CNBC.com

There already was a child-care crisis in America. Then Covid hit.

Child-care centers shut down. Working parents lost care and child-care workers found themselves without jobs. Parents, namely mothers, left jobs or reduced hours to fill the gap.

“Before the pandemic, the U.S. child-care system was in trouble,” said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group that works with local and state child-care resource and referral agencies.

“Layer Covid on top of that and the system, as it stands, really ceases to work well for anybody.”

“The system has to rely on a patchwork of funding streams that place a high burden on families to pay the price of care,” Cardona said.

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Cheddar

Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America and former senior policy advisor for the Obama Administration, discusses how the latest round of coronavirus relief impacts the child care sector and whether the U.S. has done enough to help.

Watch the interview.

American Resolution podcast

Host David Jolly, a former Congressman, is joined by Mario Cardona, the Chief of Policy and Practice for Child Care Aware of America. Early childhood education is a passion of both the host and guest in this episode and David and Mario dive into the details of how beneficial investment in early childhood education can be for the child, their family, and the entire surrounding community. They also touch on the historic investment in early education that the Biden Administration just made via the American Rescue Plan.

Listen to the podcast

Wall Street Journal

The coronavirus relief law signed by President Biden last week pours nearly $50 billion into child care in a bid to keep struggling daycare centers from closing just as the people who rely on them return to work. 

Child-care providers will get about $40 billion for operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers, and families will get roughly $8 billion from a temporary expansion of tax breaks subsidizing dependent care. 

The child-care assistance is smaller and less attention-grabbing than $1,400-per-person stimulus checks or the expanded child tax credit worth more than $100 billion to families. 

But the law, in addition to $10 billion in assistance from December legislation, represents the largest one-time U.S. investment in child care, said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group. 

“It’s largely been uncontroversial,” he said. “Some things were targeted for complete elimination or reduction. Child care wasn’t one of those things.” 

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MarketWatch

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated guidance Friday providing strategies to help child care operators offer in-person care safely. 

Though some child care providers closed at the outset of the pandemic, many reopened early on and have remained open for months. As of December 2020, 13% of child care centers and 13% of family child care providers were closed, according to a report from Child Care Aware, a child care advocacy group. 

These organizations have already been doing much of what the CDC recommended Friday, said Nicole Garro, the director of early childhood health programs at Child Care Aware. Still, Garro said, they’re “grateful” for the new guidance. The guidelines were last updated in July, before vaccines were available and when we had a different understanding of the factors leading to the spread of COVID-19.   

“This information is really important to ensuring that child care [providers] remain open and safe,” she said. 

The guidance is particularly “timely,” said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware, because it’s coming at a moment when child care providers are slated to receive more funding. The relief package signed by President Joe Biden this week will send $24 billion for child care providers to put towards their operations.

“Child care providers stand to have a significant amount of resources to put against a lot of these mitigation measures that are being suggested by the CDC,” Cardona said.

Though many child care providers are open now, at the beginning of the pandemic when state shutdown orders were setting in, many closed, putting their livelihoods at risk. At least 35% of child care centers and 21% of family child care providers were closed in July, according to a report from that period from Child Care Aware. 

Once these providers opened, the costs of operating in a pandemic environment — including personal protective equipment, more staff to decrease staff to teacher ratios, and more — has put these organizations at risk financially.

Those financial challenges are part of why Cardona described the bill signed this week as a “breath of relief.”

“For providers who are already operating on fairly thin budgets,” the extra funding required to operate during the pandemic, “either comes from the providers’ pockets or the families’ pockets,” Cardona said, “because there isn’t a system in place to provide stable support.”

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CNBC.com

With the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act on Wednesday, American families and child-care providers can look forward to a roughly $40 billion infusion for an industry rocked with closures and dramatically increased operating costs amid the pandemic.

“This critical funding will save thousands of providers from permanent closure and help families across the country afford child care,” Lynette Fraga, CEO of Child Care Aware of America, said in a statement Wednesday. “This is a monumental occasion and a historic investment in child care.”

Read the full article.

Today, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package with $39 billion in child care relief funding. The $39 billion in dedicated child care funding provides $15 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and $24 billion for a child care stabilization fund. 

The Educated Reporter (Education Writers Association blog)

“COVID really just highlighted the pre-existing situations and challenges of the early childhood system across the nation,” said Dionne Dobbins, the senior director of research at Child Care Aware of America, a research and advocacy group. “When COVID hit, it was layering it on top of a very fragile child care system — and, you know, some would say it even shattered.”

Dobbins was among the experts assembled for the kickoff panel of a recent Education Writers Association event on covering the education and care of children from birth to age 3. 

A lack of adequate federal investment in child care is the driver behind the affordability issues faced by parents, Dobbins argued. 

“The price of child care in many states is more expensive than tuition at a state college for one year,” she said.

Dobbins said data gathered by Child Care Aware indicates that a majority of states were already seeing declines in family child care, as well as the number of child care centers, in 2018 and 2019.

Read the full article.

The Lily/Washington Post

Bell’s story underscores the structural problems that fail to support struggling parents — especially women of color — in a society too quick to render someone’s fate to the incarceration system, experts say.

Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, said high-quality child care just isn’t an option for many families. “Even before the pandemic and the associated closures of child-care programs, the supply of child care was decreasing,” he said. “When covid-19 was layered onto the already fragile child-care system, it shattered.”

Before the pandemic, more than half of states reported a decline in the number of child-care centers and 79 percent of states reported a dip in family child-care providers between 2018 and 2019, according to data from Child Care Aware of America.

Cardona and his colleagues estimate that it will take a year or more to understand the impact of the pandemic on child-care services. As of July, the group found that 35 percent of centers and 21 percent of family child-care programs remain closed across the country.

Read the full article.

The Nation magazine

According to an analysis by Child Care Aware of America, while 40 states have included child care providers in the same eligibility tier as K-12 educators, five of them—Kentucky, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah, and Wyoming—and Washington, D.C., put K-12 teachers ahead of those teaching and caring for children at younger ages. Like Rhode Island, Vermont originally said that child care providers and teachers would be prioritized at the same time and then changed gears to set eligibility based on age, according to Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware. Four states—Florida, Indiana, Texas, and West Virginia—haven’t made it clear when child care providers will be eligible.

There are many reasons that child care and early childhood educators argue they should be vaccinated ahead of the general population, however.

“Child care has been essential since before the pandemic,” Cardona said. “Providers around the country are losing money and putting their health and their families’ health at risk…to keep their programs running.” K-12 educators are often getting prioritized in the hope that widespread educator vaccination can help to safely reopen schools. But “it isn’t a situation where these child care providers need a vaccine in order to open. They are open,” Cardona noted.

Cardona was quick to say that his organization is not criticizing any of the states’ eligibility decisions, noting that they’re made by lawmakers and officials on the ground. But others have no hesitation criticizing them.

Read the full article.