(Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Community Change)
North Carolina Democratic legislative leaders called on their Republican colleagues in the General Assembly Thursday to expand funding for childcare providers as federal grant money that helped centers weather the pandemic is set to expire this summer.
Childcare providers and state officials have been urging lawmakers to address the funding gap, warning that without intervention, hundreds of facilities may be forced to shut down.
House Democratic minority leader Robert Reives speaks about childcare funding at a Thursday Legislative Building press conference (Photo: Ahmed Jallow)
Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue and House Democratic Leader Robert Reives said on Thursday at a press conference that the state should be funding childcare centers instead of expanding private school vouchers.
Blue characterized efforts by Republican legislative leaders to eliminate the waitlist for Opportunity Scholarships, which Republicans have made a top priority this short session, a “manufactured crisis” that should not “distract us from the real urgent needs of North Carolina’s working families.”
“Rather than ensuring that every child in North Carolina has access to high quality education and childcare, they’re funneling taxpayer dollars into private school vouchers,” said Blue.
Blue said childcare is not just a convenience, “it’s a foundational issue that for some families it can literally mean the difference between success and failure. It’s critical and essential to high economic development, job creation and job performance.”
Republicans are proposing to allocate an additional $463 million over the next two years and to clear the waiting list for 55,000 families seeking private school vouchers for this fall.
Reives said the federal grant money has been a lifeline for working families and the business community, helping ensure childcare centers continued to function and working parents could balance work and family life. “With that money ending, now the state needs to step up and bridge the divide.”
“But instead, the focus of this session so far has been to subsidize private school education for millionaires.”
A February survey by the North Carolina Child Care Resource and Referral Council found that 88% of childcare providers say they expect to increase parent fees when federal funding ends. Forty percent said they would have to raise parent fees immediately.
Nearly half said they would lose administrative and teaching staff, and about two-thirds said they would have difficulty hiring new employees with comparable experience and education.
One-third of childcare programs said they would have to close within a year.
Kim Shaw, founder of A Safe Place Child Enrichment Center in southeast Raleigh, said the center may be forced to shut down this summer if the state does not step in and fill the funding gap.
“The parents of these children play a vital role in supporting the economy of North Carolina, knowing that their children are in safe, nurturing hands,” Shaw said. “We do not recognize the importance of public education until the children are 5 years old. The North Carolina General Assembly has the financial resources to fund early childhood education adequately.”
With the money Republicans are spending on private school vouchers, Reives said the current waitlist for children in need of childcare could be eliminated, pre-K programs could be expanded, and early education could be provided to thousands of students.
“In this building, we have had our priorities backward,” said Reives. “How much more of an impact would hundreds of millions of dollars for childcare centers have on our state than handouts to wealthy families for private school tuition.”
“It’s a ridiculous, to me, supposition, that what we need to do is take care of the wealthiest of us,” Reives concluded. “I think that responsible people here — corporations agree with this, the NC Chamber agrees with this, wealthy people agree with this. But for some reason, we decided that we’re going to prioritize our top 1 percent economically and just tell the other 99 percent figure it out as you go.”
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