The subsidy, a mix of federal and state funds that reimburses child care
providers on behalf of families, is critical to the lives of poor women. But it
has been eaten away over the years by inflation and growing need and recently
by state budget cuts, leaving parents struggling to find other arrangements to
stay employed.
“States have dropped their investment in child care substantially,” said
Linda Saterfield, vice chairwoman of the National Association of State Child
Care Administrators, who oversees child care for the state of Illinois. “We’re
being expected to do more with less.” Her state has toughened eligibility for
the subsidies and raised co-payments from families to cover the growing demand.
Sheontay Smith, a single mother in Baltimore, and her son are among nearly
8,000 families on a waiting list for the subsidy in Maryland. Pennsylvania’s
list doubled since last year to more than 10,000 children, and Arkansas’s
quadrupled to 11,000, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
At least two states, Arizona and Utah, are no longer appropriating state
general funds for child care at all.
According to a recent report by the law center, families in 37
states were worse off this year than last year as waiting lists grew,
co-payments rose, eligibility tightened and reimbursement rates for providers
stagnated.
“We recognize that this is a tough time for states,” said Shannon Rudisill,
who oversees the subsidy program at the Administration for Children and Families,
which is part of the Department
of Health and Human Services. “They have a hard set of choices that they
have to negotiate.”
She said that President Obama had recommended an increase in the subsidy in
the 2011 budget, but that it had not been approved by Congress. Stimulus money,
which had raised financing by a fifth in 2009 and 2010, is now gone.
Christian Griffith, chief consultant of the California Assembly Budget
Committee, said the state cut $335 million in child care financing this year,
and with hundreds of millions in cuts to other public services — courts,
schools and the public university system — “there aren’t many good options at
this point.”
The nonprofit Child
Care Resource Center, which determines eligibility for the subsidy for
thousands of families in northern Los Angeles County, said it had noted a 13
percent decline in licensed child care centers since June 2010 as budget cuts
reduced the numbers of families on the subsidy.
The reduction is prompting advocates for poor women to question whether the
implied social contract that emerged during the federal welfare overhaul in the
1990s — that women go to work in exchange for help with child care — is
fraying.
“There’s a long history of recognition that child care is essential to
helping low-income women work,” said Helen Blank, the director of public policy
at the National Women’s Law Center, who helped shape child care policy in the
1990s. “That commitment is being eroded.”
For children in families waiting for the subsidy, life becomes a
kaleidoscope of caretakers. Women interviewed for this article said they left
their children with grandparents, neighbors, cousins, siblings, and colleagues
at a nail salon. Such ad hoc arrangements hinder early-childhood development,
state administrators say, just as states are trying to make it a priority.
One mother on a waiting list in Virginia said her 11-year-old daughter rode
around in a city bus after school, watched over by the driver, who is the
girl’s grandmother, until the mother got off work. The smaller safety net comes
as the share of working Americans under or just above the poverty line — the target
group for the subsidy, which is linked to income — is the highest in years. And
while demand for the subsidy declined with the recession, it has shot back up
in many states as employment has returned, putting new strain on child care
resources.
“We’ve seen quite a steep increase in demand,” said Elizabeth Kelley,
director of Maryland’s Office of Child Care.
Ms. Smith, who works full time at the Baltimore Housing Authority, has been
on a waiting list since summer. She applied because her son’s father stopped
paying child support, and the monthly $520 she needed for her 3-year-old’s day
care was more than her $22,000 salary could support.
She took her son out, but ended up losing half her paycheck in unpaid days
off because her regular baby sitters, among them Ms. Smith’s grandmother, who
is on kidney dialysis, fell through. The only way to get the subsidy, her
caseworker told her, was to stop working and go on welfare. (In Maryland,
someone on welfare is automatically eligible.)
“Is the system set up for me to fail? Because that’s what it feels like,”
said Ms. Smith.
Her son is now back in day care, at the expense of other bills. Her phone
was cut off this week, and she is behind on her gas, electricity and car insurance.
Another hurdle has been the rates at which the centers are reimbursed. The
law center’s report found that only three states reimburse at federally
recommended levels, down from 22 in the beginning of the decade, and some
providers say they can no longer afford to take families on subsidies. Toni
Cacace-Beshears, who runs a network of child care centers in southeastern
Virginia, said families on the subsidy paid at rates so far below her other
customers — about two-thirds — that she had to do fund-raising to help make up
the difference.
“I’m subsidizing my subsidized clients,” she said. The gap created a
shortfall over the past year of about $272,000 — or about 14 percent of her
child care budget.
Parents in income brackets that are a little higher pay more as a result.
Monica Jackson, a bakery worker and a pharmacy technician in Norfolk, Va., was
told that she and her husband, an Army reservist who is looking for work, did
not qualify for the subsidy because their income, around $20,000, is too high,
a ruling she is disputing. They cannot afford child care, which Ms. Jackson
said cost $1,400 a month, more than their rent.
“What do you tell people who call you for an interview?” she asked. “ ‘I’m
bringing my 3-year-old and 11-month-old’?”
Those who have the subsidy live in fear of losing it. Lori Lebo, a customer
service worker for an electricity company in Pennsylvania, said she had to ask
her new boyfriend and her 8-year-old son to watch her baby girl, who was at
home screaming with a fever, because she had received too many warnings at work
about taking time off to care for her.
“If we get removed, it will be back on the waiting list for both kids,” she
worried. “That will be havoc for a new job.”