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Guest Commentary April 22, 2002
Helping Parents with Quality and Affordable Child Care
The Honorable Olympia Snowe
There is an epidemic in our educational system and it begins before many children even set foot into a kindergarten classroom for the first time. Too many American children are without adequate early childhood care, preventing them from learning the basic skills necessary to begin the process of learning.
It has been six years since Congress set out to "end welfare as we know it," and our efforts have been met with success. In this short amount of time, we have seen remarkable progress that has increased levels of self-sufficiency for lower-income American families. Mothers and fathers are back at work, and welfare rolls have fallen by more than half. As these parents return to work, however, the need for affordable child care rises. In America today, 65 percent of mothers with children under the age of six are working parents—meaning 14 million American children are placed in some sort of child care arrangement on a regular basis. While programs exist to help in supplying such care, they are underfunded, with only 12 to 15 percent of eligible children receiving the assistance for which they are qualified. In 2000, one-third of states had waiting lists for those seeking assistance, resulting in unmet needs for over 100,000 children.
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Finding affordable childcare is a dilemma that hits close to home for many Mainers. Last month, Sheila Merkinson of Kennebunk testified before a Senate subcommittee that child care costs for her two-year-old son absorbed almost half of her weekly income. Even though she is eligible for federal and state aid to help with her child care costs, she receives no assistance because there are simply not enough resources to go around.
To address this issue, I joined last week with Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), in introducing the 2002 Access to High Quality Child Care Act. Our legislation offers the promise of increased access to child care for working families, as well as increased quality of that care. We utilized this two-pronged approach with the belief that improving quality of care without increasing funding, or conversely, increasing funding without improving quality, would only threaten to diminish the pool of potential child care providers for these families.
In writing this legislation, I also worked to ensure parental choice in child care. Parents know better than anyone what environment is best for their children. The Dodd-Snowe bill supports parental choice, while providing states with guidelines to help child care providers improve the quality of care they offer. Specifically, it would encourage states to establish training standards, just as they are required to do now for other health and safety positions. It would go beyond CPR and first aid to include training in the social, emotional, physical and cognitive needs of children and the preparation of students for the challenges of reading, speaking, and writing. Under our legislation, which also reauthorizes the Child Care and Development Block Grant, states would receive assistance in increasing salaries and benefits for caregivers, early childhood development programs, and the lowering of co-payments for families struggling to make ends meet.
The 2002 Access to High Quality Child Care Act will help parents like Sheila Merkinson progress toward their goal of self-sufficiency, preventing child care costs from serving as a family "budget buster" that could otherwise force a retreat to welfare for many American families.
Olympia Snowe, a Republican, is a U.S. Senator from Maine. The above commentary has been adapted from a weekly column Sen. Snowe issued, April 19, 2002. To contact her, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
