing and learning in small groups. The ample staff provided low student-to-teacher ratios and allowed for large amounts of individual attention.

The day featured visits to the center’s “STEM Garden,” where children could learn about gardening, nature and animals from several interactive displays that offer child-appropriate introduction to science, technology, engineering and math. The kids had abundant time to run, climb and pedal bikes in one of several outdoor play spaces. And they gathered with their classmates to enjoy several family-style meals and snacks, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, Southwest turkey chili and tuna casserole.

On paper, this child care program seems like it would cost parents tens of thousands of dollars a year, rivaling college tuition, as many early learning programs do. But here in picturesque Hershey, Derry Township’s best known community, it’s all free: the first brick and mortar of a new initiative cooked up by stewards of the Hershey billions.

The early learning center, located in a town that engenders Willy Wonka vibes with street names like “Chocolate Avenue,” street lights shaped like Hershey’s Kisses and a faint scent of sweetness that wafts through the air, is one of the most recent examples of billionaires launching child care programs.

Similar efforts to provide free early care and learning are sprinkled throughout the country, including “Montessori-inspired” preschools in six states funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, as well as several programs sponsored by hotel magnate Harris Rosen in Orlando, Florida. In Pennsylvania, the Hershey early learning program is one of what will ultimately be six free early childhood education centers around Pennsylvania, at a cost of $350 million, funded by the Milton Hershey School Trust. (Catherine Hershey Schools are a subsidiary of the Hershey-based residential Milton Hershey School.)

Related: Will the real Montessori please stand up?

In a country with exorbitantly priced child care and a lack of available, high-quality options, initiatives like these provide a new opportunity to see the effect that free or heavily subsidized high-quality child care — something that is already the norm in many other wealthy, developed nations — could have in America. The fact that robust federal child care funding legislation has repeatedly been killed by legislators means that foundation funding may be among the few — and the fastest — ways to launch and test certain programs or approaches to the early years.

The hope is that ultimately, private investment will help a community “invest in something and push it forward and … help it move to the point where it gets public attention,” as well as public funds, said Rena Large, program manager at the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative (ECFC), an organization that helps philanthropists invest in the early years.

In the past few years, private foundations have taken on an outsized role in early learning programs and systems, funding initiatives that raise staff compensation, support existing or new programs and provide emergency funds. Nationwide, the amount of grants aimed at early childhood has increased significantly, from $720.8 million between 2013 and 2015, to $1 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to data compiled by the collaborative from the nonprofit Candid’s philanthropy database. (Data is self-reported and categorized by funders.)

Within the early childhood collaborative, membership numbers have tripled since 2016. “The pandemic brought more people to the table,” said Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the funders collaborative. “There’s been a real blossoming of innovation.” Many of those funders are hopeful that their efforts will lead to federal investment, as well as “policy and systems change,” she added.

At the same time, philanthropic involvement in education overall, including in early learning, raises questions around best practices. Are philanthropists adequately considering the needs of communities? How can and should a philanthropy involve community and existing efforts in the field? Are philanthropies listening to research and experts as they go forth and create? Should philanthropies reinvent the wheel or invest in what already exists?

Some in the early childhood community have criticized Bezos’ efforts, for example, arguing the billionaire should have supported existing, research-backed early learning programs and systems rather than creating “Montessori-inspired” schools based on what he thought children needed. And there could be unintended downstream effects of philanthropic programming or influence. For example, Hershey’s salary and benefits package is comparable to that offered by local school district, which may draw child care employees away from local programs that pay less.

Related: Who should pay for preschool for the middle class?

Hershey’s latest endeavor came from a clear community need identified by officials at the early childhood center. In Hershey — a community about 95 miles west of Philadelphia — and surrounding areas, child care is scarce and poverty is high. Over the past decade, teachers at the nearby Milton Hershey School, a private K-12 boarding school, noticed their youngest students were coming in markedly behind previous cohorts.

“The needs of the children enrolling at 4 and 5 and 6 were more pronounced than they ever were before,” said Pete Gurt, president of the Milton Hershey School and Catherine Hershey Schools. They needed more support with social and emotional, academic, language and even life skills, like potty training.

“When you look at the landscape [of child care] in Pennsylvania, it’s no different than anywhere else. You’ve got high demand, short supply, and of the supply, not as many organizations would be identified as high quality,” he added.

When I visited the Hershey school in October, friends and colleagues delighted in the idea of chocolate billionaires funding child care:

“Do they give them chocolate all day long?” (No, they do not.)

“I hope they give them dental screenings, ha.” (They do, for free.)

“Is it secretly a training pipeline for future Hershey employees?” (Not that I could tell, although officials from Hershey’s hospitality division were in the school’s lobby one morning to provide career information for parents.)

In addition to the trained educators, low ratios and research-based curricula, the Catherine Hershey Schools offer free transportation to its building, free diapers and wipes in classrooms, occupational and speech therapy, an in-house nurse, community partnerships, a parent resource center with individual parent coaches, external evaluators and an in-house researcher from the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the school’s outcomes to see if all of this is working.

I was mostly curious to see if free child care is as life-changing as many early childhood experts think it could be in America, especially for low-income families — Hershey sets income limits for families at 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or $77,460 for a family of three.

Nearly two weeks after the first center launched, I met with Tracey Orellana, the mother of two toddlers at the school. Orellana was delivering packages for Amazon one day when she saw the early learning center, then under construction. She had been considering putting her two youngest children in child care so her husband, who works nights, could rest during the day while she was out working. The potential to get free child care made the decision a no-brainer.

“We were juggling. We were juggling so much,” said Orellana, who also has two school-age daughters. At the time, the family had incurred a mountain of debt and was struggling to afford basic needs like groceries. Now that the toddlers are in child care at no cost to their family, Orellana has been able to increase her work hours to full time, adding to her income and stability. The family is now able to afford food and has almost caught up with bills.

The school “provides the opportunity to build a life for our kids and keep them out of whatever the situation may be, streets, poverty, keep them clothed, keep them fed, keep the electric on, the heat on,” she said. Her daughters also have opportunities they wouldn’t have at home, Orellana added, such as getting to ride bikes, play games and make new friends.

“It gives them a childhood,” Orellana said.

Related: Five elements of a good preschool  

Other parents say they’ve been able to access a higher quality of care for their children now that money isn’t a factor. Allyson Anderson, the single mother of a preschooler, had to return to her job as a therapist at a rehabilitation center a year after giving birth to her daughter, Lilah. When Anderson went back to work, she chose child care using a method familiar to many American parents: “Honestly, just an open space.”

The programs her daughter ended up in were mediocre, Anderson said. While caregivers generally kept Lilah safe, classrooms lacked structure and Anderson was disappointed with the low level of attention Lilah received during the day.

But she had few other options. During Lilah’s first few years, money was tight and Anderson was struggling to cover her mortgage, bills and child care, which cost “the same as a mortgage payment” each month.

At Hershey, Anderson is most impressed by the experience and training of teachers, as well as by the fact that there are three teachers in a classroom capped at 17 children, far lower than the state mandated ratio. “They have more teachers in the classroom. They can pay more individual attention to each kid,” Anderson said. She is no longer concerned about the level of care Lilah receives.  “I don’t really have to worry. I know she’s in good hands.”

Downstairs in a classroom for preschoolers, I watched 3-year-old Lilah, who was hard to miss in a bright red jumpsuit featuring one of her favorite characters (at that moment), the Grinch.

“Did you hear what happened to me this morning?” one of the teachers asked the children who sat, riveted, in front of her for morning circle time. “I woke up and I came downstairs and guess what?”

“What?” a child asked.

“My dog had chewed one of my shoes!”

Several children gasped.

“I was so upset because they’re my favorite shoes. So, I started crying. Then I was so mad at my dog, and I started yelling. Do you think I made a very good choice?”

“No,” the children said in low, disappointed voices.

“What do you think I should have done?”

“Take a deep breath,” one child suggested. The teacher nodded.

Related: How to bring more nature into preschool

While philanthropically-funded programs can benefit those lucky enough to access them, without receiving public funds or partnering with others to expand, experts caution that the reach of these programs will be limited and exist only in areas with willing funders.

Some philanthropically funded early childhood programs, like Educare, have developed a model of launching centers using philanthropic dollars, then pulling in public funding later, a more sustainable model for allowing replication, said Rudisill from the early childhood funders collaborative. Funding sources need to “fit together to solve the problem,” she said. “You could scoop up all the private philanthropy in America … and you cannot make up for the fact that in our country, we don’t fund an early care and education system.”

Senate Alexander, executive director of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, said he hopes the centers will ultimately become a model that can be replicated — once the program has the data to show it’s working to improve kindergarten readiness skills and outcomes for families.

“We thought about not wanting to fan out too far and too fast, we’re just starting this,” he said. “We want to get it right … we want to perfect the model.” In the meantime, the program’s first school has invited other local child care programs to attend training with Hershey staff in an effort to share resources and possibly expand their reach.

While Hershey’s funding is limited in scope to programs within the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander said replicating the model in its entirety in other parts of the country is not out of the question. That could bring free childcare and extensive resources to more children. All it will take are a few more willing billionaires.

This story was produced with support by the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School.

This story about Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Free child care exists in America — if you cross paths with the right philanthropist appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The impact of Black people in early care and education cannot be overstated. Black women, in particular, have played a crucial role in American society, caring for multiple generations of children.

Recent reports indicate that 95 percent of child care workers are female. And although Black people make up only 13 percent of the total U.S. workforce, 18 percent of U.S. child care workers are Black.

Early education and child care represent the most racially diverse and lowest-paid sector of the teaching workforce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that child care workers make an average of $14.22 an hour. That’s just $29,570 a year. And Black child care educators earn an average of 78 cents less per hour than their white counterparts.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, elected officials praised child care educators for their efforts to keep working and keep the economy going: Without them, parents could not have returned to work. Federal child care stabilization grants also played a pivotal role, keeping these programs open during the pandemic by providing subsidies to child care centers and to families.

Yet, the same officials who funded those grants don’t seem willing to extend that support. Now that the $52 billion pandemic-era funding has expired, many educators and families wonder about the future.

An estimated 70,000 child care programs could close in the U.S. because of the lost federal money, impacting nearly 3.2 million children.

Related: Evictions, high rents and strict rules plague in-home child care

America’s lack of ongoing investment in child care at the national and local levels will disproportionately hurt Black educators, children and families. Pre-pandemic, there was already limited availability of affordable options; new closures will deepen the challenges faced by parents in securing reliable and accessible care for their children.

Recently, 49 percent of parents who responded to a survey said they plan to spend about $18,000 on child care in 2024, while 23 percent will spend more than $36,000. Black median-income households generally spend a quarter of annual pay ($46,774) on child care for one child; very-low-income Black households can spend nearly half. White median-income households devote 15 percent of pay ($75,412) to child care.

I have heard many Black educators, parents and advocates express frustration at the way public officials have overlooked early care and education, especially home-based child care, whose owners typically operate on small margins and are particularly vulnerable to funding losses.

Millions of young children spend time in home-based child care, also known as family child care (FCC). Yet, there were 10,000 fewer family child care programs in the United States in 2022 than in 2019. This is in addition to the drop of more than 90,000 (42 percent) licensed family child care homes between 2005 and 2017.

Black educators I speak with advocate for all families to have access to early learning programs that meet their child and family needs. They believe that this can be achieved if more states increase funding for child care and commit to making systems more inclusive of FCC programs in order to give FCC educators access to the opportunities, support and resources they need to thrive.

For example, Maryland now includes FCC programs in state-funded pre-K programs, and last year California became the first state to launch a retirement fund for child care workers, inclusive of home-based child care programs.

We must advocate for similar policies at the national and local levels to increase investment in child care, including funding for higher wages, subsidies for low-income families and support for programs.

Related: OPINION: Home-based child care providers deserve better pay, working conditions and respect

I think about FCC educator Tiffany Taylor, CEO of The Baby Play Place Inc. in New York. As a Black female family child care educator, she is seldom taken seriously or recognized as a leader and professional in her field.

From being called a “babysitter” to being on the receiving end of racist, sexist and derogatory remarks, she and other Black child care educators must routinely navigate and overcome obstacles to providing high-quality child care to families in their communities. They must also deal with low pay, inflation, lack of benefits and high employee turnover. These challenges are forcing many Black family child care educators to close their doors, adding to the already depleted options for family child care across the country.

Still, Tiffany is aware of the impact she and other educators have on our country’s youngest learners. She refuses to give up. She is determined to advocate for additional investment by showing how better wages, funding and resources for child care can positively impact our communities.

Black early educators have made tremendous sacrifices to help hold up this country’s economic recovery. Yet they still face daily discrimination and inequities.

It’s time to give them the respect — and the funding — that they deserve.

Erica Phillips isexecutive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, the largest national organization focused on supporting family child care (FCC) educators, who offer high-quality early care and education in their homes.

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

The post OPINION: After years of silent sacrifices and unseen struggles, Black women are still holding up the child care industry appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Doubts swirled from the start.

After Cynthia King’s baby Wiley Muir died suddenly at a home-based day care in Honolulu, she fixated on the things that seemed off. The medical examiner said he died of pneumonia, but Wiley hadn’t been sick that morning. King wondered how sickness could take him so suddenly — how they could have missed that.

But most of all, there was the notebook, which King began keeping just four days earlier, when Wiley started at the day care. On the morning of February 6, 2014, King had jotted down what time her 4-month-old had woken up and what he’d eaten. That notebook had gone with Wiley to day care that morning and was returned to King at the police department days after his death.

The page she’d started the day he died was gone, ripped out. Instead, there was a new page rewritten in the day care owner’s handwriting.

“That freaked me out. Why on Earth, on the day he died, would the day care provider rip out the page and rewrite what I had already started writing?” King said.

A year and a half later, on what would have been Wiley’s second birthday, King and her husband ran into Therese Manu-Lee, the provider caring for Wiley when he died. She was wearing scrubs and appeared to be working with an elderly person. King wondered what happened to the day care.

Later, King looked her up online. The day care had been shut down by the state.

Right away, King called the Department of Human Services, which oversees the state’s child care office. Manu-Lee’s license was suspended while police investigated Wiley’s case but reinstated when the case was closed. It was shut down again a year later in 2015 when a surprise inspection of Manu-Lee’s home found her with 14 children in her care, eight of them infants — four times the legal number of infants for a home-based provider.

The doubts rushed back.

Related: A daycare center accused in baby death can keep operating

“That sort of overwhelming feeling of, ‘Oh my God, I knew she was lying to us about something, but I didn’t know what’” took over, King said.

That revelation set in motion years of battles: first with the police department to reopen Wiley’s case, and then with the state’s child care agency and the Hawaii legislature to push for new legislation that could make child care safer.

Beginning in 2016, King, an entomologist, sat on a Hawaii child care working group in the legislature and advocated for about a dozen regulation bills. But she could get only one new law through — an update requiring day cares to take on liability insurance. The Wiley Kaikou Muir Act passed in 2017.

Among King’s larger priorities was passing a law requiring Hawaii to post child care inspection violations online and track serious incidents, creating a window into the state’s child care safety efforts. But King was told at the time by state officials that Hawaii didn’t need that law — a child care safety movement at the federal level was about to do just that. 

In 2014, the same year Wiley died, the country’s central funding mechanism for child care, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), was reauthorized by Congress with new requirements. CCDBG sends money to states to subsidize care for low-income children, and because every state takes CCDBG money, they all have to comply with its rules.

Until 2014, the block grant had paltry health and safety requirements. States didn’t have to run background checks on child care providers or collect data on deaths or serious incidents.

So no one knew, really, how many kids were getting hurt at child care across the country — how many were dying.

Although child care was and still is very safe, cases of children dying in day cares from preventable causes started to gain national attention in the early 2000s. That helped advocates launch what would become a nearly decade-long campaign in Congress to weave better health and safety guidelines into CCDBG.

New requirements passed into law with broad bipartisan support in 2014. Among them: For the first time, states would be required to start collecting and posting data around the numbers of deaths, serious injuries and substantiated abuse cases at day cares. Databases also needed to go online, allowing parents to search providers and see inspection reports and violations in their state. A series of federal, state and interstate background checks were also made mandatory. States had until October 2018 to come into compliance.

Ten years after those rules around health and safety were put in place, over a dozen states are failing to fulfill all the reporting requirements, an in-depth analysis from The 19th found.

After an inquiry from The 19th, the Office of Child Care, the federal regulatory agency that oversees states’ child care systems, confirmed that eight states are out of compliance. The 19th found an additional nine states that are missing data or have outdated information online. Six states updated their reports when The 19th pointed out errors or missing data.

Related: How the military created the best child care system in the world

In the process of reporting this story, The 19th reached out to more than 40 advocates, experts and organizations in the child care and child welfare space. Few knew anything about where the states stood on the reporting requirements in CCDBG. Some didn’t know about the requirements at all.

Linda Smith, a child care expert who was instrumental in getting the regulations passed, said states have been given too much latitude to comply. Neither the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Government Accountability Office have audited the states to ensure they were following the reporting provisions, both offices confirmed.

“For the most part, they are sort of operating outside of the traditional system and accountability,” said Smith, now the director of the early childhood development initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Systems like background checks and data tracking are key safety mechanisms in any industry. Food service inspection violations are posted online and in restaurants. Accidents with airlines are also posted online, even though, like in child care, they are also fairly rare.

Overall, the number of deaths at day cares is very low, often in the single digits annually in each state, and some states haven’t had any at all for the past several years. Among the 30 states and Washington, D.C., that published 2023 data, California had the highest number of deaths last year: 10; one child died at a child care center and nine died at in-home day cares. The two states with the next highest numbers last year were Texas at six deaths and Montana with five.

Data on injuries and abuse is murkier. States can decide how they define these cases — some count any instance that requires medical attention, others count only injuries that cause permanent damage — leading to widely different numbers. Georgia, for example, had zero serious injuries in 2022; Ohio, which also counts serious “incidents,” had nearly 19,000. 

There is also no federal reporting requirement, meaning the data lives at the state level, in reports that are difficult to find and, in some cases, difficult to understand.

Celia Sims, a former senior staffer for Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who spearheaded the changes to CCDBG, said they took on the issue more than 10 years ago because tallying cases is one of the only ways to ensure safety for really young kids.

“You can’t count on your 6-month-old to tell you that something is wrong when you pick them up in the evening,” Sims said. “That’s why it’s even more important that things, when they are substantiated, get reported.”

The intent behind the requirements was also to create transparency for parents. But Sims said she’s been surprised to discover just how hard it is to even find the information. Most reports are buried in state websites, under titles like “aggregate report” or “federal reporting,” and hyperlinked in the middle of a paragraph. It’s not the easily accessible, plain language vision that was laid out in CCDBG.

“I was a little taken aback,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency. “Wow, I couldn’t find any of them.”

Related: How to make improvements to Mississippi child care

The reporting requirements aren’t the only issue. More than half of states are also out of compliance with the law’s new background check requirements, which called for five checks and three interstate checks that have to be completed within 45 days for all child care staff. For home-based day cares, that also includes adults living in the house who may come in contact with children. According to a 2022 report to Congress from an interagency task force convened to study the issue, 11 states are not conducting any interstate checks and 19 states are allowing child care staff to be hired before background checks were completed. Those numbers remain current, the Office of Child Care confirmed.

The 19th also analyzed if states had fulfilled a third requirement of creating online databases of all the state’s child care providers with inspection and violation data.

Only one state was out of compliance on all three categories: Hawaii.

Hawaii hasn’t posted any data at all from the past seven years on serious injuries and abuse at day cares. The last year it reported was 2016, making it the only state with a reporting gap that wide. The online database of violations King advocated for a decade ago — the one she was told was coming soon in 2016 — is still not up. Hawaii is also one of the states not running interstate background checks on child care providers.

The reasons why are various, but underpinning Hawaii and the other states’ compliance issues is a difficult reality. The child care system in the United States has been described by the Treasury Department as a “textbook example of a broken market.” It is losing day cares to financial constraints and a lack of federal investment. To ensure safety, day cares have to stick to strict ratios of children to teachers. That means staffing costs make up a huge portion of the budget, but that also means the staff is paid close to minimum wage, leading to high turnover. Raising wages would mean raising fees for parents, many of whom are paying more than their rent or mortgage on child care.

But when CCDBG was reauthorized, Congress did not substantially increase the program’s budget to help states implement the new safety requirements. Some of what ultimately happened was that states didn’t make safety improvements right away, Smith said. And now a decade later, some still haven’t.

None of the states have been penalized for it, the federal Office of Child Care confirmed. In Hawaii, where an extraordinarily high cost of living meets an extraordinarily low child care supply, parents don’t always report all the red flags they see at a center for fear it’ll close down and they’ll have nowhere to take their kids, King said.

That is a challenge that needs a solution, but it shouldn’t mean accountability is lost, King said. And it shouldn’t now be up to the parents whose children have already been lost to push for a better system.

“It’s so inappropriate that the onus is on the families of victims, when this should be coming from the state or federal level,” King said. “There’s something that’s really very difficult about being a group of people where everybody is not whole. That’s why nothing is happening. Because everyone is hurting tremendously.”

***

Until the early 2000s, very little was known at a national level about incidents at child care centers. A 2005 report by researchers at the City University of New York Graduate Center put together the first — and so far only — comprehensive national study of deaths in child care, cobbling together reports published in media outlets, legal cases and some state records.

They found 1,362 fatalities in child care from 1985 through 2003, 75 percent of them in home-based care, both licensed and unlicensed.

“Key to any effort aimed at reducing risks is gathering consistent, reliable data on fatalities, serious injuries, and near misses in child care,” they wrote.

Child Care Aware, a national child care advocacy group, then took the issue on, releasing an analysis of state rules and regulations around safety every year from 2007 to 2013. Their work paved the way for Congress to act in the 2014 reauthorization — the new rules all came from the organization’s recommendations.

Related: Where are the missing child care directors?

Smith was the executive director of Child Care Aware at the time, and she and Grace Reef, the chief of public policy, led that effort.

“You think that licensing means something, but what we were exposing at the time was: not really,” Reef said. “There were states that did an inspection once every 10 years — are you kidding me?”

The CCDBG requirement ultimately shaped up like this: States must produce data every year on the number of deaths, serious injuries and cases of substantiated abuse at child care. The numbers for death and serious injury were to be broken down by the type of program incidents took place in — center-based or home-based, for example— and the data had to be published online and easily accessible.

Here’s where we stand, 10 years later.

As of 2024, California is the only state that still doesn’t post serious injury or abuse data online at all.

Alaska and Wisconsin don’t provide breakdowns by the type of child care facility serious injuries took place in. Vermont didn’t either for serious injuries and deaths until The 19th asked about it and, realizing an error that occurred with a change of staff, the state updated its website the next day.

Wisconsin, which failed to include data on four deaths in its 2021 report, updated it after The 19th’s questions. Wyoming, which wasn’t posting data on substantiated abuse cases, added the figures when The 19th inquired. Alaska provided additional data to The 19th via email, though it hasn’t yet made it public.

The 19th also found one state with outdated statistics: South Dakota’s most recent data is from 2021. New Hampshire hadn’t published data since 2020, but after The 19th inquired, the state posted 2023 data in January.

Delaware, Kansas and New Jersey have all been flagged by the Office of Child Care for not posting complete data on license-exempt providers. The 19th’s own analysis found that Arkansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma are not reporting data on those providers. Delaware, Kansas, Missouri and Oregon have also failed to include totals for the number of kids in child care, another required part of the regulation. Illinois was also missing that data point but added it after The 19th asked about it.

The federal office marked Mississippi and New York as out of compliance as of the end of 2023, but both states updated most of their data online, though Mississippi still appears to be missing annual data. The federal office also flagged West Virginia for posting incomplete data on in-home providers, but the state said it hadn’t received such a notice and that it would be updating its data this month.

Even in states that are reporting data, some of it is confusing and contradictory. In Nevada, the child care division is in the process of changing departments, and that has led to two different reports online: In one published by the welfare division, the abuse cases in 2020 numbered above 3,000. In the 2020 report from the licensing department, the number of abuse case referrals is 48.

When The 19th asked about the discrepancy in Nevada’s data, Karissa Loper Machado, the state’s agency manager for child care, said she wasn’t sure how the first report was calculated. After the state looked into it, it said the data it had been publishing as its child care numbers also included cases in private homes and foster care, leading to the higher figures. The state expects to have its data updated in the next six months to a year.

Nevada also doesn’t report how many of its abuse cases turn out to be substantiated. The licensing department doesn’t keep track of it, so the state doesn’t report it.

“We are working to come into compliance,” Loper Machado said. 

Related: What is it like to run a child care provider in one of America’s poorest states?

In the 10 years since the CCDBG reporting requirements were created, states have been given a lot of autonomy in deciding what gets counted as serious injury and abuse and what doesn’t. In 2018, the Office of Child Care told state child care agencies to consider changing their definitions so that only programs with the most egregious cases were penalized. Some states changed their definitions, and others did not.

In Georgia, cases are put on a scale — low, medium, high or extreme harm or risk — and only extreme cases now get reported, said April Rogers, the child care services director of policy and enforcement at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.

Georgia lists two serious injuries in 2023, and both of those programs lost CCDBG and state funding as a result of that determination, said Ira Sudman, the department’s general counsel, and programs with “high”-level injuries can still potentially incur penalties.

By contrast, in Ohio, the state counts all serious injuries and incidents, covering everything from deaths (which get double counted) to COVID-19 cases. There were 18,788 serious injuries or incidents in Ohio in 2022, the most recent year for which there is data. Even without including COVID cases, the number is still 4,762 — at least 10 times what many other states are reporting. In early 2017, the state put in an automated reporting system that allowed day care owners to report serious incidents quickly online.

Reef said that over the years, state legislatures have battled over what they should count in the numbers. But for the data to be tracked well, there need to be requirements of day care owners, too, state child care agencies said.

All of the data on deaths, serious injuries and abuse is self-reported by the day care providers themselves typically through forms they submit to the states. The states do inspections of the providers to make sure they are following safety requirements, but several states, including Georgia and Missouri, told The 19th they don’t know how accurate those reports are because they’re relying on the day cares to submit them.

What’s missing is “political will around forcing private business to give us data they clearly do not want to give us,” said Pam Stevens, Georgia’s deputy commissioner for child care. “We would love to know everything because it would help everybody.”

In Missouri, Nancy Scherer, the administrator of the state’s Office of Childhood, said getting day cares to report is the highest hurdle they face.

“I think they’re afraid: ‘If I report that, I’m going to have a violation, they’re going to shut me down,’” Scherer said.

And those are the providers the state knows about.

In 2021, eight children died in Missouri day cares. Seven of those deaths took place in unlicensed child care, which the office isn’t tracking because it doesn’t license them. Deaths are tallied instead through tips that come in.

“We don’t know about it, until we know about it,” Scherer said.

***

After King learned that her son’s provider had been shut down by the state of Hawaii, she asked to see his full police case file. For the first time, she also brought herself to read his autopsy in its entirety.

Those files contained numerous inconsistencies — vindication that King had been right to have her doubts.

Manu-Lee told police Wiley was in her arms when he died, but she told the ambulance crew that she’d put him down for a nap and later found him unresponsive. And in the autopsy, Wiley’s cause of death was not pneumonia, but bronchiolitis, which affects a different part of the lungs than pneumonia.

The autopsy findings helped King push the police to reopen the case, but ultimately prosecutors told her there wasn’t really an avenue to pursue. Detectives didn’t have any evidence of abuse or trauma.

The 19th reached out to Manu-Lee via phone and email, but she did not respond to requests for comment. In 2016, she told Civil Beat that, “the child was ill. It was not my fault.”

King was, however, able to have other pediatric forensic pathologists examine Wiley’s autopsy, who determined he could not have died from bronchiolitis or pneumonia. In Honolulu, the medical examiner admitted to King, she said, that he’d put that cause of death to give her a sense of closure.

The cause of death was ultimately changed to “undetermined.”

“It was hard emotionally to have to justify to people again and again why having an incorrect cause of death provided to us was so damaging and counterproductive toward finding out what really happened,” King said. “When the cause of death was changed, in some ways it was sort of a relief.”

Related: For Mississippi parents, child care costs lead to tough choices

King refocused on legislation, but while she waited for Hawaii to implement the requirements of the federal law, she became disheartened. By 2017, the new requirements were still not in place, and King, still pushing for new laws, pleaded with the state.

“I am asking you to change this shockingly broken system and instill real accountability,” she testified at a hearing for what would go on to be another failed child care accountability bill.

In 2019, past the deadline for states to come into compliance with federal regulations, Hawaii still hadn’t implemented the changes. King still hadn’t had more luck with legislation. And she was pregnant. By the time COVID-19 shut the world down, King realized there was no hope in pushing for changes in an industry that was being decimated by the pandemic. Nothing would pass. So she moved on.

She hadn’t looked back into whether the state had kept its promise of publishing data and creating its day care database until The 19th called her near the end of 2023.

Hawaii is now the state most behind in implementing the federal child care safety requirements.

The state told The 19th it is struggling to do so with a licensing department made up of only three people. The entire Human Services Department has a vacancy rate of about 25 percent.

Dayna Luka, the child care regulation program administrator in the Hawaii Department of Human Services, told The 19th that the state isn’t posting recent data because it has not finalized its definitions of serious injury and abuse. Without a definition, Hawaii can’t track the data, and it’s not posting it online. It’s the only state that doesn’t have its definitions finalized, The 19th’s analysis of the states’ child care plans found.

The process of creating definitions is long and requires public hearings and comments, Luka said. The last time Hawaii had a public hearing for child care regulations was in 2021, she said.

“We may not be reporting that data because we don’t have the definition, but we are definitely investigating any kind of allegation of injury, any kind of violation of our licensing rules,” Luka said. 

The state said it is asking the federal office for technical assistance to begin reporting serious injuries and abuse, but it didn’t provide a timeline for when it will begin doing so. It hopes to have its day care provider dashboard, as well as inspection reports, online by the summer. For now, it contracts with the state’s child care resource and referral agency for its child care provider database, but that dashboard doesn’t include inspection reports.

On a national level, it is impossible to know how many cases are not getting reported or investigated in child care because there is so much that falls into a gray area, said Christopher Greeley, a professor of pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine who has spent more than two decades studying pediatric abuse and neglect. And those investigations are further complicated because of their charged, emotional nature, leading to inaccurate recollections, as well as witnesses who may not be verbal.

“The narrower question of, ‘Is this injury abuse versus not?’ becomes quite fraught with difficulty because we all may agree the child has a broken bone, but now I’m adding a value judgment of whether that was done intentionally or not and some of that information may not be available,” Greeley said. That’s in part because some states don’t even have the capacity to thoroughly investigate those cases.

Advocates have been calling for more funding for the child care system, which could help states finally meet all of the safety requirements in CCDBG. A national effort to inject $400 billion over 10 years into child care failed in 2022, and other proposals haven’t found traction. It’s a hard truth in child care: A system that has been under-resourced for its entire existence can’t solve the big problems if it’s fighting to exist in the first place.

“One of the reasons that we talk about the need for a comprehensive system is that we understand then that the data would also be easier to track,” said Nina Perez, the early childhood national campaign director at MomsRising, a national network of moms pushing for child care and other family policies. “Any parent would tell you that they absolutely want reporting and transparency, particularly in instances of neglect and harm. This is a situation where the government needs to step up and resource that, including state governments.”

Anne Hedgepeth, the current chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware, said states and child care providers “understand the seriousness or importance of the work they’re doing.” But “ultimately, licensing is complex and not every state system is sufficiently funded to do this work. Until we fix that problem, reporting won’t be as robust or transparent as it needs to be.”

When the country considers what another reauthorization of CCDBG might look like in the coming years, more support for compliance on health and safety could be areas marked for improvement, said Smith, who crafted the 2014 reauthorization. She wants to see the Government Accountability Office audit the states. And it could be a time to revisit whether the data needs to be reported at the federal level.

Through her own work, King understands the complexities of data collection. She worked at a state agency and knows what it means to be under-resourced, for things to take time. But she also carries the burden of being a parent who has lived through the death of a child that happened — at least in part, she feels — because the accountability wasn’t there.

A decade after her son’s death, she is still often struck by how many of the systems that are in place for other industries aren’t yet standard in child care. King, who this week marked the 10-year anniversary of her son’s death, said she was shocked to learn Hawaii was still so behind.

“I have been chronically disappointed in the level of response,” King said. “I understand that everybody is overtasked and under-resourced but I do think it’s such an important issue. It’s been devastating to not see progress made.”

Since Wiley died, King has had two more children, a boy and a girl — children she’s had to leave at the door of a provider after her trust was shattered.

“My husband and I are both lucky that we came out on the other side of Wiley’s passing away,” King said, but when it came time to decide where to put their children, they put their trust somewhere else.

They found a day care provider who they felt was taking all the safety precautions necessary, who was keeping the number of children they cared for low and who let the families into their space. A person who did everything possible to ensure they weren’t reported.

Ultimately, King turned away from the system that was built to ensure safety. The system that failed her.

Instead, she put her children in unlicensed care.

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

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The pandemic underscored the stark differences in pay, working conditions, and respect between K-12 educators and child care teachers in many communities. The disparity is rooted in race, class and gender: Child care teachers are more likely to be female, less likely to be white, and more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds than public school teachers.

In spite of historically poor treatment and low pay, child care workers have been exceptionally hard to unionize, due to high turnover rates, the geographic spread and isolation of the workforce, labor laws, and other factors.

Yet there have been union victories in recent years. In California, Child Care Providers United, which represents more than 40,000 home-based providers, won the right to collective bargaining in 2019, and last year secured a second substantial reimbursement increase from the state for many home child care providers. In New Mexico, where it’s harder for employees to unionize, organizers have taken a different tack: Through the leadership of an organization called OLÉ, parents and child care teachers joined forces to organize a public awareness campaign which contributed to voters approving a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to free child care for most of the state’s families.

I spoke earlier this month with Alexa Frankenberg, executive director of California’s Child Care Providers United, and Brenda Parra, senior digital strategist for OLÉ about how to effectively organize child care workers and the importance of diverse strategies for doing so. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me about your personal background and how you became involved in the field?

PARRA: It’s been maybe six or seven years. I used to be a child care worker. I was in a classroom with 3-year-olds and I had to leave my position, unfortunately. I really loved doing the work, but the pay was very low and it was not supporting my family anymore. Somebody told me about OLÉ, which was doing child care organizing at the time. So I started joining these meetings. And I stuck around for a while until I decided to become an organizer. 

What have you learned about what makes organizing effective in the child care space?

FRANKENBERG: One of the things that makes it uniquely challenging is just how dispersed the family child care providers are. They obviously work in their own homes so there are tens of thousands of work sites around the state for the members that are represented by CCPU (Child Care Providers United). That means you need to figure out how to have conversations with people spread over [many] work sites about how organizing together to build power through a union can make a difference in their lives.

Another challenge relates to the low pay. Many child care providers and staff have to hold multiple jobs to be able to make ends meet and support their families. So it’s a challenge for them to find the time to have the conversations, do the organizing work, and work together to make change. That takes time.

Thinking about the success that you’ve had in California, what were some specific strategies that you used there to try to overcome some of these challenges?

PARRA: There’s work you can do in terms of systematically identifying and recruiting leaders, equipping them to do the work. You’re never going to be able to have the resources to staff a campaign to go to 50,000 work sites to talk to folks. That requires you to think early on about individuals leading and owning this work, including talking to their coworkers. 

When OLÉ first started its work, what was its strategy?

PARRA: From what I am aware, OLÉ started door knocking and organizers used to go to centers and, once there, they would talk to the director and ask if they could talk to their teachers and their parents.

How did strategies evolve over time?

PARRA: The digital work ramped up during COVID. 

It was super hard to be able to find child care because of the circumstances of COVID and everyone getting sick. There were a lot of centers closing down. We were running ads on social media. We were able to get further out there and get people more informed. When we started doing online organizing, we would get maybe a week’s worth of work visiting centers done in one day. 

Thinking of New Mexico, and OLÉ’s success at making inroads for child care teachers outside unionization, how important is it to think about other strategies apart from traditional organizing?

FRANKENBERG: I don’t think it has to be either-or. We have worked side by side with allies, such as parent advocates and others, here in California. And that has been part of what has allowed us to be successful, both at the state level as well as local level. We worked super closely with parent voices in Alameda County to win passage of a local measure to fund additional child care slots, higher pay and other supports that are needed. We continue to look to New Mexico for the work they’ve done to move to alternative methods. We obviously think that there’s some really critical and important guarantees that a union contract allows providers to have, but organizing and collective power take a lot of different shapes.

How have you been able to translate online organizing in New Mexico into concrete victories for child care workers?

PARRA: My work is to put up the online ad and collect the phone number and name of the person who responds. After that, I will put it into either a phone bank or a text bank so one of the organizers from the early education campaign can send them a text or get more information from them.

Do you feel the pandemic made it easier or harder to organize in the child care space?

FRANKENBERG: That’s a hard question to answer because there’s nothing about the pandemic that was easy. What these individuals went through — financially, physically, mentally, emotionally — all these things are still being felt. So it would be really hard to say it made things easy. What it did was make consequences very stark. It was very clear that there was work that was needed to ensure basic health and safety of individuals. We had to fight for Covid closure days so that people could close down and not lose money because they had Covid or someone in their child care had Covid.

The pandemic shone a spotlight on the value of child care to allow people that needed to go to work to go to work in those first few months, particularly when schools closed. Child care workers were holding up our economy for a long time. And they’ve never had a break, really.

What do you feel the future holds for child care organizing? 

FRANKENBERG: We’re in the middle of moving to cost-of-care reimbursement, which is something they’ve achieved in New Mexico. That’s a big thing on the horizon for us. There are a lot of short-term gains we’ve been able to make on pay. And it’s critical that we don’t continue to just go short-term to short-term to short-term, but really move towards a system. We’re glad to have the governor’s partnership on this. And we’re working toward ensuring people are receiving more than pennies on the dollar.

We need to make sure that the child care system that we have is one that really reflects who California is in the year 2024, not a system that was set up 50 years ago and may have some of those biases. We need to root out the racism, the sexism, that’s inherent in the system. It’s baked into the pay and compensation, but it’s also baked into really unjust policies that have negative impacts on families and providers.

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

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