was originally reported by Lauren Nutall of .

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — In early December, drilling resumed near Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

Newly installed gas wells dot property at 2020 S. Watson Road, less than one mile from the day care. One day in December, the sound of fracking machinery was so cacophonous that children couldn’t play outdoors.

For gas companies and stakeholders, the project is . But many Arlington residents and experts say it could come at the expense of the community��— especially its children.

In January 2025, the Arlington City Council unanimously approved a permit allowing French oil and gas company TotalEnergies to install 10 new gas wells in East Arlington, which has a heavy concentration of Black and Latinx residents. It marked the first time in over a decade that the city council approved a permit for a new drill site after years of community opposition.

Named Maverick, the new site also lies near three schools — Johns Elementary, Adams Elementary and Thornton Elementary. Five wells owned by the same company already occupy the plot of land near the new drilling site, which the company has owned since 2008.

Hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — is used to extract gas by pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals into bedrock. Texas policymakers have lauded the activity as a boon to local communities, garnering $2.48 billion in state tax revenue in 2025, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Arlington is choked with hundreds of these gas wells. The city, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, is a modern-day Golconda. ��

But fracking has drawn sharp criticism from health experts, who say it could be linked to severe conditions like preterm births, congenital anomalies, lung diseases and childhood cancers.

The practice has also elicited backlash because of its role in accelerating the global climate crisis through greenhouse gas emissions. TotalEnergies has been embroiled in legal controversies for years, and its troubles have mounted in recent months. , brought on by a coalition of French environmental groups and more than a dozen municipal authorities.

The company has rejected proposed limits to its fossil fuel production. “It makes no sense at all to prevent TotalEnergies [from] producing oil and gas that the global energy system still uses today,” it “The courtroom is not the right place to advance the energy transition.”

The 19th interviewed Arlington residents about the impact fracking has had on their lives. They shared their fears about their grandchildren’s health, their experiences living in neighborhoods impacted by fracking and their reservations about TotalEnergies expanding operations in the city.

Devastated residents throughout Arlington

Ingrid Kelley, 69, has grown tired of the gas wells sprouting throughout North Texas. Several sit less than a mile from her house in East Arlington, and a pungent lingering scent of sulfur and something else that she can only describe as “rotten” has settled into her neighborhood. She fears what might happen to her 4-year-old grandson, who lives with her and attends Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

“I can’t project and trace what all is going to affect him and all those that live around there and all those that are around these sites,” she said. “It’s very hard to project what’s going to happen, how many people are going to have increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, cardiac disease — all the things that go along with being premature or having congenital heart disease that affect you the rest of your life.”

Her grandson — who was born in Arlington with a congenital heart disease — has had to undergo intermittent nebulizer treatment since he began attending Mother’s Heart in 2024, a treatment typically reserved for those who have lung complications. He had no prior respiratory complications, Kelley said. Kelley won’t open windows at home, fearing contaminated air from nearby fracking sites will seep in.

“We’re like one big science experiment here,” said Kelley who, in 2016, became involved with . She is now on the board.

Edgar Bunton, who is in his 60s, moved to his home in southwest Arlington six years ago and lives less than 600 feet from more than a dozen wells. His wife began to experience frequent and unexplained migraines. Two of his grandchildren who live near these gas wells have respiratory complications, which Bunton attributes to the wells.

“I really got on board because of my grandbabies,” he said.

The adverse health effects of hydraulic fracturing on children have been studied over the decades.

“This is a cumulative risk issue, because this is not just one chemical at a time people are being exposed to,” said Meagan Weisner, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund and a former public health epidemiologist who has studied health impacts related to oil and gas development in Colorado. “This is dozens of chemicals coming from more than just one site because they’re already near other wells.”

According to Weisner, the contaminants released are dangerous to nearby residents not only during the drilling phase, which emits numerous toxic chemicals, but also after.

“There were a lot of parents that were reporting their children were feeling ill during the pre-production phase,” Weisner said, which encompasses drilling. “So it would not surprise me at all if these residents in Texas that are close to these 10 wells experienced adverse health impacts because of their proximity.”

Children in particular are uniquely susceptible to harm. “We saw health impacts in children extended out to two miles from the pad,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be the exact same in Texas, but we saw adults had reported significant adverse symptoms within a one-mile radius but, for children, it was within a two-mile radius, and that does track along the lines of children are just much more vulnerable.”

The 19th reached out to the City of Arlington for comment. In an emailed response, the city only said that the drill site was approved because “it met the 600-foot spacing requirement from protected uses, as outlined in the City’s Gas Drilling and Production ordinance.”

TotalEnergies did not respond to questions from The 19th.

Before energy companies descended on Arlington, the sprawling land behind Phil Kabbakoff’s house was decorated with oak trees. When the company Chesapeake Energy arrived in his neighborhood, they were leveled and reduced to kindling. Now, a towering drill rig owned by TotalEnergies looms behind the 84-year-old’s home in their place.

Kabbakoff resides in the Glen Springs subdivision of southwest Arlington, the same neighborhood where Bunton’s grandchildren developed respiratory illnesses.

“A lot of these houses now are leased, and so people come and go, and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “We used to know everybody on the street.”

Like other residents, he was upset that more gas wells were installed by Mother’s Heart. “We were up in arms about it all the way around,” he said.

While Kabbakoff would like to see sustained changes made to fracking practices in the city, he believes that Arlington elected officials will only continue to value the interests of gas companies despite protest.

“They’re never going to change, not this council,” he said. “They don’t know anything about it. Nobody’s researched it. They could care less. They know they make money from it, and that’s all they’re worried about.”

‘Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters’

In 2005, landmen arrived to secure land for mineral ownership and drilling rights from Arlington residents. Ranjana Bhandari, founder of Liveable Arlington, was approached and ultimately declined.

“This is almost 20 years ago,” she said. “Because I was a mother — I had a young child — I didn’t think that it made any sense to have that kind of pollution around our children.”

At the onset of the fracking boom in Arlington, Bhandari spent hours poring over reports from other regions that experienced similar fracking booms, hoping for a glimpse of what this new development might mean for her city.

“Very quickly, they built 56 drill sites here, and they were spread out all over the city,” she said. “There’s literally one everywhere you see, one every few minutes.”

She read studies about cancerous pollutants linked to childhood leukemia coming out of states like Colorado. In the neighboring city of Fort Worth, she saw reports that air quality was slowly deteriorating because of drilling-related emissions of benzene, .

“Benzene is a serious, serious cat,” she said. “It’s a category one carcinogen. There’s no safe amount of it.”

Bhandari recalled a particular moment when she and her family stopped at a red light directly across from one now-defunct drill site around 2011. Within minutes, she said, they began to feel sick. “That was my first inkling that we weren’t just looking at climate harm.”

The discovery was bleak to Bhandari. By 2015, families in Arlington found themselves overwhelmed by the drill sites’ noxious fumes and the effects of fracking that rippled throughout the city — so much so that they decided to intervene. She created Liveable Arlington the same year.

“We were a mothers’ organization — mothers and grandmothers concerned about children’s health — and, through our campaigns and over the years, started learning many new things,” Bhandari said.

“We focused on the science. We focused on the community,” she continued. “I started it as a concerned parent. We were much more focused on fracking near children, fracking near day cares and schools, and so some of our most successful campaigns and most of our advocacy was to stop expansion of fracking around eight sites in Arlington, which are right next to day cares.”

Now 61 years old, she has seen the very problems she once read about penetrate her own community. And the repercussions have been more consequential for some communities than others. More often than not, Bhandari said, they’ve settled disproportionately in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, like the one where Mother’s Heart is located.

“The burdens of fracking were so unequally distributed,” she said. “The other bigger picture that people seem to miss when they say, ‘It’s OK to put it somewhere else, just not near me,’ is that you always will preserve a safe place. Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters.”

The Trump administration says it’s planning to freeze about $10 billion in federal support for needy families in California and four other Democrat-run states, as the president .

The plans come on the heels of the Trump administration , citing fraud allegations against daycare centers in the state.

The state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz — who ran for vice president against Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024 — announced Monday he was dropping out of running for reelection. He pointed to fraud against the state, saying it’s a real issue while alleging Trump and his allies were “seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”

On Monday,  that the administration was expanding the funding freeze to include California and three other Democrat-led states, in addition to Minnesota. Unnamed federal officials cited “concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens,” The Post reported.

Early Tuesday, President Trump alleged that corruption in California is worse than Minnesota and announced an investigation.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

He did not specify what alleged fraud was being examined in the Golden State.

LAist has reached out to the White House to ask what the president’s fraud concerns are in California and to request an interview with the president.

“For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said an emailed statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal childcare funds.

“Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office  on social media, arguing that since taking office, the governor has blocked $125 billion in fraud and arrested “criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers.”

Criminal fraud cases in CA appear to be rare for this program

Defrauding federally funded programs is a crime — and one LAist has investigated, , which surrounded meal funds.

When it comes to the federal childcare funds that are being frozen, the dollar amount of fraud alleged in criminal cases appears to be a tiny fraction of the overall program’s spending in California.

A search of thousands of news releases by all four federal prosecutor offices in California, going back more than a decade, found a total of one criminal case where the press releases referenced childcare benefits.

, brought in 2023, alleged four men stole $3.7 million in federal childcare benefits through fraudulent requests to a San Diego organization that distributed the funds. All four pleaded guilty, with one defendant sentenced to 27 months in prison and others sentenced to other terms, according to authorities.

It appears to be equivalent to one one-hundredth of 1% of all the childcare funding California has received over the past decade-plus covered by the prosecution press release search.

Potential impact on California families

The plans call for California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Colorado to lose about $7 billion in cash assistance for households with children, almost $2.4 billion to care for children of working parents, and about $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, according to unnamed federal officials  and .

In the largest category of funding, California receives $3.7 billion per year. The program is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

 ”It’s very clear that a freeze of those funds would be very damaging to the children, families, and providers of California,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives “at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

 ”It is a significant portion of our funds and will impact families and children and providers across the whole state,” she added. “It would be devastating, in no uncertain terms.”

About 270,000 people are served by the TANF program in L.A. County — about 200,000 of whom are children, according to the county Department of Public Social Services.

“Any pause in funding for their cash benefits – which average $1000/month – would be devastating to these families,” said DPSS chief of staff Nick Ippolito.

Ippolito said the department has a robust fraud prevention and 170-person investigations team, and takes allegations “very seriously.”

It remains to be seen whether the funding freeze will end up in court. The state, as well as major cities and counties in California, has sued to ask judges to halt funding freezes or new requirements placed by the Trump administration. L.A. city officials  with that, including shielding more than $600 million in federal grant funding to the city last year.

A union representing California childcare workers said the funding freeze would harm low-income families.

“These threats need to be called out for what they are: direct threats on working families of all backgrounds who rely on access to quality, affordable child care in their communities to go to work every day supporting, and growing our economy,” said Max Arias, chairperson for the Child Care Providers United, which says it represents more than 70,000 child care workers across the state who care for kids in their homes.

“Funding freezes, even when intended to be temporary, will be devastating — resulting in families losing access to care and working parents facing the devastating choice of keeping their children safe or paying their bills.”

Federal officials planned to send letters to the affected states Monday about the planned funding pauses, the New York Post reported. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, state officials said they haven’t gotten any official notification of the funding freeze plans.

“The California Department of Social Services administers child care programs that help working families afford safe, reliable care for their children — so parents can go to work, support their families, and contribute to their communities,” said a statement from California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel.

“These funds are critical for working families across California. We take fraud seriously, and CDSS has received no information from the federal government indicating any freeze, pause, or suspension of federal child care funding.”

This was originally published on .

Parents with children enrolled in a universal pre-kindergarten program in New Haven, Connecticut, increased their earnings by an average of 20.9%, according to a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week.

Families had more money because the pre-K reduced their child care costs while also enabling them to work more hours.

The study is sure to be ammunition in Minnesota’s longstanding debate about child care and universal pre-K, which has been a priority of some progressives for years. Former Gov. Mark Dayton made a strong push for pre-K in 2015 but was thwarted by the GOP-controlled House.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

“Universal pre-K” refers to programs that are free and aren’t means-tested, meaning they are available to all families regardless of household income. The New Haven program in the study had a limited number of slots, which were distributed using a lottery system, allowing researchers to compare the outcomes of families in the program to those who didn’t get a slot.

The authors found that for every dollar spent by the government to support the program, parents took home an additional $5.50, a better return on investment than the and the .

The New Haven universal pre-K program offered up to 10 hours of child care per day — which was key to the study’s findings.

Parents whose children were enrolled in the universal pre-K program got an average of 11 more hours of child care coverage per week, compared to parents of children in other child care programs.

The additional child care coverage allowed parents to work an average of 12 hours per week more than parents with other forms of child care — and reap the economic benefits.

Parents with children in other child care programs caught up to the hours and earnings of universal pre-K parents by the time their kids entered middle school.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

The sector in discussion is child care, and the discussion focuses on what can happen if private equity firms take over a larger share of the child care market. Slaughter was speaking on a panel at a day-long event in Washington D.C. to mark the by the National Women’s Law Center and Open Markets Institute: “Children Before Profits: Constraining Private Equity Profiteering to Advance Child Care as a Public Good.”��

The concerns about private equity’s influence are well founded. by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers result in significant job losses. These firms reduce wages, benefits and staffing at firms they acquire – with devastating consequences to thousands of workers, their families and their entire communities. Private equity funds also should their tactics to maximize profits fail. And for a business like child care, primed to receive a possible influx of federal and state investment, private equity’s interest in the sector is likely to increase.

“The report isn’t anti-private equity, it’s pro-child care,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center and one of the authors of the report. Boteach and her co-author, Audrey Stienon from Open Markets Institute, advocate that child care should be understood as a public good that’s in need of sustained government investment. The report lays out a vision of how a robust child care system would provide universal access to high quality child care with appropriately compensated providers. The goal, says Boteach, is that if private equity firms, or other outside investors, are going to enter the child-care market, they should do so in a way that upholds this vision.

The timing of this report coincides with several states — including , and — instituting record levels of government investment in child care. from the First Five Years Fund also shows strong bipartisan voter support for more child care funding, with 93 percent of voters believing it’s important for working parents of young children to have access to affordable quality child care programs.

Private equity has a history of chasing after industries that receive sustained sources of federal funding. Eileen Applebaum, co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an , who also served as a panelist at the event, detailed the way in which private equity firms began investing in a substantial share of hospice care services. Much of hospice care is funded by Medicare, which pays a fixed amount to the hospice agency for each day an eligible Medicare beneficiary is enrolled, regardless of whether the patient receives actual services on a particular day.

Other tactics from the private equity “playbook” as Applebaum discussed, include myriad anti-competitive behaviors, including consolidation, creating higher debt burdens, cutting labor costs and staff benefits, and enacting policies that maximize short-term profits to the private equity fund while passing on the liabilities and burdens to the individual companies they’d invested in. Applebaum points to the wide discrepancies in profits and patient care for hospice services: profit margins for a nonprofit hospice provider were around 4-5%, and for those owned by private equity firms, it was 19 percent. Nonprofits are more likely to use funds to invest in staffing and the business, debt-financed acquisitions to restructure these companies to maximize their profit margins, and try to sell them to the highest bidder within three to five years.

In the case of hospice, Applebaum that private equity hospice providers have higher rates of neglect, low staffing and are more likely to pass on the higher costs to patients and families.

Child care is in a unique position of being primarily a small business industry, with low profit margins yet with high demand because it is a necessity for many Americans to go to work and for the economy to function. “A textbook example of a broken market” is how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin in the United States. Yet if a child care center is forced to declare bankruptcy, the private equity company may still see a high return on the investment, even though the individual businesses may have shuttered, and the communities that rely on such child care centers may no longer have a viable option.

Boteach emphasized that the presence of private equity and the private sector itself is not problematic – and that the existence of more child care options with high quality care can be a profitable industry if sufficient government funding is provided. Often the individual child care centers are owned by women, many of them Black and brown, with strong ties to the communities they serve. Making such industries profitable so that they can pay their employees a living wage is a noble goal, she said. “The problem,” Boteach explains, “is that private equity firms have a traditional playbook, whereby the firms collect the profits and pass the risk and liabilities back to the companies they’ve taken over. And with the influx of possible public funding, external investors should have guardrails in place to protect the child care industry and the families they serve.”

The report is coming out at a moment in which private equity is poised to enter the child care market, but it is “not yet entrenched,” said Audrey Stienon of Open Markets Institute, and the report’s co-author. “It is possible to get ahead of the problem and change patterns.”

Experts encouraged action to counter the threats of private equity takeover. This can be done at both the state and federal level, though guardrails surrounding government funding.��Examples cited included to create standards and restrict profit for for-profit preschools that receive state funding. In Massachusetts, efforts are underway to limit the amount of state funding any larger company can receive. And for an industry like child care, which many families rely on for their own work, there is potential for real momentum in organizing parents to insist on such accountability measures for the involvement of outside investment groups like private equity. And as Rebecca Slaughter told the group, they need to bring such examples of poor conduct to the attention of the FTC. “I can’t solve a problem if I don’t know about it,” she said.

Child care may have a constituency that is primed to be vocal proponents. “Parents of children are a really good group of people to organize,” said Eileen Applebaum.�� “You have to let them know that they are not alone.”

In the midst of a child care crisis, community colleges continue to serve as an important link between families and child care access, and between communities and the early childhood teachers they need.

Any long-term child care solution also will inherently involve community colleges, said Robin Warfield, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the intersection of early childhood education and community colleges.

“They are inextricably linked,” said Warfield, who has taught as an adjunct professor in early childhood at Alamance Community College, and now serves as the birth-to-3 coaching manager for the at the Child Care Services Association.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Economists have described the child care industry as a broken market, because child care businesses cannot produce the desired product (high-quality early care and education) at a price that is affordable for most parents. Instead, parents struggle to afford care while teachers are paid some of the lowest wages of any industry. As federal relief funding for child care runs out on June 30 — and the legislature is still debating whether to extend assistance, and by how much — those challenges could get worse.

Moving forward, colleges “absolutely need to be a part of the discussion,” Warfield said.

Reducing barriers

Community colleges provide support on both ends of the struggle: helping families afford and access care, and also strengthening the early childhood teacher pipeline.

From their inception, Warfield said, training the early childhood teacher workforce has “just always been part of what community colleges do,” she said.

Colleges also use grant funding through and federal sources, as well as private funds, to help student parents afford care. A handful of North Carolina’s community colleges also operate on-site child care programs. According to EdNC’s research, as well as the research of NC State University’s , 13 colleges have active on-site programs. Four more have closed an on-site program in the last four years.

“It just alleviates that huge barrier that can end up getting in the way and keeping them from being able to be successful in school,” said Crystal Harvey, director of at Forsyth Technical Community College, which serves preschool children and prioritizes serving the children of students.

The lab school also provides hands-on learning for students in Forsyth Tech’s early childhood department.

“They are receiving top-tier support, mentoring, and access to high-quality practices,” Harvey said.

Colleges’ on-site models vary across the state. Haywood Community College through its . Cape Fear Community College operates both a licensed full-day program at and for parents looking for more flexible options. Halifax Community College hosts . Sandhills Community College offers drop-in and after-school care for school-age children t on campus.

Piedmont Community College in recent years to its to stay open for a longer period of the day and to serve wider age ranges. Like the program at Forsyth, it creates learning opportunities for potential early childhood educators as well.

“We had to dig in and figure out some better solutions to make sure that we could continue to provide this service, which is an attractor for employees and students who might have young children, a service for the community, and it’s great for our own early childhood program — our students get to do some of their clinical time in that setting,” Piedmont President Pamela Senegal told EdNC in 2022. “It was just the right thing to do, but we had to figure out how to do it in a way that was financially sustainable.”

Programs pull from a variety of sources to operate their programs, including the state’s child care subsidy program, private donations, state community college appropriations, and private tuition.

The on-site programs’ funding challenges reflect the broader challenges of the industry, Warfield said.

“They’re encountering the same problems that all facilities are encountering, which is they can’t retain teachers,” she said. Outside funding is needed to attract students to early childhood preparation programs and to support on-site and off-site programs, she said.

“I think they all need to be able to have on-site, high-quality child care,” Warfield said, “that is meant for the students and it’s also available to the community. And I think it needs to be its own thing, too. This just needs to happen for our economy.”

Here are the community colleges that EdNC knows are operating on-site programs:

• Alamance Community College
• Cape Fear Community College
• Davidson-Davie Community College
• Halifax Community College
• Haywood Community College
• Johnston Community College
• McDowell Technical Community College
• Nash Community College
• Piedmont Community College
• Sandhills Community College
• Southeastern Community College
• Vance-Granville Community College
• Wayne Community College

An underrepresented population

Beyond its lab school, Forsyth Tech is leading the way in holistically supporting student parents. It is one of five colleges across the country chosen to participate in , which is researching innovative practices and policies to support student parents.

The leader of Forsyth’s efforts, Shanta Reddick, has first-hand experience of the challenges.

“I’ve been the single mom that worked two jobs, had four kids, balancing it all and still finishing it,” said Reddick, director of student outreach at Forsyth, in an interview with EdNC in April. “So I’ve been through the challenges, and if I would have had an inkling of the support that we’re able to give, I knew what that could do.”

Reddick’s story, her example, and her work have made the difference between failure and success at school for students like Antoine Lash, a student with six children.

Seeing that Reddick could overcome challenges made Lash realize that “it’s a possibility,” he said. “When you see that you’ve got people along your way that can show you things like that, it’s 10 times better.”

The initiative, called SPARC (Student Parent Advocacy Resource Center), helps students afford care at the lab school and at private programs in the community, connects students to drop-in care through a partnership with a local provider, hosts student parent expos, and creates spaces for student parents to build community and shape the school’s policies.

The program uses funding from the state’s community college child care grant program, , and the federal grant.

SPARC also provides flexible support in moments of need. Lash recalled a moment when he was a couple of months behind paying for child care. He called Reddick for support.

“Next thing I know, they were like, ‘Your balance is being paid,'” Lash said. “It’s as streamlined as that.”

Reddick said she realized the need for better support for student parents during her time as a navigator for Forsyth Tech Cares, the college’s holistic support program that helps students meet their basic needs and connect to all kinds of community resources.

“I started seeing, they’re an underrepresented population,” Reddick said. “I started looking at the numbers. They’re making up 30% of our college campuses, and nobody is doing anything.”

Shanta Reddick, director of student outreach at Forsyth, talks about the focus groups she held with student parents. Liz Bell/EducationNC

She started by surveying student parents and asking about their experiences and needs. She got responses from 135 students, then held focus groups to dive deeper into their experiences. She heard familiar challenges from her own background: impossible hours, stresses, and expensive and hard-to-find child care.

“If they have the supports, they’ll finish quicker and faster than anyone else that’s coming into your college,” Reddick said.

She decided to create a Student Parent Council. “The goal is to give them a voice,” she said.

Reddick wants to build a library of books and resources for children and for parents, establish drop-in care on campus, and secure a physical location for SPARC.

Maya Clay, the mother of an 18-month-old with another baby due in August, had become pregnant while at a four-year university in Maryland. She had overcome great obstacles to get where she was after navigating dyslexia throughout school, she said.

She was thriving in school, almost in the nursing program, and maintaining a 3.5 GPA. Then she got pregnant.

“For a while I had this depression, because it’s like, ‘I don’t want to stop. I have so much potential going on,'” Clay said. She couldn’t find resources to support her pregnancy, and she couldn’t find child care access. She came home to Forsyth County, defeated.

She then looked at Forsyth Tech’s website and saw an advertisement for child care support through the college. She put in her information but didn’t think much about it, she said.

Then she got a call from Reddick.

“I was like, ‘Yes, I need help. It was that door, like hope brightening my future — helping me brighten myself up again. Because it was like, ‘I still have a chance.’ She gave me that fighting chance.”

Clay was able to return to in-person classes and is working toward a degree in biotechnology.

When she got pregnant this time around, Clay said, she was nervous. Her first pregnancy came with sacrifices to her goals. Instead, she was met with congratulations from Reddick.

“Being able to have somebody in your corner, who just wasn’t there to support you financially but emotionally, and like making sure you’re successful, and being able to link you to other resources, makes being a student parent here so different,” she said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

More than 250 Kentucky child care providers responsible for 150,000 children across the state sent lawmakers a letter Tuesday pleading for more support, saying in the state budget “is not enough” as their industry is “.”&�Բ�����;

The letter asks lawmakers to pass a supplemental lifeline funding bill in the final days of the 2024 legislative session Friday and Monday.

Such support, the providers said, should “at a minimum:” 

Provide routine, direct sustainability payments to child care providers to help keep doors open, stem tuition hikes and prevent wage cuts. Maintain Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) eligibility at 85% of state median income to prevent thousands of parents from losing access to this aid, which could result in many dropping out of the workforce and withdrawing kids from child care. The current version of the budget hold eligibility at. Provide enrollment-based CCAP reimbursements to providers. 

“Without these crucial supports, there is no chance of survival for many of our child care centers and home-based care providers,” the letter states. “Families will be left with even fewer options that are more expensive, quality will suffer, and many will decide it is better to leave the workforce.”&�Բ�����;

Kentucky’s child care industry — which some would like to — is about to lose the federal COVID-19 dollars that helped stabilize the industry during the last few years. This leaves many centers to cut pay for their workers, raise tuition for parents, cut services and even close,

The budget that the legislature passed  includes $42 million in new spending on child care in 2025 and $50 million in 2026. That includes $1.3 million a year to cover the cost of background checks for potential employees and  $1.5 million a year to add a six-month adjustment period for families who are no longer eligible for CCAP.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy previously estimated that $300 million is needed to replace the federal aid that’s ending. The state Department for Community Based Services says the need is closer to $100 million.

In its  of the legislature’s budget, the center says: “While all of the policies the budget funds are necessary to support   and the  ,   in light of the coming fiscal cliff, particularly with the loss of quarterly stipends to child care providers previously funded with federal dollars.”

The largest legislative proposal for child care this year, . Its sponsor cited its $300 million price tag as the main reason behind the demise. 

Lawmakers return to Frankfort on Friday and Monday for the last two days of the 2024 session, during which they could pass additional legislation. But they must send Gov. Andy Beshear veto-proof bills at that point, since they will no longer have the ability to override him. 

“An investment in child care is an investment in the commonwealth’s present and future,” the child care letter states. “The Kentucky General Assembly should step up and make that investment now, before you gavel out on April 15. We cannot hold on until the next budget.”&�Բ�����;

Letter to lawmakers from child care providers

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

After a year in which the pandemic decimated pre-K enrollment nationwide and with families now appearing eager to counter early learning loss, Boston Public Schools is preparing to expand its universal pre-K program while launching a pilot program for 3-year-olds.

The city’s public schools will offer at least in 31 community-based organizations in 2021-22 while some of those community sites will also extend instruction to 3-year-olds in mixed-aged classrooms. In all, the city plans to deliver 6 ½ hours of quality pre-K instruction to about 3,000 students a day in the coming school year.

When former Boston , the city’s eye was on expanding access for 4-year-olds. Boston’s UPK Director TeeAra Dias explains that the pandemic has shifted their focus, telling ����Ӱ��: “now we need to address any learning loss” and look to involve families and children in schooling earlier.

“We want to make sure that we do it right. We want to make sure that we’re focused on quality as we’ve always been, so it’s more of a gradual expansion,” Dias said. “We want to determine the right classroom configuration — is a mixed-age classroom or 3-year-old classroom best?”

While Boston’s UPK expansion mirrors a federal push for early child care investments — President Biden recently proposed spending a for the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds — it comes at a time when pre-K enrollment has experienced historic declines.

Nationally, 22 percent fewer students enrolled in pre-K in 2020-21 than the previous school year. Across Massachusetts, enrolled in pre-K in 2020, marking a 30 percent decline from .

Many families delayed their children’s start because of the pandemic, and now in public kindergarten enrollment. Whether that will flow down to the pre-K level in 2021-22 remains to be seen, although interest in social-emotional learning opportunities and closing early learning gaps appears high.

In Florida’s Hillsborough County Schools, one of the country’s largest districts, a voluntary pre-K program is seeing its . This fall, they expect around 1,000 students, up from 500 this summer and 300 in summer 2020.

While there isn’t yet widespread data on how early childhood enrollment may bounce back in Massachusetts, Boston continues preparations for its UPK expansion. Each community-based organization operating a universal pre-K program will decide whether or not to adopt the 3-year-old pilot model. If a site opts in, Boston’s UPK office will support them in preparing 25 percent of their class seats to serve the younger students.

Given that some organizations operate specialized programs, for low-income or unhoused families, the flexibility allows sites to assess whether the model is feasible and aligns with community needs.

The City of Boston began formally funding community sites to operate quality UPK in 2019, with Mayor Walsh committing .” Community organizations apply for grant funding and support, but whether or not they ultimately run pre-K programs during the school year is a matter of supply and demand.

The demand, which helps determine the number of seats and community sites prepared, has been tricky to determine — even before the pandemic upended traditional enrollment patterns. Boston’s UPK office gets a sense of neighborhood need and available high-quality, licensed programs in a given area. “Even if we don’t fund [a community UPK program] for seats, we fund them to onboard them and help get them ready,” Dias said.

Critics of the wider UPK program often point out that the number of seats available are frequently . Going by population estimates alone, though, doesn’t account for the families who opt for alternatives outside of Boston Public Schools.

To get a more accurate pulse, the UPK office also assesses how many BPS families enroll students in first and second grade, and how large the gap is between that number and existing UPK seats.

Still, Dias notes enrollment hovers around 85 percent of available seats. There’s layers behind why some go unfilled: whether a family doesn’t feel comfortable with in-person schooling, their preferred program site has been filled, or not knowing the program is free and has a rolling application.

In Chicago, updated marketing and centralized application systems sparked an uptick in pre-K enrollment for Black and low-income students. Boston has similarly adapted its UPK application and outreach in the hopes to close in early learning.

Alexandra Smith, communications and marketing manager for BPS’s early childhood division, said they’re reflecting on how to build public awareness for UPK and connect more deeply with neighborhoods. As a citywide program, they lean on partnerships with the Office for Immigrant Advancement and Office for Women’s Advancement.

“We’re trying to figure out who could help us reach these prospective families — where they’re located, what materials they need to access, and how they prefer to receive information,” Smith said.

Boston Public Schools ran ads for the UPK application on the side of city buses and within train stations, along with mobile app advertisements, in the summer and fall of 2020. For a personal approach, UPK’s family engagement coordinator reaches out to interested families to let them know how many seats are still available in their preferred program and facilitate tours of program sites.

The 2021-22 UPK application rolled out in late March, about five months ahead of last year’s, giving families more time to engage with the centralized portal and program sites. An early pulse of applications shows sizable interest from families, Dias says, and aligns with seats available so far.

Outreach efforts and enrollment for Boston’s UPK run throughout the upcoming school year; there’s no cutoff for a family hoping to secure a seat for their child.

“I have confidence that we’re going to be able to fill the seats early,” she said.

Given that pre-K can have for young people, filling seats remains a priority for the city as Boston schools adapt to pandemic learning loss and address student mental health concerns from isolation.

A , admitted to limited seats via lottery from 1997 to 2003, found that those who did attend had higher high school graduation and college enrollment rates and less behavioral challenges or suspensions.

The National Institute for Early Education Research’s director, Steven Barnett, has seen states embrace 3-year-old instruction for years through programs like Head Start, though the growth has been slow.

“Our research in New Jersey has certainly convinced us that if you have a high quality program designed for 3- and 4-year-olds, you definitely get larger impacts from two years than one year,” Barnett said.

At the same time, Barnett cautions against any federal initiative for public pre-K from moving too swiftly. In order to fulfill Biden’s , he says there must also be capacity at the Department of Education to conduct research on programs, develop standards, and then assist states in adjusting or building their iterations of UPK.

Currently, 44 states and the District of Columbia offer public preschool programs that serve more than 1.6 million children, from Barnett’s Rutgers University-based institute from the 2019-20 school year. Only some offer full-day programs that are universal or nearly universal, and reach 25 percent of their 3-year-olds.

“You can’t do this overnight,” Barnett said. “If we’re going to build this system, we have to take the programs that kids are in now and that we have, and transform them into high quality.”