Tiffany Gale, owner and director of Miss Tiffany’s Early Childhood Education House in Weirton, has joined the effort to have Congress renew federal funding for child care, which was set to expire Sept. 30.
Miss Tiffany’s opened its doors at the end of 2019, without knowing a global pandemic was coming just a few short months later.
“During the pandemic, families lost their jobs and no longer needed care causing number of students to drop drastically,” Gale said. “Children and employees who caught COVID19 were off for weeks at a time. Supplies including food, educational materials and cleaning supplies necessary for caring for children were hard to come by if we were even able to find them at all.
“Employes left the field to work for corporations who could afford to raise wages for their employees to incentive them to stay in the workforce,” she said.
It became extremely hard to stay open, she explained, noting that childcare providers around the state and nation were experiencing the same thing.
“Our industry was on the brink of collapse and that meant that other businesses were also going to be on edge of failure as childcare is the business that supports all other businesses. Without childcare, families cannot get to work and businesses cannot thrive,” Gale said.
Eventually lawmakers began looking at the issues childcare businesses, early childhood educators, and working families have always faced.
They found it is hard to attract and retain employees when the average wage for a child care employee in the state of West Virginia is $10.66 per hour and those employees cannot accept a raise as it would cause them to lose child care subsidies for their own children and would have to use the majority, if not all, of their paycheck on child care.
“The numbers don’t add up,” the local director said.
Lawmakers learned that child care businesses are forced to pay such minimal wages because families can’t afford to pay anymore for childcare services, the reimbursement rates for families on subsidies are low and providers are only paid for families who receive subsidies based on their attendance although centers must hold a space for them whether they’re in attendance or not.
The pandemic highlighted these issues and brought the importance of child care to the forefront of infrastructure. It was evident that the economy couldn’t keep going without child care, Gale said.
Lawmakers understood the link between child care and workforce participation and realized they had to stabilize the child care industry in order to ensure the economy could stay afloat, Gale explained.
As a vehicle to ensure essential workers could stay on the front lines, the West Virginia Dept. of Health and Human Services utilized American Rescue Plan Act funds by increasing child care subsidy reimbursement rates, paying providers based on enrollment rather than attendance of children, issuing stabilization grants to providers, and raising the percentage of families who qualify for subsidies to the 85th percentile of the state median income.
“Those changes allowed us to be able to make ends meet, not worry as much about if we were going to be able to pay our bills as well as stay open, and we were able to retain staff due to the ability to provide bonuses from the stabilization grants,” Gale said.
“Families who previously did not qualify for childcare now qualified and could go to work, which meant more people on the front lines and more people helping our economy thrive.
“Although child care remains as vital as ever, the vehicles that have stabilized our industry and the economy are being stripped from us.
“With ARPA funding coming to a close, we will be reverting back to the outdated, ineffective structures upon which the childcare industry cannot survive, continuing to dismantle the inner workings that have helped stabilize our industry as well as our local, state, and national economies.”
“As a result, facilities Miss Tiffany’s are facing closure as we lose child care providers and attendance drops – again, forcing working families and child care workers to leave the workforce to stay home and care for their children because they either cannot find childcare, do not qualify for subsidies, and/or cannot afford the cost of tuition,” Gale said.
“The fact of the matter is that families cannot afford to pay more and providers cannot survive on any less.
She said that with funding day care centers can attract, hire and retain qualified and educated staff, provide quality learning materials and activities to children in this critical time of their lives, accept more families who want to reenter the workforce and propel communities forward by through workforce participation and impacting the lives of young children at such a crucial age.
Advocates for extended federal assistance are urging lawmakers to provide $16 billion in emergency child care funding, which they say will help prevent an impending child care crisis that will disrupt families’ access to child care and ability to make it into work, prevent local businesses’ ability to thrive, and devastate West Virginia’s economy.
Without that $16 billion emergency child care infrastructure investment, child care programs in West Virginia and all across the U. S. will be forced to either raise their rates, which families already struggle to afford, or close their doors permanently, leaving thousands of families in West Virginia without the child care that they depend on to make it to work.
“The domino effect continues to dismantle the local economy as families have to tell local businesses they cannot make it in as they cannot afford or find child care in the area,” Gale said.