Latest news with #StateWithoutChildCare
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Child care providers to reopen centers, urge communities to join call for funding
Brynne Schieffer is a child care provider in Cameron, Wisconsin. She addressed a gathering outside the state Capitol on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner) After a week at the state Capitol to draw attention to their demand for a robust state fund for child care providers, advocates will spend the next couple of weeks back home to amplify their message. Child care centers will reopen this week after closing their doors for all or part of the past week as providers sought to underscore the urgency of additional support for child care. Providers will focus on raising more awareness in their local communities, said Corrine Hendrickson, co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), a coalition of providers and parents. Federal pandemic relief money that has bolstered providers since 2021 will run out completely by early July. This week, WECAN is encouraging providers to do 'larger [local] community actions to help inform the community,' Hendrickson told the Wisconsin Examiner. 'We're also going to be calling other child care programs, making sure they even know this funding's ending.' WECAN organized the week of action in Madison, calling it 'State Without Child Care.' A small group of providers shut down for the week to dramatize the loss of child care that they contend will be inevitable without strong state support. Others closed for a day or two, and still others opted to stay open while also endorsing the funding demand. Earlier this month leaders of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee removed a $480 million child care funding provision from Gov. Tony Evers' proposed 2025-27 state budget, along with more than 600 other items. On Friday, Hendrickson and WECAN cofounder Brooke Legler were joined by parents and other providers in front of the Capitol to reiterate their case for restoring the funds. 'My family still currently pays 25% of our monthly income towards child care, and honestly that's just after-school care and then summer camps,' said Katy Dicks of Sun Prairie, who has a 10-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. When the children were younger, child care accounted for a third of the family's income, she said — while 'it has been suggested that 7% of a family's income is what is affordable.' Dicks leads the Wisconsin chapter of Mother Forward, a national advocacy group for child care, paid family leave and other policies to support families. 'We need policy that works for all families,' she said. 'The quality of care for children approximately 3 months to 5 years should not be based on a child's parents' income.' Also at the Capitol were Rochelle Navin and her husband. They have a 2-year-old daughter, and Navin is expecting twins. Their daughter is usually at Legler's New Glarus child care center, The Growing Tree, while her parents work, but they juggled home care arrangements to support Legler's decision to close the center for the week. Navin told the Wisconsin Examiner it was disruptive to their routine, but the couple understood why Legler took that step. 'There's two sides of it, right?' Navin said. 'You fully understand why it's gotten to this point, and why the extreme [response] needed to be taken, while at the same time being scared about what the future looks like.' Evers' proposal was to extend the Child Care Counts program, originally funded by federal pandemic relief money. The subsidy — originally $20 million a month, then cut back to $10 million a month in mid-2023 — enabled providers to raise wages without having to increase the fees parents pay for care. A statewide survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty found that 25% of providers said they might close if the revenue isn't replaced. Hendrickson said in the coming weeks she and other providers who have been active in campaigning for the support will reach out to operators with messaging guidance for talking to parents as well as to their local lawmakers. 'This week was definitely about coming together as a group in solidarity and really standing up for ourselves and for our children and our families and our communities,' Hendrickson said Friday. Over the course of the week at the Capitol, 'we visited almost every single office, dropped off information, talked to staffers and really helped them see who it is that they're hurting,' she said. The providers who engaged in those conversations also aimed to show legislators 'that their constituents actually know what they're talking about — we know what we're talking about with our businesses, we can speak to it and the reason why we need the funding, and it's not a handout,' Hendrickson added. In the Institute for Research on Poverty study, up to 40% of rural providers said they might close if the additional funding stops. That's nearly twice the projected closure rate of urban providers. Brynne Schieffer operates a child care program in the community of Cameron, near Rice Lake in Northwestern Wisconsin. 'I have spent the entirety of my adult life caring for not only my own children, but other people's children, raising them, raising them to be kind human beings that will hopefully one day go out and be carers themselves,' Schieffer told the group gathered on the Capitol steps Friday. 'The funding runs out in July, and to avoid closure we have to raise our rates between $35 and $50 per child per week. Whose pocketbook can handle that?' Hendrickson told the Wisconsin Examiner that if rural providers have to raise their rates, they're more likely to lose families who can't afford the increase, with no one to replace them. In cities, she said, moderate- and low-income families will be hurt by the loss of child care, but there are likely to be more high-income families able to keep up with rising costs, so fewer providers would have to close. All but one of the providers who made the trip to Madison last week were from rural communities around the state, Hendrickson said. 'People drove four or five hours to get here,' she said. 'It's because they don't feel listened to [back in their districts]. And that's what they said — 'I've had to come all the way down here to get them to listen to me.'' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Wisconsin is Cutting State Funding for Child Care. Providers are Taking a Stand.
On Monday, child care providers across the country participated in the fourth annual Day Without Child Care, closing their doors and gathering to demand a better child care system with more public dollars. In Wisconsin, some providers may remain closed for quite a while longer, according to Corrine Hendrickson, owner of a family child care program in Wisconsin, and one of the organizers of a prolonged protest — dubbed 'State Without Child Care' — which intends to push back against the state legislature's cuts to essential child care funding. While direct actions — a form of activism that uses strikes or public demonstrations — by child care providers remain relatively rare in the U.S., it may be an increasingly important arrow in the quiver when fighting for the system children, parents and providers need and deserve. At issue in Wisconsin is the fate of the state's child care stabilization fund, known as Child Care Counts. Wisconsin is one of six states that doesn't fund child care, relying instead entirely on inadequate federal funding. That temporarily changed during the pandemic, when providers began receiving regular payments through Child Care Counts that allowed them to maintain operations and kept parent fees from spiking. With these pandemic funds drying up, Gov. Tony Evers proposed $442 million over two years to continue the fund, but last week the Republican-controlled joint finance committee voted to zero out the child care money. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter If this funding ends, there will be massive consequences for children, families and providers, which is one reason providers are engaging in such an unprecedented action. As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported, 'A quarter of child care providers are more likely to close without further funding from Child Care Counts, and those that remain could be forced to raise their rates, according to a survey released April 10 by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families.' This does not appear to be hyperbolic: funding reductions to Child Care Counts over the past few years have already caused providers to increase fees and to have more difficulty hiring qualified staff. Providers have seemingly had enough. Hendrickson stated in a press release that, 'While politicians negotiate over our funding and our lives, Wisconsin working families are once again left without. We've done everything we were told to do. We called. We showed up. We shared our stories. And still, lawmakers voted to cut child care from the budget. No plan. No replacement. No respect. We've had enough and we are drawing the line.' Providers across the state began protest actions in Madison on Tuesday, May 13, and according to Hendrickson, some will remain closed until the legislature guarantees they'll restore the child care funding. Single day child care protests are increasingly common. These have been seen in Australia and Ireland, and they have proven useful at garnering media attention — in fact, the 2020 Irish protest is credited with making child care a major campaign issue that year. These have also occurred regionally in the U.S.; for example, in Connecticut in 2022, providers organized a 'Morning Without Child Care,' which became a landmark event that sparked other communities to follow suit via the now national Day Without Child Care. The Wisconsin protest sets itself apart from these one-day actions though, in that the intention is sustaining activism until the state legislature meets a specific demand. Perhaps the most notable modern example of a sustained child care work stoppage comes from Germany. In 2015, German child care staff across the country went on strike for four weeks to protest their low wages, marking one of the nation's largest post-reunification labor actions and making international headlines. (The strike ended with a modest salary increase.) Similarly, in 2004, Scotland saw a strike of 5,000 child care educators that dragged on, in some localities, for more than three months. One structural element that has made direct child care actions in the U.S. less common than in other nations is the fact that there is less government involvement to begin with. Both German and Scottish child care workers are largely hired by — and have their wages set by — municipalities, and most workers belong to a labor union. In the highly privatized and fragmented American system, there is little unionization and the divisions between employers and employees can be fuzzier; in fact, in many cases it is the owners of U.S. child care programs that are protesting. However, both Connecticut and now Wisconsin have been able to tie their demands to state legislative action, with the presence or lack of state funds for child care acting as a sort of stand-in for collective bargaining. That said, the Wisconsin providers face challenges ahead. While the movement has received support from the community organizing group Community Change, the providers are not unionized. There is no standing strike fund, and for programs operating on thin margins, every day the doors are closed poses a significant loss of revenue. And of course, the participants would much rather be providing care and learning to the children in their programs. Participating in sustained closures is emotionally fraught. For early educators, it's difficult to deprive families of a vital service they rely on. For families who will feel the impact, it's expected that reactions will vary, but looking at Connecticut as an example, parents made it clear that given the choice between a temporary stoppage and permanent closure, reduced quality, or unaffordable fee hikes, they will generally stand alongside their child care providers. Child care providers in the U.S. have long advocated passionately for more support, but have rarely engaged in prolonged protests. In Wisconsin, we're about to find out whether sustained activism is a tool that can sway policymakers.
