Last Friday, the Iowa Capital Dispatch published Casey Quinlan's Women workers could bear economic brunt as federal child care funding ends.
Apparently, Minnesota families have a DFL trifecta reprieve from that States Newsroom gloom.
At the Minnesota Reformer, Madison McVan reports in While other states face child care funding cliff, Minnesota avoids disaster:
Most of the pandemic-era federal funding that raised pay for child care providers and kept day cares open expired over the weekend, but in Minnesota, the programs will largely continue with state funds.
Across the country, thousands of day cares are expected to close due to the expiration of the federal money, worsening a child care shortage that has persisted since well before the pandemic.
In Minnesota, more than 8,200 child care providers serving 212,500 children received $324 million in American Rescue Plan Act stabilization grants. Those funds expired Sept. 30.
Minnesota’s child care demand is much greater than the supply; in June 2022, the state was short nearly 100,000 child care slots, according to data from First Children’s Finance.
The shortage is keeping mothers out of the workforce at a time when labor is in high demand.
Facing the expiration of federal funds, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature approved nearly $1.3 billion in child care funding last session. About $575 million is available over the next four years to continue a federal program that improved pay and benefits for early educators.
The Legislature also increased the number of subsidized child care slots by more than 50%.
The historic funding, however, still won’t be enough to close the gap between child care demand and supply.
Other states, particularly those with Republican-controlled state legislatures like Texas, Missouri and Louisiana, opted for smaller investments that fell far short of covering the expired federal funds.
Democratic-controlled New York took a similar path as Minnesota, allocating $500 million to child care in the coming year.
There's more on the same topic at the Star Tribune, Kids Count On Us posted on X today:
Even with the funding from #mnleg this year, childcares are still closing. We still have a long way to go to the childcare system all Minnesotans deserve.#fullyfundchildcare
— Kids Count On Us (@KCOU_MN) October 2, 2023
'Struggling' Minnesota child care centers brace for the end of federal aid https://t.co/YYGBYzwPvK
The Minnesota Reformer article was republished under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Photo: Though Minnesota is spared the funding cliff, Gopher State residents all over the state are concerned about a shortage of child care. This group of citizens and legislators gathered in Clinton, Minnesota as part of Kids Count On Us Rural Childcare Tour. Via September 13 Kids Count On Us X post.
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