Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
For Barbie Blanchard, who since 2002 has run a home-based childcare program in the Rutland area, providing meals for her charges has always been a given. Kids in her care get a carefully planned breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack every day.
“I think kids need a variety of food, just like they get in the school system,” she said.
But it’s not just for the kids, Blanchard said. Particularly in her initial years in the city of Rutland, before she shifted to nearby Rutland Town, she knew that some parents were less financially able than others to provide consistent healthy meals for their kids. For those families in particular, built-in certainty about their child’s daily nutrition has been an important part of her operation, she said.
“It’s either going to come out of my pocket or someone else is going to help me,” Blanchard said of the costs of those meals.
Blanchard has always paid for that food, at least in part, through the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program. Several types of care providers, including home-based ones like Blanchard’s, larger childcare centers and some after-school programs, are able to claim a flat-rate reimbursement through the program for each meal they serve to kids. The program also requires — and provides menus and other resources to support — various nutritional standards for the food it pays for.
The $4 billion federal funding stream delivers millions of dollars for millions of meals in Vermont each year. But recently, the model hasn’t been working well: Participation has declined sharply across the state, stunting Vermont’s share of federal cash and sparking concern from advocates and officials.
While most states saw their federal funds from the program climb in recent years, Vermont received nearly 25% — or $1.3 million — less in annual reimbursement grants in 2025 than in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal agency’s count of meals served annually through the program in Vermont tanked by more than 40% over the same period — among the most extreme drops in the nation.
State program officials say the increasing administrative burden for small, understaffed providers has been a major factor in the declining use of the program. Several home childcare owners, who enroll in the program through nonprofit sponsors, told VTDigger that they had decided against doing so. The extra duties for employees didn’t seem worth the extra funds, they said — particularly since reimbursements often don’t fully cover food costs.
The program’s oversight mandates include annual financial reviews and biannual administrative audits for many organizations, site visits, laborious double-checks on student attendance and various other time-intensive reviews, according to Vermont officials’ recent complaints to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“I’m very, very concerned about where we are,” said Rosie Krueger, Vermont’s state director of child nutrition programs. “Particularly with daycare homes, it’s kind of a — really a shocking decline.”
Home-based childcare facilities like Blanchard’s have dropped off the program in huge numbers, from 688 in 2016 to 171 this year, according to Krueger. It’s a statistic that also reflects a decrease in the number of home-based providers in Vermont during that time; there are currently about 400. But even since 2023 — the year the state’s landmark childcare funding law passed, pushing new growth among such providers — home-based facility enrollment in the food program has slid roughly 50%.
Keely Agan, who leads child nutrition initiatives at Hunger Free Vermont, said the relatively recent end of federal pandemic-era food aid makes programs like this one even more important. As participation decreases, she said, fewer childcare providers are able to offer a meal at all, shifting the financial and organizational burden back to parents.
“This not only puts a really big stress on families financially,” she said, “but it means that children aren’t receiving, in that case, (equal) levels of nutrition in their childcare setting.”
Krueger’s team has sent several formal pleas for help to federal officials, most recently earlier this year. In the last few years, Krueger said, new federal rules have required more comprehensive and frequent oversight of providers receiving money through the program, driving costs up for everyone involved. Plus, the program’s payouts, some components of which advocates say are outdated, have lost ground compared with rising costs in Vermont.
The state has added staff for the program and directed small subsidies to swell the most meager reimbursement streams, drawing on hundreds of thousands in state dollars to do so. But worryingly, Krueger said, four of the seven sponsors that are the link between home-based providers and program officials have dropped out since 2017, citing the financial strain. If the state loses one more sponsor, childcare homes in swaths of Vermont wouldn’t be able to participate in the program, according to Krueger.
Capstone Community Action’s Pat Siergiey, who along with a part-time co-worker now sponsors over 100 childcare homes in 10 counties, said she’s traveling farther and farther to cover programs. In withdrawing from the program, she said, owners cite overwhelming paperwork, relatively low reimbursement rates for meals, and a recent easing of financial pressure in other areas due to new public tuition coverage.
The federal reimbursements for administrative outlays usually come up around $30,000 or $40,000 short of her small team’s actual costs, Siergiey said.
“They talk about paperwork reduction,” she said, laughing. “We don’t really see too much.”
In both cases, Vermont’s petitions to lighten the program’s paperwork load were denied.
“I think nationally there’s a lot of pressure on these programs because of the recent high-profile cases that have happened with fraud,” said Krueger. “I think USDA is not predisposed to offer any flexibility.”
But her office will keep trying to make this program work for both sponsors and providers, Krueger said. Last year, at the urging of Agan’s organization and others, the state made a small appropriation to reduce the financial losses of offices like Siergiey’s, which Krueger supported.
“We want to see kids fed really great quality meals at all ages, and there is a federal funding stream here to do that,” Krueger said.
