Child care is still an issue for Vermont voters, even after a year of Act 76
The Vermont Legislature last year passed a historic bill, that, for the first time, dedicates substantial state funding to child care.
But when we asked Vermonters what they wanted to hear from the candidates leading up to Election Day as part of our Citizens Agenda project, child care was still one of the issues on voter’s minds.
“For me, child care is my No. 1 priority,” said Susan McCaslin, one of the nearly 700 people who took part in Vermont Public’s Citizens Agenda project. “What we need is an infusion of young families in the state. And one of the essential things to attract them has to be affordable, dependable, good quality child care.”
Act 76 created a new payroll tax which lawmakers said would pump more than $100 million, annually, into the child care system.
With the new windfall, more families are receiving more subsidies.
The state is also paying programs at higher weekly rates to provide care.
Across the state, Act 76 has so far helped create 1,000 new child care spaces. That's according to the advocacy group Let’s Grow Kids.
And for the first time since 2018, according to the group, more child care centers opened than closed in Vermont.
McCaslin followed the child care legislation as it was debated in the Statehouse.
And while she recognizes how much the new law has helped, she says it’s still an issue she expects candidates to be talking about.
McCaslin says child care is an especially important issue during this election cycle, specifically because the new law is just underway.
She doesn’t want elected officials to put it on a back burner, because while Act 76 did inject tens of millions of dollars in its first year, McCaslin says it will take Vermont a long time to fully recover from the child care crisis that saw dozens of centers close over the past few years.
“It’s clear the free market can’t provide affordable, dependable child care,” McCaslin said. “And so the state has to come in and do some public investments. And I was delighted when last year the state did finally make a public investment in child care through Act 76. And I know that that’s a beginning.”
Jackie Myers, who has been running early child care programs around Bennington County for more than 30 years, said the funding from Act 76 helped her open a new infant-care center that serves 24 children who are younger than 1 year old.
“We had babies on our list, that were put on our list before they were even born, and we wouldn’t be able to get them in until preschool,” Myers said. “It’s sad. You know it’s hard when you’ve got a parent that has to go back to work and has nobody to care for their child.”
Caring for infants is labor intensive, and you need a big, clean space with a lot of cribs, and gates and toys.
Myers says before Vermont passed Act 76, the new early child care law, it would have been impossible to run the program.
“We would never be able to open an infant program here, there’s just no way it would sustain at all. Not even close,” Myers said.
Nate Simpson of Waterbury also said child care was an issue he wanted candidates to talk about when he filled out his Citizens Agenda form.
“Our issue was the availability,” Simpson said.
Just like every other industry in Vermont, child care needs more workers, and the public money alone cannot fully address the need to find more educators to take care of Vermont’s youngest citizens.
Simpson says it was a challenge finding a spot for his 3-year-old, and he bounced around three centers this summer before finally finding a stable place in Northfield.
While the new law has funded additional child care spots, Let’s Grow Kids says the state still needs up to 10,000 new slots to catch up from years of child care center closures.
“We’re both from Vermont, and we moved back from Salt Lake City to Rutland during COVID. And so kind of coming in and finding it as we needed it was really difficult because there’s so many waitlists,” Simpson said. “So it was always tricky kind of having to move around and then kind of having to find child care, what seemed like at the last minute.”
“I would love candidates, and I see that it’s happening, to be saying, ‘We’re not going to forget about child care because we passed a historic bill,’” said Let’s Grow Kids CEO Aly Richards. “We owe it to Vermonters to stay on it.”
Richards says since the new child care funding is tied to the payroll tax, there will be natural growth as wages naturally increase annually.
Still, she says there are big challenges in supporting career training, and improving benefits and health care for child care workers.
So Richards says she expects child care to be one of the top issues for candidates, and then elected lawmakers, to continue addressing.