The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed in March 2021, included $15 billion in supplemental Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) discretionary dollars and $24 billion to make child care stabilization grants available to providers.While states have until September 2024 to spend the supplemental CCDF discretionary funds, states were required to spend stabilization grant funding by September 2023. 

On March 23, 2024, Congress approved a FY24 appropriations package, ending a particularly long and turbulent federal funding cycle.  

Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) applauds this hard-fought bipartisan deal aimed at protecting and prioritizing child care funding for families, children and communities across the country. This package builds on recent historic progress to lower child care costs for families and improve access to the high-quality care they need. 

Since 2019, Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) has partnered with Nemours Children’s Health to create geographic information system (GIS) technology story maps to visualize and better understand child care program participation in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). Story maps combine both maps and text to help users interpret what they see. They can help us visualize current challenges and opportunities in a state’s early care and education systems. 

This blog recaps our work to develop the story maps and explores how states, including Pennsylvania and Vermont, are using these tools to make data-informed, strategic decisions to promote CACFP and increase provider participation.

 

Building off a busy legislative year for child care in 2023, we are already seeing earlyindicators of which states are prioritizing child careinvestmentsthis year.This is a key moment for states to prioritize child care, as it is unclear if there is a path forward in Congress to secure significant funding in 2024 before federal relief funding is fully exhausted and attention shifts to the November elections. This blog explores the states’ legislative landscape, governors’stated priorities and what’snext for states in 2024. 

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a set of powerful software tools used to create and display maps that help geographically illustrate and communicate complex problems. They can also highlight potential solutions — maps can help identify assets and resources, as well as understand underlying location-based trends in datasets. This wealth of information can be key for child care advocates to educate and inform local and state decision-makers about the challenges facing the child care community and the need to advance specific policy solutions.  

Federal Policy Update 

Last week, Congress avoided a government shutdown with just hours to spare before the October 1 deadline when federal funding was set to expire. This is a huge relief, as a government shutdown would have temporarily disrupted critical programs that children, families and communities rely on. However, child care and early education programs are not in the clear yet. Congress was able to pass a short-term spending bill, called a continuing resolution or CR, to fund the government through November 17 at the same funding levels as FY23. Although this prevented a shutdown, it is still a temporary solution and only buys a small amount of time before we face the same threat again come November.