What were once “women’s issues” are now essential economic issues that have gained wide support. Access to child care can make the difference for a family, whether it slips into poverty, or holds on to the middle class.
For millennial families, two working-parent families predominate, often of financial necessity rather than by choice. They depend on child care for their families to flourish.
A tri-partisan consensus around the importance of child care had been emerging before the pandemic, but the coronavirus crisis put the issue in the spotlight.
Seventy-one percent of Vermont’s kids have all parents in the workforce, yet three out of five of those young Vermonters don’t have access to a regulated child care program.
A generation of young children are learning how to socialize and ‘social distance’ at the same time.
“I don’t want to be the skunk at the garden party here,” DCF Commissioner Sean Brown said Wednesday, but based on a “high level” look at the bill, administration officials believe the eventual cost could be in the ballpark of $300 million to $500 million a year.
This commentary is by Reeva Sullivan Murphy of Stowe and Kim Keiser of Fayston. Each is a former deputy commissioner of child development for the Vermont Department for Children and Families, and Keiser is also former director of the child care services division in the Vermont Department of Social & Rehabilitation Services. Governor Scott’s vision […]
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the state has invested $40.5 million in child care business stabilization funds, restart stipends, hazard pay and relief grants.
State officials say too much time is wasted on coordination between agencies instead of providing direct services to kids and families.
Child care does not just benefit families; it benefits everyone in a community, and so we need to figure out how to increase public investment in this public good.
At Growing With Wonder, a clear runny nose that needs to be wiped only five times or fewer in half an hour can stay. The rest go.
What we have come to learn is that care is education in these early years, whether we are intentional about it or not.
The state’s patchwork child care solution still leaves plenty of families in the lurch, many of whom are balking at paying for care they once received for free through their public schools.
The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor called his platform, which includes roughly 60 proposals, a ‘blueprint’ for making the state ‘a better place to live.’