ARLINGTON, Texas — At the Cornerstone Academy in Arlington, children of working families have received care since 2007.
When the pandemic hit, the daycare center was at risk of closing, director Carla Smith told WFAA.
Federal funding from the Child Care Stabilization Grant Program allowed the center’s doors to remain open.
This Saturday, the pandemic-era federal funding, which has provided nearly $24 billion dollars to more than 200,000 daycare providers across the country, will expire.
“With that coming to an end, we can’t help parents anymore,” Smith said.
Smith said the funding was a lifeline during the pandemic, when the entire school only had six students.
“If the funding wasn’t here, I don’t know that we would have a school at all,” Smith said.
The funding allowed her to provide struggling families with free tuition, renovate classrooms, and add two teachers to each classroom. Before the funding, Smith’s early learning educators earned between $10-$12 an hour. Smith raised her staff’s wages to $18-$20 an hour with the help of federal funding.
“When we’re able to help these families out, it just keeps the entire county afloat,” Smith said.
In anticipation of the funding’s expiration, Smith’s center made the difficult decision to lay off a longtime employee. Employees will switch to four-hour workweeks and Smith and her assistant director are both taking a 40% pay cut.
Child Care Associates CEO Kara Waddell said an end to the funding will have ripple effects for an industry that faced challenges long before the pandemic. She anticipates several setbacks, including: staff shortages, low wages for educators and tuition costs have led to a strained system, Waddell said.
The Century Foundation estimates 70,000 child care programs across the country could be forced to close after the funding expires, and more than three million children are at risk of losing their spots in child care centers across the country.
“It’s a national challenge,” Waddell said. “Families simply cannot afford to pay a dime more, and the government most likely is not going to pay 100%. It puts more pressure on a very fragile childcare system already, and at some point, we need to be able to come up with some economic solutions.”
One potential solution? Waddell and Tarrant County leaders are piloting a new program. The Prime Early Learning Pilot Program involves 20 child care programs in Tarrant County. It uses an offset of public funding to pay child care educators $18 an hour. The goal is for wage increases to offset the cost of child care for children.
“If tuition has to keep going up, that means more families dropping out, and with more families dropping out, the school would have to close,” Smith said.
Smith said more funding and investing in quality early education is critical.
“It’s important, because children deserve it,” Smith said.