In a bid to ensure child care facilities can afford to reopen when the pandemic ends, Vermont has promised a massive bailout to the industry.
But as part of the state’s stabilization program, families are being asked to pay 50% of the tuition they were paying before facilities closed if they want to keep their spot in a program.
That puts parents like Brittany Powell of Middlesex in a tough spot. Powell will keep paying partial tuition to keep her son’s spot at the Sweet Clover Nursery in Montpelier, even though her husband, like tens of thousands of Vermonters, was laid off in the wake of coronavirus. He’s applied for unemployment, but his claim hasn’t been processed yet.
So for now, the family is putting many of its bills on credit, and hoping for the best.
“Our finances are just so up in the air right now,” she said.
If families disenroll and don’t pay anything, the state has pledged to child care programs that they’ll cover 100% of the lost tuition. But that’s only if providers promise that they’ve consulted their waitlists first, and come up empty, in order to backfill the spot.
Vermont’s child care sector – like the industry nationwide – operates on notoriously razor-thin margins, and suffers from a shortage of available care. A report released earlier this year by Let’s Grow Kids, a child care and early education advocacy organization, estimates that Vermont needs to expand capacity in the regulated child care sector by nearly 9,000 slots in order to meet existing demand.
Given the scarcity of available care, Powell worries that the state’s policy will hurt those who most need the help.
“This is incredibly punitive to lower income families or parents who may now be unemployed and unable to pay the required fees,” she said. “What would happen if they lost their space and could not return to work once the state reopens?”
Madelief Becherer, the administrative director at Sweet Clover Nursery, said she’d had “a couple of families call in a panic” about the tuition policy.
“The people who are needing that support the most in our programs are the ones who tend to have lower incomes or be living paycheck to paycheck. And so they’re the ones that are having a harder time now, because of the nature of their work,” she said.
Sweet Clover has a long waitlist, Becherer said. Families who want a spot in the Montpelier child care program typically wait six months to a year. So those who unenroll don’t stand much of a chance of getting their spot back when child cares are finally allowed to re-open.
She credited Vermont for being “proactive and generous” in acting to stabilize the industry, especially compared what other states had done. But she still feels like its policy unfairly favors the affluent.
“Because there’s a shortage it almost feels like the way this was rolled out gave a clear advantage to those who are wealthy and have more financial resources,” Becherer said.
Luciana DiRuocco, a spokesperson for the Department of Children and Families, noted that low-income families that received subsidies for child care would only be required to pay 50% of that subsidized rate. And she said that families who lost income because of the crisis might become eligible for those subsidies, in addition to enhanced unemployment benefits.
“We understand that child care programs cannot continue to pay their staff and overhead costs without funding and we are asking families to share in this significant cost,” she said.
Vermont’s emergency child care measures will not be cheap. DiRuocco said state officials estimated spending an extra $1.5 million a week to cover tuition reimbursements and financial incentives for providing child care to essential workers.
Aly Richards, the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, which was key in lobbying for the stabilization package, acknowledged the group had heard from parents concerned about needing to pay in order to keep their slot.
“The needs of families continue to rise, and I think the uncertainty is the real question,” she said. “We don’t know how long this is going to go on.”
But she argued the stabilization program didn’t exacerbate the inequity baked into the child care system so much as it highlighted it.
“If you can afford to pay for child care, you get child care,” Richards said. “It’s always been a bad situation.”
