Morning Consult

President Joe Biden has signed the American Rescue Plan into law, granting $40 billion in child care funding and providing much-needed relief to providers, parents and children alike.

This child care relief is notable for three reasons: First, it is the largest investment this country has ever made in child care, and is roughly 20 times larger than the child care relief provided in President Barack Obama’s stimulus measure. Second, despite the investment’s size, it has been uncontroversial and has not attracted the types of criticism directed at other relief policies. Third, because it is a one-time investment, it will not be sufficient to advance longer-term transformation in the system of child care.

Congress and the administration will need to build on this investment so that communities can make permanent changes to ensure all families have access to affordable, high-quality child care.

Read the full op-ed.

We mourn the recent acts of violence in Atlanta and reaffirm our solidarity with our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) colleagues, family members, friends and community members, and we condemn the violence and racism directed at them. 
 
We realize that the murders perpetrated in Atlanta are the latest in a long history of violence and discrimination against the AAPI community. Discrimination, prejudice and racism have no place in our country or our child care system – which relies on the work of women, particularly women of color and women from immigrant communities. We are committed to reversing the structural and institutional racism, poverty and lack of opportunity that exist in the United States.  

Equity and anti-racism will continue to be at the center of our work to support all children and families.   

Additional Resources: 

Whether children have witnessed a violent event, or have seen coverage of events in the news, it is important for parents and caregivers to be ready to help and talk about their feelings. Visit our page for resources to help children understand and cope after facing traumatic events, including a white paper that outlines what stress may look like in children younger than five years old (also available in Spanish).

You may also be interested in our three-part webinar series on racial justice and equity in the child care system  in which we discuss how we can create an equitable system that supports providers, children and families. 

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.

Read the full article.

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.” 

Read the full article.

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.”

Read the full article.

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. 

MomsRising blog

On International Women’s Day (March 8), and during Women’s History Month, we call attention to and celebrate the contributions of women throughout history and in our own lives. However, we must acknowledge the inequities and biases found in our society that women continue to face. We must also recognize the intersectionality of race and gender and commit to address in our policies, our workplaces and our communities the structural inequities that persist.

As a mother and as an early childhood educator and advocate, I have personally experienced, seen and heard how critical child care is to American families, and how gender inequities are negatively impacting families as well as the early childhood workforce.

If we want to support women, we must direct people’s attention to changes that can transform the child care system so that it no longer perpetuates the gaps and inequities that keep children from developing to their potential, that keep parents mired in poverty and that keep providers operating on razor-thin margins.  We need to leverage equity-focused data and ensure Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) leaders are in key decision-making roles. 

Read the full blog post.