NEW ORLEANS– Last summer, Derrika Richard was incarcerated. She didn’t have enough money to pay for childcare for her three youngest children, ages 1, 2 and 3. Yet the demands of daily care made it impossible for Richard, a hairstylist, to work. One child care program turned her away because she wasn’t working enough. It felt like an unsolvable dilemma: without care she would not be able to work. And without work she couldn’t afford care.
But Richard’s life changed that fall when, thanks to a new city-funded program for low-income families called City Seats, she enrolled the three children at Clara’s Little Lambs, a child care center in New Orleans’ Westbank neighborhood. For the first time, she earns enough to pay her bills and pay for online classes.
“It paved the way for me to go to school,” Richard said one morning this spring, after walking the three children to their classroom. City Seats, she said, “changed my life.”
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This series on how the child care crisis is affecting working parents – with an emphasis on solutions – is produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms including The Hechinger Report, AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor , The Dallas Morning News, Idaho Education News, The Post & Courier and The Seattle Times.
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Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 childcare slots for low-income families after voters approved a historic 2022 property tax increase. The referendum increased the program’s budget sevenfold – from $3 million to $21 million per year for 20 years. year. As Louisiana’s early childhood fund doubles money raised locally for child care, the city will receive an additional $21 million to help families find care.
New Orleans is part of a growing trend of communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million to the county’s annual budget for child care and children’s mental health care. A marijuana sales tax approved by voters in Anchorage, Alaska last year will raise more than $5 million for early childhood programs.
The state of Texas has chosen a slightly different course. In November, voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing tax credits for eligible child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties may choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or part of its property taxes. Dallas was one of the first city-and-county combinations in Texas to provide a tax break.
Recent local initiatives are more focused than ever on younger children (infants and toddlers), says Diane Girouard, a senior state policy analyst at Child Care Aware, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
“In the past, we’ve seen more of these local or state-driven initiatives focused on pre-K, but over the past three years we’ve seen voters approve ballot measures to invest in child care and early learning,” she said.
One reason: People saw the economic impact of a lack of child care during the pandemic, said Olivia Allen, co-founder of the nonprofit Children’s Funding Project.
“The value of childcare and other parts of the care economy became painfully obvious to many business leaders,” Allen said.
For some Americans, the child care crisis has persisted, preventing them from keeping their jobs and advancing in their careers. The number of parents who reported missing work because of childcare increased dramatically in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak; it has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. In Louisiana, 27% of households with children under age 5 reported a child care disruption in February or March, according to data from the Census Household Pulse Survey analyzed by the Associated Press in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative.
In New Orleans, a city with many service and other low-wage jobs, City Seats funding has been transformative for parents who struggle to hold down demanding, mostly non-union jobs. The program has also been a boon to the child care centers themselves.
Richard has struggled at times to find affordable childcare since dropping out of college when she gave birth to her eldest son, now 12. That’s even though she immediately put her name down for a spot in childcare centers when she discovered she was pregnant. . “When you see the ‘positive’ line, you’re literally filling out an application,” she said of taking a pregnancy test.
Now that she can think about starting a career again, Richard has set her sights on completing her university studies. Her dream is to have a career in forensic science.
Another parent, Mike Gavion, who has two children enrolled at Early Partners in the Garden District, said City Seats allowed his wife to finish school and get a job as a nurse. Before the program was available, Gavion’s wife had to care for the children, now 2 and 4, and was only able to progress slowly through the courses she needed to qualify for a job.
“It really gave us an opportunity,” Gavion said. “If we had to pay for two children, I don’t think she would have been able to study nursing.”
Families in New Orleans are eligible for city seats if they have children from birth to age 3 and earn within 200% of the federal poverty level. But many don’t get a spot right away: In April, City Seats had 821 students on its waiting list, according to Agenda for Children, the nonprofit organization that administers the program.
About 70% of City Seats’ budget is spent visiting centers that are considered high-quality under the state’s rating system. The rest of the budget goes to improving quality: childcare providers have access to a team including a speech therapist, a pediatrician and social workers.
Participating providers must pay their staff at least $15 per hour — on average, child care workers in Louisiana earned $9.77 per hour in 2020 — and adhere to strict teacher-child ratios and class sizes. They also receive professional development from early learning experts.
With funding from City Seats, Wilcox Academy’s three centers in the city’s North Broad, Central City and Uptown neighborhoods have been able to increase average staff salaries to $18 per hour. The Academy’s goal is to raise it even higher: to $25 per hour.
“Teachers deserve it,” said Rochelle Wilcox, founder and director of the Academy. “They deserve to go on vacation, they deserve to buy a house, they deserve to buy a car. … This is not a luxury.”
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Valeria Olivares of The Dallas Morning News and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press contributed reporting. ___
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