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The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how critical child care is for families while also highlighting and exacerbating the existing inequities in the sector. Throughout these challenges, child care providers caring for school-age children have adapted their operations to accommodate remote and hybrid k-12 learning options so parents can continue working while children are learning.
However, this is not a pandemic problem alone. The need for care for school-age children existed long before the pandemic—especially for parents who work nontraditional hours. Even as schools are beginning to reopen, policymakers need to continue investing in school-age care to meet families’ needs and address the long-standing inequities that children, families, and providers have faced.
Today, CLASP’s Alyssa Fortner, Alycia Hardy, and Stephanie Schmit released a fact sheet detailing the importance of significant and sustained direct spending for school-age child care. School-Age Child Care: Overlooked and Under-resourced highlights a new CLASP analysis estimating that it would cost between $48.4 billion and $79.6 billion to reach all school-age children eligible through the Child Care and Development Block Grant. And the system would need additional funding to provide equitable access to stable, affordable, sustainable, and quality child care programs to meet the urgent child care needs of families not currently eligible for CCDBG.
The authors outline numerous viable and meaningful proposals currently on the table. These bold proposals would have a tremendous, positive impact on school-age children’s access to care. Policymakers must continue making large-scale investments in the sector to ensure that all children, including school-age children, can access the care they need. By prioritizing these significant investments, policymakers can support the establishment of a child care system that will support workers employed in millions of new good-paying jobs, enable parents--especially mothers--to participate in the labor force, advance gender and racial equity, lay a strong foundation for children’s development, and support economic growth.
If you have any questions, please contact Stephanie Schmit at [email protected].
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