Daycares still waiting on subsidy payments from the state
AURORA, Mo. – The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is continuing to struggle to pay daycares and foster parents.
As Ozarks First reported in July, the money is there, DESE just hasn't gotten the payments out on time.
'I need that money if I want to stay open,' says Aurora daycare owner Elizabeth Hostetter.
Hostetter says she hasn't been paid since October. She says she needs at least $10,000 or she might have to shut down.
'We don't make money,' Hostetter said. 'Everything I get, I pour right back into the daycare kids like because I feel like they're my own. I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing it because I love the kids.'
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Hostetter has operated her daycare, The Wild Ones, out of her home for 10 years. She says it costs about $4,000 a month to operate her daycare.
'I'm trying to push the issue so that everybody knows what's going on so we can get DESE to pay,' Hostetter said.
She takes in a wide range of ages, from newborn to 10 years old. She also takes care of kids with special needs or autism.
'Her routine, her schedule is so important,' Hostetter said, referencing a 4-year-old she takes care of with stage two autism. 'If you take that away from her, especially somebody with autism, it's going to throw off their whole family, because they have to have that routine.'
She says the parents who rely on state subsidies have expressed their concerns to her.
'They've talked to me about it, like, 'I don't know what I would do,'' Hostetter said. 'I don't know what they would do either, because I'm not taking any more state children. I would imagine other facilities are not either. We're not getting paid. We're not going to take those children.'
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Kaitlin Shepard, a parent at The Wild Ones, says daycare these days is extremely expensive.
'We need the daycares to be open to help take care of our children so we can continue our economy growing and keep the whole world going on,' Shepard said.
Shepard decided to go back to college in December, and that's when she enrolled her 1-year-old son at The Wild Ones.
'I finally got to start my dream career, going to college and my husband working,' Shepard said. 'If we want to be able to do any of that, I can't just wait for him to get off work to go to college.'
Shepard was a stay-at-home mom for six years before deciding to go to college.
'For us to be able to be a family together, we have to have someone to be of watch our kids,' Shepard said. 'Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, but I'm ready to start living. To be able to provide for my family as well and help put income into our home.'
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Both women emphasize the importance of reliable daycare on the workforce.
'You're not going to have any of that because they're not going to have anybody to watch your kids,' Hostetter said.
Shepard agrees.
'When you don't have someone to watch your kids and you can't go to work all the time, you're going to lose your job,' Shepard said.
DESE tells Ozarks First the Office of Childhood fixed nearly all of the technical issues, so they don't expect any future backlogs.
They say they are making progress and have cleared 70%.
Per the information shared in DESE's 1/24 news release, DESE's Office of Childhood (OOC) and its vendors resolved nearly all necessary technical issues within the new Child Care Data System last month (January 2025), which will help prevent any future backlog.
The OOC shares a weekly report on the DESE website to track the status and progress of the work to address the backlog.
Family Applications & Provider Contracts: The most recent backlog report shows the OOC is processing cases within the last few weeks for family applications and provider contract applications, which is near the OOC's expected processing time.
Payment Corrections: It is important to note that currently, subsidy payments are being processed correctly each day for providers' attendance claims since fixing the payment calculator in the system in summer 2024. While there continues to be a backlog in payment resolution requests from the time the system wasn't working properly, the OOC is making progress reviewing these requests. To date, team members have closed out or paid approximately 70 percent of all payment resolution requests in the backlog queue. The team anticipates the majority of the work will be accomplished by the end of this month (February 2025).
DESE
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