Chuck Cohn sees both ends of the problem at his South Austin child care center. Parents need to line up child care so they can get back to work, but that care is getting harder to find. About 1 in 8 licensed child care centers in Austin closed temporarily or permanently because of the pandemic, along with nearly a quarter of home-based child care providers, according to data compiled by the Success By 6 initiative for the United Way for Greater Austin. Cohn’s waiting list at Angel’s Care and Learning Center is 10 kids and growing.
At the same time, Cohn has struggled to hire enough people to keep his facility fully staffed. Child care jobs in Austin typically pay $8 to $14 an hour, less than what many people can collect now on unemployment. Cohn’s job postings draw less than half the applicants he saw before the pandemic. “It’s so competitive to find people to hire,” he told us. “A lot of time by the time we call them, they’ve already been hired by someone else.”
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the workforce landscape, knocking a sizable share of women — especially women with young children — out of work while upending some of the child care facilities that working families need. Many facilities in Austin held on thanks to city grants and federal aid. Others fared worse: In the first five months of the pandemic, 184 communities across Texas became child care deserts, left with little or no providers.
Against this backdrop, Gov. Greg Abbott wants to get more Texans back to work. But his announcement last week cutting off the extra $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits touches only one facet of a complex problem. The question facing many families is not whether work pays more than unemployment, but whether they can find and afford the child care they need in order to take a job. Even with providers working to keep costs down, child care is the second highest monthly expense for Austin families, behind housing.
Texas has a critical role to play here. It is long past time for the state to expand the funding and reach of the program that helps cover child care costs for lower-income families, enabling those parents to work. The massive influx of federal COVID aid Texas is receiving can help accomplish this in the short term. But Texas must make its own investment to meet working families’ needs in the long run.
As we noted in 2018, Texas is one of a handful of states that puts the minimum amount of federal funding toward child care subsidies, diverting other dollars to plug holes in the state budget. As a result, only 1 in 6 families who qualify for the aid actually receives it.
By early 2020, just before the pandemic unfolded, Texas had a jaw-dropping 34,396 children on the waiting list for federally subsidized child care, according to a report by the National Women’s Law Center. This is a problem of Texas’ own making, based on years of short-changing the program.
These subsidies are more than a financial lifeline. They translate into safer care for babies and toddlers. Families who don’t get the subsidies may turn to unlicensed or minimally regulated caregivers who charge less, often for lower quality care. As the Statesman’s 2018 series Unwatched found, 80% of the children who died in Texas day cares over the past decade were in facilities that were unlicensed or offering the least-regulated level of care.
Among non-working low-income parents with young children, 70% cite their lack of access to affordable child care as the reason they’re not in the workforce. With Texas now pushing to get more people back to work, the state should use federal COVID relief dollars to make child care subsidies more widely available.
Officials should also look at increasing the amount of the subsidies paid per child — not only to provide more revenue for child care facilities to hire and keep quality staffers, but to make families’ contributions more reasonable. The National Women’s Law Center study found Texas requires some families receiving subsidies to put about 10% of their income toward their child care costs, even though experts recommend keeping those costs closer to 7.2%.
The state should also consider incentives for some facilities to offer child care on evenings or weekends. Many of the jobs that need to be filled now are in restaurants and other parts of the hospitality industry that don’t keep bankers’ hours.
Lawmakers could also start the long-term planning by passing House Bill 619 by Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston. The measure, which passed in the House last month and is pending in the Senate, would direct the Texas Workforce Commission, which administers the child care subsidies, to develop a strategic plan for addressing pay disparities, training needs and other issues.
In an interview last week with Fox News, Abbott said Texas is “focused on free enterprise and getting people back to work.” But that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Texas needs to play a greater role in supporting the child care programs that help working families and day cares better serve their communities.
Austin American-Statesman
