Knoxville News-Sentinel

The pandemic meant a lot of child care agencies closed, and some of those have remained closed.

Child Care Aware of America compared data between December 2019 and July 2020 and found that 35% of child care centers remained closed and 21% of family child care programs were closed.

Since presenting those findings, the organization's senior data analyst Kristina Haynie analyzed December 2020 data. She said the supply of child care is recovering from the initial shock of COVID-19, but attendance data is still concerning.

Child care comes with a trifold challenge: how do you provide high-quality care, while keeping it affordable and while paying fair wages to employees?

Haynie said providers want to "be on the cutting edge of child development" but are often short on time or money.

The latest COVID-19 relief package from Congress could help. The American Rescue Plan provides $39 billion in child care relief funding.

It includes $24 billion for financially stressed child care providers for personal protective equipment, rent and mortgage payments, labor costs and other expenses. Another $15 billion would help subsidize child care costs for eligible families, helping an estimated 875,000 children, according to USA TODAY.

Haynie said the money will lay the foundation for a more equitable system that provides "quality care that all children deserve."

Haynie, the data analyst, said a one-size-fits-all approach won't work since some communities need more after-hours care or some employees might want on-site care for the typical working day. But businesses should partner with their local child care resource and referrals agency, like Bowlin's, to better understand what their community needs.

Haynie said businesses should also ask their employees what they need through surveys or other means. Some folks might love their current child care situation but would appreciate extra financial support to pay fees.

Vox

President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan is expansive and ambitious, a $2 trillion infrastructure package that includes money for roads and bridges, home health care for seniors, measures to fight climate change, and more.

One thing it doesn’t say much about, though, is child care.

But some worry that by the time that second piece comes before Congress, there may be no money — or political will — left for the reforms that are needed to truly fix the problems with America’s child care system.

Those problems include concerns with physical infrastructure, like damaged or unsafe buildings, but include cost and access issues as well. Improving facilities “is incredibly important, and there’s certainly a need there,” Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at nonprofit Child Care Aware of America, told Vox. But “more needs to be done.”

The American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package signed by Biden in March, includes a much-needed $39 billion to help the child care sector recover, but that’s not a long-term solution, experts say. “It helps repair some of the damage of the pandemic, but we’re really playing catch-up,” Cardona said. “It’s going to take bold year-over-year investments” to actually make affordable, accessible child care — and good-paying child care jobs — a reality around the country now and in the future.

But “when we talk about infrastructure,” Cardona said, “it’s really important to note that for child care in particular, it goes beyond facilities improvements.” Building a sustainable child care infrastructure for the future would include making sure workers get a living wage, ensuring high-quality care for all children, and making sure care is accessible and affordable for families, he explained.

The money in the American Jobs Plan is important, Cardona said, but “it’s insufficient to meet the range of needs that exist in this country and that the pandemic has laid bare.”

Read the full article.

Tokyo Business Today

As women around the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, a startling reality sunk in. 47 million women – the equivalent of the entire country of Spain – have dropped out of the labor force due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the United Nations.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that in January 275,000 women left the labor force compared to 71,000 men.

One primary solution is child care.

That is why President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill is putting $50 billion into the child care sector.

Child care providers will get about $40 billion for operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers, and families will get about $8 billion from a temporary expansion of tax breaks subsidizing dependent care. The goal is to help centers handle revenue shortfalls and increased costs while making it easier for mothers in particular, to return to work as the economy reopens.

“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.

Read the full article.

New York Times

These stories, from four different parts of the United States, aren’t isolated pockets of struggle. They are emblematic of a larger problem that has been widely acknowledged by people from the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to Amy Schumer: America’s child-care industry is in crisis.

Initially, as parents pulled their children out of child-care centers in the first months of the pandemic, revenue plummeted. Then, as child-care centers opened back up, the burden of safety for the community’s children — including, in many cases, schoolchildren whose parents couldn’t help them with remote learning — fell on providers that were already struggling to survive on thin budgets.

By summer, 50 percent of providers were still closed, according to a research and advocacy group, Child Care Aware of America. That number fell to 13 percent by December but those that have opened are debt-ridden, pinching pennies here and there, and short-staffed to keep costs down.

Read the full article.

Miami Herald

Mario Cardona knows child care is critical. He’s currently chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit that helps families access care. In his former role as a congressional staffer, he wrote and led staff negotiations to pass the Child Care & Development Block Grant Act of 2014, which comprehensively updated the quality and standards in federally subsidized childcare for the first time in years. We checked in with Cardona and asked him to take the pulse of child care in the U.S. today.

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.

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.