The 2025 legislative session in Vermont has been marked by uncertainty around the future of federal funding for essential programs that support our communities, as well as difficult state FY26 challenges related to property taxes, public education reform, and housing. Despite this, Vermont lawmakers continued to make progress on child care.
In January, Vermont’s Child Care Campaign, led by Let’s Grow Kids and our partners, outlined three primary policy goals in our 2025 Child Care Agenda:
- Protect Act 76 funding
- Increase access and affordability for families
- Strengthen the early childhood education (ECE) workforce
These goals aim to close the remaining gaps in our child care system and build on the progress we’re seeing from Act 76, Vermont’s landmark 2023 child care law.
Thanks to the hard work of our lawmakers and the thousands of Vermonters who took action for child care this year, we have made significant progress on each of these goals. As the legislative session comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on these accomplishments.
Protecting Act 76 Funding
In the first two years since Act 76 passed, public investment has helped create over 1,000 new child care spaces and over 100 new child care programs around the state. This is a tremendous amount of progress in a short period of time. And yet, we know thousands more child care spaces are needed, particularly in the rural parts of the state, to meet the estimated demand. Sustaining the public investment that has allowed us to make this progress is critical to ensuring continued growth of our child care system. With your help, that’s what we advocated for this session.
On Wednesday, May 21, Governor Scott signed into law the state budget bill for Fiscal Year 2026, which begins in July. The budget created a new child care reserve fund, which will provide greater long-term stability for our child care system, and includes important language that will better protect the public investment of Act 76 in future budget negotiations.
This budget is a bipartisan policy achievement that will help expand our child care system to better meet the needs of our communities and set us up for continued progress in years to come.
Increasing Access and Affordability for Families
Act 76 expanded eligibility for child care tuition assistance (CCFAP), which has allowed over 3,000 more Vermont children to qualify for reduced tuition costs. The law also increased the reimbursement rates that child care programs receive from the state as part of the CCFAP program, which has helped many programs stabilize, expand, and increase staff wages. At the same time, many families may qualify for assistance but still not have access to a spot for their child due to an ongoing lack of capacity.
To address this, the FY26 budget prioritizes child care funding for one of the most critical needs: infant and toddler access. Through a 5% increase in reimbursement rates for infants and toddlers, this budget will help child care programs expand capacity where it is needed most. Increased reimbursements will help stabilize the business model of child care programs serving infants and toddlers, which will lead to improved access for families with young children.
The FY26 budget also includes funding that will help child care programs participate in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which helps children access nutritious food and snacks while attending their child care programs – another example of how public investment in our child care system is helping to bring down costs for Vermont families.
Strengthening the ECE Workforce
Research shows that the single greatest factor determining early childhood education outcomes is the qualifications of the educators working with our children. And yet, early childhood educators (ECEs) have long been among the lowest paid workers, leading to high levels of turnover and staffing shortages that bottleneck the capacity and quality of our child care system. This year, thanks to the diligent work of our partners at the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children (VTAEYC), the Vermont Legislature took significant steps to address this by advancing a bill to recognize ECEs as a licensed profession.
Creating an ECE profession would help ensure Vermont’s ECEs have the necessary training, support, and compensation to provide high quality early education, with clear and transparent pathways for advancing in their field. This will help bring more Vermonters into the ECE field, leading to increased stability, quality, and capacity in our child care system.
The ECE Professional Recognition bill, which was crafted based on recommendations from the Vermont Office of Professional Regulation, was advanced by the Vermont Senate on May 23 and will be taken up by the House in January. When passed into law, Vermont will become the first state in the country to officially recognize the profession of early childhood education.
In the meantime, the FY26 budget increased funding to grow the Early Childhood Youth Apprenticeship Program which provides the next generation of ECEs with on-the-job learning opportunities, so they graduate ready to enter the field.
Moving Forward
These are significant accomplishments for Vermont’s children and families, and they would not have been possible this year without the thousands of Vermonters who came together to raise their voices for continued progress on child care — talking to their neighbors, sharing their stories, attending campaign events, calling and emailing their lawmakers, testifying in the State House, and so much more. Thank you!
The progress we’ve seen since Act 76 was passed makes clear that long-term public investment is the key to creating a child care system that fully meets the needs of all Vermonters. We still have work to do, but by protecting Act 76 funding, increasing access and affordability for families, and strengthening the ECE workforce, we are building on a solution that we know is working.
Thank you to all of the Child Care Champion lawmakers for their tireless work in support of Vermonters this legislative session. We look forward to continuing to work together to build a child care system that prepares our youngest children for lifelong success, allows parents to fully participate in the workforce, and supports our state’s ability to thrive.