WASHINGTON, D.C. - Add child care to the services that members of Congress want to subsidize in the next coronavirus relief package.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown this week joined a group of his Democratic colleagues in a letter that asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York to include a $50 billion child care bailout in upcoming legislation to help the nation recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Their letter notes that the $3.5 billion that was included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to fund child care for frontline healthcare workers and other essential employees, was an important step. But it said the pandemic has created a “dire situation” for child care providers whose businesses have seen “an enormous drop in revenue, almost overnight” as attendance is down.
“Child care programs across this country have been pushed to the brink and many now find themselves making a difficult choice: stay open, providing childcare for essential workers and serving vastly fewer children with increased staffing and necessary cleaning costs and diminished tuition revenue, or close altogether to help stop the spread of the coronavirus,” their letter says.
The letter says that even before the pandemic, child care costs were a huge burden for many families. It says child care workers “are generally paid less than they deserve,” in more than half the states in the country, and the cost of a year of child care exceeds the cost of a year’s in-state college tuition. It says money is needed to keep all providers in business and paying their workers during the crisis, and that more long-term investments in child care are needed after Americans can safely return to their jobs.
“The average cost of child care for a single child is between nine percent to 36 percent of a family’s total income, and that share increases dramatically with multiple children,” it continues. “For single parents, the cost of center-based infant care could easily eat up between 27 percent to 91 percent of their average income. And even before child care providers started laying off workers and closing their doors due to coronavirus, more than half of all Americans lived in child care ‘deserts’—communities without adequate childcare options. Child care deserts are especially prevalent in rural, Native, and Latinx communities.”
The letter also urges the leaders to ensure that small businesses and nonprofits involved in caring for children receive support from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which the CARES Act established to provide forgivable loans that small businesses could use to pay their staff during the pandemic. The legislators say child care providers have told them they’ve had difficulty accessing the money.
“We have only two options as a country: we can either do what is needed to stabilize the child care system, or we can watch child care providers collapse, one by one in our communities, leaving children, families, and child care workers with no system to return to and hamstringing our economic recovery,” the letter concludes. “We must act to save child care and ensure that it can be an active engine in our eventual economic recovery.”
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