Effective July 13, the Administration for Children and Families will several Biden-era that sought to create more predictable, reliable payments to childcare providers. These include paying providers based on a child’s enrollment, rather than their attendance, which protects them against financial losses from unplanned events such as illness and family travel, as well as making subsidy payments in advance, rather than reimbursing providers the following month.

Both practices help to stabilize the industry by giving programs consistent revenue that allow them to plan and budget month over month, providers and experts said. 

Although the requirements will be rescinded, states will still have the option to pay based on enrollment and in advance of services — just as families who pay privately for child care have long done. There is nothing in the new rules to prevent states from continuing or starting those payment practices, noted Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit that supports early childhood advocates across the 50 states. 

“It doesn’t require it, but it doesn’t prevent it from happening,” she said. “You can 100% still do it.”

But without the requirement, ����’s likely that some states will reverse course. Already, three states — , Ohio and — have paused efforts to implement or extend enrollment-based pay, noted Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

“It’s one of those things that, absent that requirement, and given the fiscal situation states are in, states are not going to prioritize these changes if they’re not required to,” said Hains, “and that’s going to have a negative impact on providers and, ultimately, families.”

Currently, about now pay providers based on enrollment, according to an analysis from the First Five Years Fund that was published in March, while the other half still pay based on attendance. At least 10 states are paying providers up front for childcare subsidies, rather than in arrears, according to policy tracking from NAEYC. 

The particulars of how and when a provider gets paid can seem like a technicality, but to an early care and education program operator, that may be the difference between financial solvency and ruin. 

The administration first announced these proposed rule changes in early January, before opening up the issue to public comments. NAEYC included more than a dozen provider voices in its to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ACF.

A program director in Louisiana explained why the Biden-era policies help to keep her in business.

“During cold and flu season, if childcare providers were only paid based on attendance rather than enrollment, many of us simply would not survive the winter,” the director wrote. “Most of our families have multiple children, and when one child gets sick, it often spreads through the entire household. Enrollment-based pay is the only model that reflects the real cost of maintaining stable staffing, ratios, and operations.”

A program director in Kansas wrote, “Childcare is a tough job. Providers don’t need any additional obstacles. … Having to wait for reimbursement for a month or more can have a significant impact on a provider’s financial well-being in their program.”

And a director in Maine pointed out that a child whose spot is funded by subsidies should not be treated any differently than one from a family who is paying private tuition. “We cannot predict attendance,” she wrote. 

The Maine director’s point is one that motivated the Biden administration’s 2024 rules, Hains said. The in 1990 establishing the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which authorizes the CCDF, sought to have states’ subsidy payment practices “reflect generally accepted payment practices of childcare providers” who receive payments privately from families, to maximize choices among low-income families seeking care, Hains explained. The Biden rules to get states back in compliance with that original intent. 

Stebbins, of the Alliance for Early Success, said she couldn’t think of a single other industry that operates in the way that early care and education does. 

“It’s Business 101,” she said. “I paid for two kids in childcare. I always paid in advance. I paid if they were sick or we went on vacation. Why is this such a big leap?”

Now that this issue is being returned to the states, she said, ����’s on policy advocates and the early childhood community to help make the case to state leaders why enrollment-based pay and prospective pay are so essential. 

“It’s good for the field … because it creates a stable, predictable source of income, and it is aligned with how private pay works in the industry,” Stebbins explained, laying out the argument. “It treats kids who are on subsidy — low-income children — just like everybody else.” 

Those outcomes, she added, have ripple effects across communities and entire states. 

“A stable industry is good for the kids and the programs. There’s less turnover and uncertainty about income,” she said. “It’s good for the state economy because it allows parents to work.”

On the other hand, attendance-based payments may disincentivize programs from accepting families who pay with subsidies altogether, said Casey Peeks, senior director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. 

The enrollment-based pay and prospective pay are only two of the “four critical levers to improving the sector” that the Trump administration is rolling back, Peeks said. The third is the use of grants and contracts to provide direct childcare services, which allow states to enter into agreements with providers to reserve slots for certain populations of children. The reversal of that practice may mean that some families, particularly those with infants and children with disabilities, could have more trouble finding slots for their child. And the final lever is capping the maximum amount a family can pay out-of-pocket for childcare, which the Biden-era rule set to 7% of household income, based on federal affordability standards. 

The co-pay limit isn’t perfect, Peeks acknowledged, but “it gives this peace of mind to know how much you’re going to pay,” she said. 

In Ohio, one of the that has not yet capped co-pays at 7%, the limit is 27% of income, which can be crushing for some families. 

“I think knowing how much of a burden this [childcare] expense is — it rivals mortgage payments and rent payments — to take away a lever that exists for affordability and offer no alternatives puts families who are already struggling in a really difficult spot,” Peeks said.

In 2024 alone, more than 6,000 early childhood educators in Wisconsin exited the field, representing about a quarter of the state’s overall child care workforce, according to a from the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports early childhood educators and the children they serve. 

Without qualified teachers to fill classrooms, most center-based programs are not able to enroll as many children as they can accommodate. As of October 2025, more than three-quarters of programs were under-enrolled, with the average program operating at only about 75% of their licensed capacity, according to the WECA study, which analyzed monthly data over the past five years that early education providers submitted to the state’s Department of Children and Families. 

That translates to more than 33,000 licensed but unfilled child care slots across the state. To make those seats available, the state would need an estimated 4,000 additional educators.

Wisconsin’s high staff turnover and worsening shortages have strained its child care capacity, leaving the state with the space — but not the teachers — to meet the needs of families.

There’s clear data proving that this paradox is playing out in Wisconsin. There’s also ����’s other states. It’s not surprising, in a nation where the average wage for early childhood educators around $15 per hour, employer-provided benefits are rare, and nearly half the field some sort of public assistance. 

“We have a precarious workforce,” acknowledged Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America, a national organization that promotes high-quality, affordable child care. 

In Wisconsin, where the last pandemic-era relief payments are due to this June, that has perhaps never been more true.

“Staffing has always been a challenge, but it continues to get worse,” said Paula Drew, director of early care and education policy and research at WECA. “This business model is not focused on what it costs to provide high-quality care to children. It’s based on what parents can afford to pay. [Providers have to cover] rent, liability insurance, food. What’s left is what goes to staff.”

In Wisconsin, early childhood educators earn an average of just over , while the statewide median wage across occupations is close to $23 an hour. The result is a workforce that can barely make ends meet. 

Across the country, fast food restaurants, gas stations and retail stores have since the pandemic. Early care and education programs, in many instances, are no longer trying to compete with their prices — they simply can’t afford to. They’re relying, instead, on people who love young children so much that they are willing to forego financial stability. 

Drew pointed out that in the K-12 education sector, pay is modest, but public school employees often get rewarded with great benefits. 

“There isn’t something like that in early childhood,” Drew said. 

She added: “It’s great to watch a lesson in circle time play out, to see children use a lesson you just taught them. But when you worry about how you’re going to pay for groceries or get to your second job, there really isn’t something that helps you stay.”

In interviews, several providers in Wisconsin shared that they have lost exceptional teachers to jobs in unrelated fields, strictly because of compensation. 

Virginia Maus, co-owner of Joyful Beginnings Academy in Hortonville, said her program lost 18 teachers in 2025, out of a staff of 38. 

Every single one of them left for higher pay, she said, and 80% of them left early education altogether. (Maus has a day job as a data scientist, so naturally, she collects and analyzes the center’s data on staff turnover.) 

“They all came to me and said, ‘I got this offer,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t match that,’” she explained.

One went to McDonald’s. Another, who Maus said was a “really, really great teacher who really connected with the children,” left for a job at a factory. 

“It’s really saddening, when they’re really talented people and the children adore them — to think she’s now standing in front of a machine,” Maus said. 

Julia Wilridge, who runs Lov ‘N Care Academy, a child care center nearly 150 miles away, in Kenosha, has also seen many teachers leave the industry for better-paying jobs elsewhere. The cost of living has gone up, she pointed out. Pay for unskilled jobs has gone up. But wages for early childhood educators? They’ve remained stubbornly low — at least in her program. 

“Young kids are getting jobs at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, getting $16 to $18 an hour,” she said, “and we’re still offering $12 and $13 an hour.”

Wilridge is in the process of increasing her base pay to staff, out of necessity. Assistant teachers without experience would start at $13 an hour, instead of $12, while lead teachers would start at $15 an hour, up from $14. 

Part of the challenge in Wisconsin, providers shared, is that the state’s child care quality rating system, YoungStar, when more teachers have advanced certificates and degrees, but these programs aren’t making enough money to pay degree-holding teachers what they want.

Wilridge, for example, needs to hire a new teacher to lead her 4-year-old classroom, but that teacher has to have an undergraduate degree. 

“I already know I’m going to run into an issue,” she said, noting that the last time she was hiring for a similar role, candidates all wanted at least $20 an hour. “None of our staff make $20 an hour. I’m going to run into a problem getting people to accept a job paying $16 or $17. I don’t blame them, but I know that’s going to be an issue.” 

Annette Larson, director of Coulee Children’s Center in La Crosse, said her program closed the toddler classroom she was teaching in after she stepped into the director position there three years ago. They haven’t been able to find a teacher to help reopen it, since that person needs to have a degree. 

“You don’t find a lot of four-year-degree people who want to work in child care due to what you get paid in child care,” Larson said bluntly. “That’s a lot of the issue.”

Her center is licensed for 125 children but currently only serves 70, in part due to staffing, she said. 

Child care programs can hire people without experience and education, but then they have to ensure those teachers obtain the required coursework. Even assistant teachers are required to take one or two classes — depending on the age group they teach. That’s a financial investment and time commitment for programs, which are already just scraping by. 

Hedgepeth, at Child Care Aware, described teachers as the “linchpin” of early care and education programs. “It’s critical to figure out what we need to do [to keep them] in our programs and fill vacancies when we have them,” she said. 

Drew, who led the WECA study and plans to continue to track statewide staffing data, emphasized the importance of this issue. 

“Workforce is everything. That is child care supply, child development, child care quality,” she said. “One of the items on the list to do to improve child care infrastructure is shoring up our workforce.”

Milo has been coming to work with Wiseman since he was 8 weeks old. He started in the infant classroom, and now he’s in a classroom for 1-year-olds. Wiseman said having Milo in a nearby classroom with teachers she knows and trusts has been a great relief.

“I knew I wouldn’t stop working after I got pregnant and I couldn’t imagine not working, but I also couldn’t imagine putting him in a different space than where I was,” said Wiseman. “It helps to not have to be paying for it.”

Milo’s child care tuition is covered by (CCAP), which was to employees working in a licensed child care program, like Wiseman, the benefit of free child care. Under the program, anyone who works for or more as a licensed child care provider in the state of Kentucky is automatically eligible for full child care assistance, regardless of their total household income. The program was designed to help recruit and retain child care workers amid facing the industry as temporary child care relief funds from the American Rescue Plan were coming to an end.

“The purpose of this program was to increase staffing in child care programs when wage inflation was causing child care providers to leave for more lucrative positions in retail and hospitality industries,” said Sarah Vanover, policy and research director at Kentucky Youth Advocates. Vanover was previously the director of Kentucky’s Division of Child Care and was the force behind expanding CCAP’s traditional income-based subsidies to include early childhood educators. Vanover points out that in the U.S., child care workers make , and that low wages make recruitment and retention of staff a constant struggle. 

Kathy Donelan, the owner of Aunt Kathy’s Child Care & Preschool, knows all too well that would-be hires can easily go to a nearby Amazon warehouse, or even the gas station across the street, and make more money “doing less work” there than working in child care. “It takes a real special person to come here,” Donelan said. Before CCAP covered the child care tuition for her educators, Donelan had always extended the offer for each of her educators to enroll their own children in the program, but the teachers who utilized this benefit would earn a reduced wage. In 2022, when the CCAP assistance kicked in for her teachers, Donelan was able to change her policy so that her employees could get free child care and get their regular salary.

Stephanie Milleck, the director of Aunt Kathy’s, said she saw her salary go up when the CCAP began covering the cost of her daughter’s child care. Both of her kids are now in elementary school, but she is still able to take advantage of the CCAP benefit during the summer when they participate in a summer camp program at Aunt Kathy’s. Milleck works with Donelan on hiring for new positions and says the free child care makes the job more attractive to candidates with young kids and helps with retention. “If ����’s a mom of a new baby, we know we will have them for at least five years,” Milleck said. 

New data provided by Beth Fisher from Kentucky’s Division of Child Care shows that as of 2025, 5,510 families have utilized the program that provides free child care for child care providers, and that has included 9,657 children. Another 4,000 child care providers applied for the program, and were found to be income-eligible for child care subsidies for low-wage workers, and Vanover explained they were routed to that program instead. 

For Megan Senn, a preschool teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, this program has been “life changing.” Senn, who has a master’s degree in early childhood education, said she loved teaching but couldn’t make ends meet on the low wages she received when she was a Head Start teacher a decade ago. At the time, she was making less than $30,000 a year working full time, and had to rely on food stamps. In 2016, she moved into a series of management roles at Head Start and later the YMCA, where she oversaw six child care centers, at a significantly higher salary. She was making over $70,000 a year, but Senn said she missed working directly with kids in the classroom. 

It was CCAP that allowed Senn to go back to teaching. She found an early childhood teaching position that would pay her close to $50,000. She estimated that the cost of child care would be between $20,000 to 25,000 a year for her twins. “If you take that off the table, I could take a pay cut and go back to the classroom,” she said. Senn began working at Virginia Chance, an independent school in the Louisville area. When her twins turned 2 years old, CCAP paid the full cost for them to attend preschool there.

Being a teacher and being able to afford to send her own children to the same school she teaches in, has been game-changing,  said Senn. “They get a beautiful education and I don’t have to think about tuition costs and worry if I am bringing in enough money.”

The program is showing results because the math makes sense. Vanover explains that best practice is to have . “If the state pays the child care expense for one of those ten children in order to attract the child care provider, that still opens spots for nine more children who will have parents and caregivers working in the community and providing income tax,” Vanover said. 

have seen the success of Kentucky’s program in retaining child care providers and shoring up their early childhood workforce and are trying to follow suit. In August, Rhode Island launched a based on Kentucky’s model and Vanover said she’s been invited to speak to the Ohio Legislature about setting up a similar program, and has received interest from Utah as well.

While the program has garnered attention for its impact, there are still some areas for improvement. Although the ����’s benefitted a majority of licensed child care centers in the state, not all early educators are eligible. Providers who care for their own children in a family child care program that they own are excluded. Vanover explained that the federal laws governing child care payments through Child Care and Development Block Grants from receiving payment to care for their own child, and Kentucky has modeled their program based on those same rules.

But many home providers go into child care because they want to care for their own kids, in addition to those in the community, said Natalie Renew, director of Home Grown, a national collaborative supporting home-based child care providers. “If [owners of] home-based providers could participate in this policy, it would support supply building and encourage more start up,” Renew said. As it stands, the policy is “prejudiced against home-based providers because staff in centers can work in the same place as their children, but those [who run] home-based care cannot.” 

“It’s challenging,” said Vanover, in addressing the ways owners of home-based programs are excluded from the program. She said the legislature is considering modifying the program so that more home-based providers may be able to access the benefit in certain instances, for example, if their child attends a licensed after-care program at another location. 

Some providers have also critiqued the enrollment process. Donelan said four out of her 24 employees are enrolled in CCAP, adding that a fifth staff member has been trying to access the benefit for over a year, but has been unable to do so due to bureaucratic hurdles. One challenge is that although the program doesn’t require income eligibility, applicants must provide extensive paperwork requiring up-to-date paystubs and income verification for all adults living in their home — and any delay in processing the applications requires that new paystubs are submitted. Donelan said she’s had to intervene with CCAP on behalf of teachers during delays. 

Another issue is that providers who have the summer off must withdraw from the program at the end of May and reapply in July. Senn’s school closes during the summer, and she said the reapplication  process takes about two weeks and involves multiple follow up phone calls adding that it can take up to two and a half hours to get through to someone.  

But this July could be the last time Senn needs to reapply since her 4-year-old twins will move into kindergarten.“I am truly thankful and it could bring me to tears how this [program] has just helped me. We have quality teachers that want to be in the classroom but choose not to be because it doesn’t bring enough to the table for their family,” she said.  “It’s heartbreaking because we need it so badly. Every state should have something like this.”

Keeping to this ambitious timeline has depended on more than picking a location and making sure the facility meets regulatory standards. The initiative’s success depends on building a strong, sustainable workforce. It’s not just finding talented, certified early educators and getting them to show up on opening day, but creating a plan to retain them year over year. 

In light of an uncertain economy and a number of systemic factors, achieving this goal may be easier said than done. “We recognize many organizations have experienced challenges in attracting educators. Fewer people are entering the field, which makes it even more important to invest in developing and supporting those who choose this career,” said Beth Kroutch, human resources director for Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning. 

With three centers already open and three set to open by fall 2027, Kroutch stressed the importance of planning ahead and forging partnerships. One approach her team has taken, she said, “is to reach out proactively to local colleges and universities in advance to talk about our organization, engage in a partnership and make a connection that hopefully shows benefits to both parties.” In addition to developing partnerships with local higher education institutions, the Catherine Hershey Schools have an internship program for high school students that offers a pathway to employment. She also described other recruitment strategies such as social media and career fairs. 

Kroutch is right. Other early learning leaders are feeling the pain, too. “I spend most of my waking hours contemplating this topic,” said Rhian Allvin, founder of , a network of three centers — two in northern Virginia and one in Washington, D.C. It was never easy to attract talent to a profession with low wages, poor or nonexistent benefits and minimal opportunities for career advancement. And ����’s a challenge to keep early educators in the field. Physical demands, long hours and emotional stress of the work all contribute to a in early childhood education.

A dramatic intensification of immigration enforcement has exacerbated these challenges. A considerable segment of the early care and education workforce are immigrants — at least 21% nationwide, according to published by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley. With the of protections limiting federal immigration arrests around sensitive sites, about immigration raids on schools and child care programs have escalated and many providers are faced with difficult decisions like .

Felicia Jones Taylor, co-founder of , a consultancy that provides technical assistance to child care centers, underscored the impact of immigration policies on early educators. “Immigrants came from their countries with transferable skills. They have experience working with children, but there are barriers preventing them from participating in this workforce,” she said. 

More than other workplaces, child care centers are protective communities that support kids and families, said Lauren Hogan, managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). When educators are afraid, it affects the whole community.

Amid major workforce challenges, developing creative approaches to recruiting and retaining qualified child care staff has become increasingly important, early learning leaders said. Wages came up again and again as the most powerful recruitment tool. The child care , which is predominantly female and often women of color, has long endured . Unless and until things change, compensation will remain a leading reason why ����’s hard to attract new talent, and why some experienced providers for higher-paying jobs. Caitlin McLean, a senior research specialist at CSCCE, summarized the problem: “You’ve invested that money in training people to work with kids and who probably would like to work with kids, but they end up leaving.” While the profession is rewarding, she noted, it is also demanding, and the supports that might keep them on the job aren’t always readily available.

of child care providers are considering leaving the workforce. that increasing pay reduces turnover and some programs have raised wages. The , a child care program that arose in Austin, Texas, in 2018, with a drop-in care model to offer flexibility for families, pays its educators $28 per hour, according to the center’s founder Choquette Hamilton. That’s nearly twice , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To make this level of compensation possible, Hamilton said the center uses a braided funding model including support from the city of Austin’s . 

The choice to prioritize compensation was intentional. “That rate was a decision from the beginning,” said Hamilton. “The educators do feel respected and valued. All of our recruitment has come from word of mouth, so they definitely tell their friends, but sadly, it still isn’t enough, because the work is not full-time at that rate.” She explained that many of their educators work part time and are gig workers who piece together their livelihoods working multiple jobs. 

While compensation is key, leaders said a thoughtful recruitment and retention strategy goes beyond the paycheck. “There are lots of ways that directors demonstrate, in partnership with the families, just how much they really appreciate the work that the early childhood educators are doing,” explained NAEYC’s Hogan. She cited Children’s Village, a nonprofit preschool in Philadelphia, as an example of a program illustrating that appreciation by for employees including health care, vacation, sick leave and a retirement plan. “Most of our educators do not have access to that,” she said. “That demonstrates caring for them in a real way, thinking about their long-term well-being.” Hogan also pointed to the for child care workers to access child care for their own children, and said, “It has definitely had an impact on recruitment and retention, helping staff come in and stay and feel supported.” 

In addition to improving working conditions and pulling levers that make the field more hospitable, building a robust pipeline of candidates is also crucial. Keeping a full staff in place often means recruiting more people than you think you might need, but even in the rare instances when a child care program is able to offer and sustain higher pay and good benefits for employees, there are other factors that make it hard to hire and keep employees. Candidates are juggling personal and professional stressors that often shape their decisions. 

Allvin described frequent instances in which an educator will get through the screening part of the hiring process at Brynmor, but fail to show up for the interview. “We don’t ever hear from them again,” she says. “It happens all the time.” 

One point all leaders were sure to make is that community is key to retention, but building it takes time. The first year is critical, leaders said. Once staff see the investment, culture and support, they’re more likely to stay long term.

“You lose people mostly within the first six months,” said Allvin. Keeping the turnover rate under 20% per year has been a steady challenge. She expressed relief that after two years at her flagship site in Lorton, Virginia, the center finally has no openings to fill.

Kroutch said that because there are a number of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, her team has been able to show potential staff members for new locations what the culture is like by inviting them to open house events at existing sites. Meeting candidates in person is important, Kroutch said. It’s a first step in building community. 

In the face of staffing challenges, many child care professionals who are responsible for hiring and maintaining staff, have adopted an all-of-the-above approach, and have maintained optimism in spite of the odds. “Just because the system is broken,” Hogan mused, “does not mean that it is beyond fixing.” 

Over the years, she’s lobbied her state legislature to secure funding to support children with disabilities and worked with local officials to . When COVID-19 hit, she co-founded the Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Network (WECAN), an advocacy organization focused on increasing public investment in early childhood that grew to include 2,000 child care providers, educators and parents in Wisconsin. 

During COVID, she relied on to keep her doors open, but when those dollars finally dried up for good this past summer, the economics of running a family child care center in rural Wisconsin no longer worked. After 18 years in business, she on Aug. 29, 2025. 

Four days later, she filed to . 

She’s not alone. A number of child care providers have become involved with advocacy efforts, whether working with statehouses to add money for child care to state budgets or collaborating with local governments to coordinate distribution of funds — and some of them have gained the skills, confidence and passion to run for office.

Buoyed by her work organizing providers to take action on child care, Hendrickson said she feels prepared to explain how and why allocations from the state budget affect providers’ livelihood, and why child care plays a critical role in her state’s rural economy. When she goes out into the community to talk with people, from firefighters to farmers, they consistently bring up child care as one of the barriers they face. “It’s coming up organically,” said Hendrickson. “Which is telling me ����’s really an issue.”

For BriTanya Brown, owner of a family child care program in Texas, it was organizing two successful ballot measures on child care in her state that motivated her to seek office. The first was a statewide property tax measure designed to offer child care providers a break by waiving property taxes and the second was a in Travis County, Texas to leverage property taxes to make child care more affordable for residents. 

Brown, who began working in child care when she was 13 years old alongside both of her grandmothers who cared for neighborhood children, opened her own program in 2019 after her twins were born. That same year, she began organizing family child care providers to send in stakeholder comments and lobby state legislators on reimbursement rates. “We do the same work as centers and abide by the same rules. We wanted pay parity,” she explained. 

Then, in 2021, Brown created and organized a , an event which has since become the largest one-day work stoppage in child care organizing history. 

Over the past few years, Brown said she hit a number of roadblocks including licensing obstacles and financial challenges with subsidies. She ultimately had to close down her family child care in July of 2025.

“It was devastating,” Brown said, “but that loss became the catalyst for my advocacy. I had seen, up close, how fragile our care infrastructure truly is.”

In August, when Rep. Stan Lambert announced after serving four terms in the Texas Statehouse, Brown jumped at the chance to . “I’m a new face, but I’m a trusted face in my community so I think I really have a chance,” she said. 

***

Child care issues gained political momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the U.S. got a crash course on the importance of child care to its economy, and the sector continued to garner public interest through the 2024 presidential race. by New America found that by 2025, mentions of child care in the media are twice as high, on average, than they were before COVID, with a spike during the 2024 election. As the child care crisis continues to be part of the news cycle and political discourse, “����’s not surprising that the groups would recruit and support people who have a distinct expertise in this area, and would bring a unique and important perspective to the table,” said Kelly Dittmar, the director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

Erin Vilardi, CEO of Vote Run Lead, a nonprofit that recruits and trains women on the campaign trail, said issues surrounding child care are often an impetus for candidates to run. “Half of the women who come through our program are parents,” she said. “The child care debate is one of the top three things we are talking about.” 

Brown and Hendrickson aren’t alone in leveraging their child care backgrounds to run for office. Shaolin Brown operates a registered family child care program from her home and is running this November against a longtime incumbent for Mercer County Clerk in New Jersey, hoping to address child care capacity limits and licensing requirements, which she said can help families know which providers are meeting state safety guidelines. 

And a number of existing public servants have paved the way for these candidates by successfully drawing from their experiences working in early care and education to become legislators. Sen. Patty Murray, for seven years before becoming a state senator and then a U.S. senator. Alabama Sen. Kirk Hatcher is the ; Aletheia McCaskill, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates runs a and has been a licensed family child care provider since 1998; and Rebecca Dow, a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives, founded a child care center, where she worked for ten years before retiring in 2019.

Both Hendrickson and BriTanya Brown said the unique insights they’ve gained into families with young children have helped shape their platforms, and the communities they’ve developed through their child care work have been crucial as they run for office.

“I now have a huge group of people to support me. Most can’t donate, but they can make calls,” Hendrickson said. “This helps me be more inclined to do it. It’s not as scary when you know the people who have your back.”

Hendrickson said the power of her personal story of hardship resonates with voters, regardless of political affiliation. She speaks openly of a time when she had young children at home and her husband lost his job. “We had to rely on food stamps and BadgerCare,” she said, referring to Wisconsin’s state health insurance for low-income families. It was her family child care program that kept her family afloat, and it was also what brought her to advocating for change. 

“People feel ashamed because of the way the system is set up — they feel like failures. But the system has been created so that it doesn’t work for us and it exploits women and young children,” Hendrickson said. 

Running for office, she added, is “part of my journey of being a family child care professional.” 

In a published with RAND Corporation this year, the at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa examined the wages, working conditions and benefit challenges for the ECE workforce in Hawaii. The project was funded primarily by a grant from the Early Educator Investment Collaborative. Researchers found that since the pandemic, it became more difficult to recruit teachers and retain them, according to Dr. Theresa Lock, director of the Hawaii Early Childhood Educator Excellence and Equity Project, who commissioned the study.

“Some of them, if they had an associate degree in early childhood education, could actually make even more if they went to work at a service industry job like a restaurant or even a fast food restaurant,” Lock said. “We found that that was the case, that some of our folks were actually leaving the field. So we wanted to really capture that in the data.”

The report also examined policy options in other states that employed both long-term and short-term strategies to improve recruitment and retention in the ECE field. Although Hawaii has increased investments in early child care education, the current level of funding has fallen short of what is needed to expand access to programs, the report notes.

Like their colleagues in the continental United States, ECE educators in Hawaii are often paid low wages and see little professional advancement in their careers. That low pay translates to a broader lack of respect for their profession, according to the RAND report.

“We work hard. And we try to get our children successful to get to kindergarten. But we still look like glorified babysitters,” one provider said in a focus group.

But Hawaii residents also face unique challenges; the state has the highest cost of living in the country, according to a recent ranking from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. Wages and salaries for early educators in Hawaii are not competitive with jobs requiring similar education or experience, the RAND report notes citing Bureau of Labor Statistic data.

“Median hourly wages, estimated at approximately $13–$17 per hour, are well below the living wage estimate of at least $28.50 per hour for the state,” the report states. “Although median wages for child care workers in Hawaii exceed the national median, the pattern is reversed once the high cost of living in the state is accounted for.”

Hawaii’s isolated location outside the mainland also means that the pool of ECE workers is not as flexible as other states, said Lynn Karoly, a RAND Corporation Senior Economist and professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School.

“If you were looking in other parts of the continental U.S. where people might move in and out more readily, you can expand the supply of your workforce more easily,” Karoly said. “So, when there are shortages of staff, they’re particularly hard to sell because it’s not as easy just to advertise, ‘We’ve got great positions and we pay well.’ You’ve got to move to Hawaii…that puts pressure on the ability to have the workforce that’s needed.”

The islands’ demographics are also distinct from their mainland counterparts and its workforce should reflect that diversity, including its native populations, the report notes. That means knowledge of the Hawaiian language and culture may also factor as a prerequisite for an ECE position. Hawaii could look to states like Oregon, which awarded grants to providers using an equity-based formula that accounted for underserved families, including culturally diverse families and those who receive subsidies, the authors wrote.

“There’s a real commitment to ensuring that programs in these early years are culturally relevant, with an increased emphasis on learning the native Hawaiian language,” Karoly said. “So that also means that you’re really looking for people who have that kind of training and backgrounds to serve in those roles, which, you know, is somewhat unique from what communities might be looking for in other parts of the country.”

Hawaii’s preschool infrastructure is one of the most tenuous in the nation. In 2016, just 1 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in state-funded pre-K in Hawaii, according to a report from Rutgers’ National Institute for Early Education Research. The existing issues with recruitment and retention have only worsened since the pandemic. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, nearly 40 percent of child care providers shuttered across the country and in 2021, state-funded preschool enrollment dropped for the first time in two decades, according to the .

“It’s already fragile, but I think it became even more fragmented and broken than ever before,” Lock said. “What we found even before the pandemic, we knew the wages were lower, especially in our private programs.”

The condition of preschools and the work environment for early child care educators is starting to get more attention among state politicians. In her , Hawaii’s newly-elected Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke singled out the high cost of tuition as another barrier to a coveted few preschool slots in Hawaii. Luke noted that the Hawaii legislature already provided funding for 2,000 to 4,000 new seats. While Luke has committed to expanding access to preschool, no one has identified state investments for the workforce yet, Lock said.

Successful Policies Ripe for Replication?

As part of their study, the authors looked at what policies have worked in other states to boost recruitment and retention. In particular, a recent tax increase in the District of Columbia drew their attention. In 2021, the in support of a tax increase on those earning $250,000 or more per year. The tax was expected to garner $100 million in revenue to fund early childhood education from birth to age three, Washington City Paper reported.

Karoly noted that D.C. and Hawaii’s ECE sectors are similar sizes and share challenges around compensating their early childhood workforce and getting a high-quality early learning opportunity. At the same time, she acknowledged that while the progressive tax solution worked for D.C., regressive taxes might garner more support in other states.

The D.C. Council also established the Early Childhood Educator Equitable Compensation Task Force, which provides recommendations on how to implement an employee compensation scale for early childhood development providers. In 2018, the D.C. Council passed the Birth-to-Three for All D.C. Act, which requires the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to create compensation scales that ensure compensation parity with D.C. public schools teachers. While the pay scale was still under development, D.C. distributed pay supplements to early educators.

Researchers also examined wage programs in North Carolina, Tennessee and Illinois. The COVID-19 stimulus package pumped $805 million into the North Carolina Child Care Stabilization Grants, which aim to improve recruitment and retention. Since the grant program launched, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services distributed more than $335 million to nearly 4,000 child care centers, . In March 2021, Illinois launched a three-year pilot program that provided $3.8 million per year to hire additional staff or increase the salaries of existing staff for 35 child care centers in rural counties. Illinois drew funding for the pilot from both the federal Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five and state child care funds.

Salary scales and compensation parity work offer long term, sustainable solutions, while the bonus programs have often prevented the existing workforce from looking for jobs elsewhere that pay the same or more, Karoly said.

“The problem with these wage bonuses is that because they don’t change the underlying base compensation, they can easily go away and you’re back to where you are,” she said. “It becomes kind of a temporary fix, but they also used it as a way to make the transition to this approach of having a salary scale.”

Legislators in Hawaii are already looking at wage pilots or bonus programs of their own. In early 2022, Hawaii State Senator Bennette Misalucha introduced two bills aimed at improving child care worker retention. The first bill, , would authorize the Department of Human Services to require staff of licensed and registered early childhood programs to provide specific information each year to the Department’s Early Childhood Workforce Registry. Misalucha’s other bill, , would use department of human services funds to establish a one-year child care worker subsidy pilot program to help retain the existing workforce.

SB2701 failed, but advocates plan on taking up similar bills again during the legislative session in January, Lock said. She hopes the report is the first step toward more concrete efforts to improve ECE worker compensation in Hawaii.

“The vision for our state is that every child should benefit from high quality programs that are supported by a well-prepared, well-compensated early care and education workforce,” Lock said. “And it’s going to take time.”

• Lilia Vergara, director of human resources at
• Alessandra Lezama, founder and CEO of
• Laura Kaloi, partner at
• Abby McCloskey, founder and principal at

Here are our top takeaways:

1. Child care is on everyone’s minds. Oldham said she’s never seen this much focus on the issue. Citing the Center for American Progress’s , she noted the particularly steep decline in small, family-run care businesses even before Covid. While noting that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to fix the problem, Oldham said that employers are trying new approaches and the media is reporting on the crisis like never before, even while parents are still wrestling with what’s on the horizon. Lezama, who invoked her own experience as a single mom as the genesis of TOOTRiS, noted a groundswell of enthusiasm for reinventing child care, making it convenient, affordable and on demand. She called child care “the glue that holds communities together.”

2. Businesses are stepping up. Well, some are. For example, Dr. Bronner’s, the organic products manufacturer based in Vista, California, has about half of its 280 employees working on site and half working remotely. Some have part-time or nontraditional shifts, and the TOOTRiS platform offers flexible child care solutions, which are subsidized by the company. Lezama praised Dr. Bronner’s for getting the most out of their workforce by recognizing that family supports make better workers, while Vergara noted the impact on retention—which, considering it can cost 150% of a salary to replace an employee—profoundly affects the bottom line. Solving child care jams reduces anxiety and contributes to overall job satisfaction.

3. Re-engaging moms is a priority. The trend of women leaving the workforce during the pandemic is making it harder for businesses to attract talent. that women lost 140,000 net jobs in December 2020 alone, with Black and Latina women hit hardest, while a found 28% of women (compared to 10% of men) with kids under 18 in the household have temporarily or permanently left the workforce to become a primary caregiver to children. Making child care more affordable is a big part of bringing women back to work; , about 55% of families report spending at least $10,000 a year on child care.

4. Don’t expect much progress at the federal level. “Child care is a workforce issue, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum,” Oldham maintained. Kaloi said that both sides of the aisle recognize that U.S. companies need to stay competitive and that millennials expect more from their employers, and yet bipartisan momentum hasn’t materialized for sweeping, sustained change.

5. States can lead the way. Given the federal paralysis, Kaloi said states have an opportunity to build programs that expand the pipeline of child care providers, which could make their services more affordable. “There is agreement,” she said, “that we don’t have the workforce we need.” McCloskey said she sees hope in using technology to make finding child care easier without jeopardizing quality. She’s also an advocate of reducing excessive regulations and elevating solutions that maximize parent choice.