As he stood at a child-care center in Burlington with three mothers under a halo of dangling mobiles, Gov. Peter Shumlin took a hard-nosed stance against legislative tinkering with his child-care proposal.
The governor said he and his administration are “bound and determined to ensure that our entire package that we proposed to the Legislature gets adopted.”
Lawmakers have criticized the plan, which calls for funding a $17 million increase in child-care subsidies with money diverted from the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), saying it pits one group of poor people against another.
“Heart,” not money, is at the core of the administration’s child-care proposal, Shumlin told reporters at a press conference Monday at Trinity Children’s Center in Burlington.
“I know it’s been suggested by some that our proposal isn’t compassionate,” Shumlin said. “I would argue that there is no greater compassion that we can have as Vermonters than taking care of all our children and giving them all a strong start.”
The governor began the press conference by running through the financial rationale for his plan.
“We know that the dollars we spend on early childhood education, $1 spent now saves $7 later on down the road.”
Then Shumlin abruptly switched gears. “That’s about money. We want to talk about our hearts for a minute.”
“I just have got to say from my heart, and I suspect Vermonters agree with me, this is about our children, but it’s also about our moms and our parents. And we currently have system that, as has been alluded to here, traps people into assistance.”
Shumlin soon circled back to the subject of returns on the state’s investment. “The dollars that we spend early on, on our most needy kids, will pay huge rewards down the road.”
The governor argued that the current system creates perverse economic incentives that keep parents out of the workforce.
“When they start to move up the economic ladder … our current system penalizes those parents to the point where they are often better off going back onto welfare or onto Reach Up instead of moving up the economic ladder. Our current system freezes our kids in poverty, it freezes our parents in poverty.”
Reeva Murphy, deputy commissioner of the Department of Children and Families, gave a more nuanced appraisal of the system. She said it is a “common passing thought” for parents — that they would be better off making a lower income and qualifying for the state subsidy — but the real deterrent to staying in the workforce is the challenge of securing high quality child care.
Erica Star-Hughes, a single mother whose son attends Trinity, said, “finding good quality child care that you can get into is an insurmountable task in and of itself.”
The Shumlin administration estimates its proposal will bring an additional 900 families into the subsidy program, and the governor said his plan will improve, not exacerbate, a shortage of child care providers.
“I would argue that as we start to shift more dollars toward early childhood education toward quality child care, we are going to find that more providers come into the system because they know they are going to get a check at the end of the week.”
Murphy agreed: “Water an arid ground, and you get plants.”
The mothers who spoke had benefited from the state’s current child care subsidy program to varying degrees — one received a full subsidy, another has a partial subsidy, and the third, Star-Hughes, said she earned $62 over the eligibility limit.
Shumlin’s proposal would change the marker that is used to determine subsidy rates from the 2010 federal poverty line to the 2013 poverty line, which would make some additional families eligible. The current “benefits cliff” wouldn’t budge under the new plan, however, so families above 200 percent of the poverty line would remain ineligible for any subsidy. Star-Hughes wasn’t sure if she would qualify for the program under Shumlin’s proposed changes.
