When Gov. Doug Ducey released his multimillion dollar budget proposal last week, he included $56 million in subsidies for day care, saying it would make such care more affordable for low-income families and expand its reach to about 29,000 children.
“We’re going to move from the back of the pack to right in the middle, and then we’re also going to let about 5,000 other children have these subsidies that don’t have them today,” said Christina Corieri, the governor’s senior policy adviser.
The state pays subsidies to day care centers to cover part of a child’s tuition, allowing qualifying families to choose a government-funded center. But the subsidies have stagnated even as day care costs have risen. The budget injection is meant to narrow the gap.
Families sometimes are forced to walk away from a day care center when the subsidy program doesn’t provide enough financial help, a day care administrator said.
“It’s hard. As soon as they walk in, we know we are going to have to have the talk,” said Kelly McCready, administrator of Kreative Kampus in central Phoenix.
Without the option of licensed day care providers, she said, some parents rely on friends, family members or acquaintances – who aren’t trained – to watch their children, or the parents are forced to reduce working hours to care for their child.
“We’re taking away the opportunity for them to choose – to choose what’s best for their family,” McCready said.
The state last adjusted funding in 2000, giving care centers an average of $350 per child. But as employee salaries and other costs of running a day care facility escalated, so did families’ share of the bill.
In 2014, Arizona families paid an average day care cost of $9,437 a year, according to an Economic Policy Institute report that says high-quality child care is financially out of reach for most families.
McCready said day care owners and managers sometimes will try to make ends meet without asking families to pay the overage, but that goodwill strains those businesses’ resources.
“Working and living in the early-childhood industry, there’s so much passion and willingness to give that extra 10 percent to make up for not quite enough,” McCready said.
Ducey’s plan for the $56 million is to put half of the money toward lowering fees families have to pay by an average of $100 and the other half toward adding 5,100 children to the program. That would bring the number of eligible children to 29,000, according to Corieri, Ducey’s adviser.
“We are not supplementing parents in any way,” McCready said. We are just supporting them, so having relationships with the families, with the children, we can then support here through the day what those families need.”
For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2019.
Governor Ducey should be commended for his support to expand day care financial help to an additional 5,000 low-income children.!
He should continue his support for Public Education by reducing the cost of attending Arizona’s Universities consistent with the Arizona Constitution…as free as possible. Better yet…FREE to all Qualified Arizona Residents; an investment in the Future of Arizona!!!
I’m sure I sound cold-hearted, but governments should do more to DISCOURAGE irresponsible people from having kids. Democrats have pandered to welfare voters (women, immigrants, minorities, inept parents, etc.) for years by telling them they’re stupid victims who need the government – that is the more intelligent, hardworking, responsible taxpayers – to take care of them. This only serves to increase the numbers of those same welfare moochers, including future generations. It doesn’t solve the problems.
MMP….Let’s Castrate you/ give you a Hysterectomy, as appropriate, as the first step!!!
Francis Saitta … If you stop taxpayers from having kids, you won’t have anybody left to support future moochers. Imagine a society where nobody pays taxes & everybody else wants something “for free”.
All you need to do is look at Venezuela. That is exactly what comes from socialism. Dictators and poverty. Go ahead and find a couple where there is partial success and they have no long term viability as their population ages. Who is next, us?
MMP/Who’s Who in America:
The Constitutional Democracy of the United State, is based upon private property rights, a market economy, and the unfettered accumulation of wealth. These are the tools that our society uses through which individual and national ambitions for freedom and happiness may be reached. Could all this be illusionary and productive of neither, and, in fact, destructive of both when pursued in contradiction to community interests and achieved on the miseries or credulity of others?
Can we look at our own enormous wealth and see, at the same time, our own decadence; the untrammeled pursuit of individual wealth and luxury that has been destructive of both community and individual interests as evidenced by a decaying system of Public Education, Public Health Care, and, in fact, the decay of the very health of our Citizens?—- all related to the centrifugal focus of our Society.
We are all susceptible to the vagaries of Time and Situation; understanding that the very Nature of Human Society involves an Inherent Relatedness, Commonality, and Mutual Dependence; Domestically and Internationally; a responsibility to provide Assistance to others with Assistance is necessary…a Representative Social Democracy!!
“the early-childhood industry” – frightening.
Government should subsidize what we know is best for children: staying home for the first several years with a loving parent.