Members of Gov. Josh Stein’s bipartisan Task Force on Child Care and Early Education got an update on licensed child care closures during their most recent meeting.
“Just in the month of August, we had more than twice as many programs close as open,” said Candace Witherspoon, director of the Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE).
Based on data provided by the N.C. Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) Council in partnership with DCDEE, EdNC previously found that North Carolina lost 5.8% of licensed child care programs during the five years when stabilization grants were used to supplement teacher wages.
That net loss has increased to 6.1% since the end of stabilization grants. Family child care homes (FCCHs) make up 97% of that net loss.
Trends among licensed centers and homes
Since February 2020, the last month of data before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of licensed FCCHs has decreased by 23%. The number of licensed child care centers has decreased by 0.3%.
The trend for licensed FCCHs since EdNC began tracking the data in June 2023 has been one of consistent net loss, decreasing each quarter.
Graphic by Katie Dukes/EdNC
There were 1,363 FCCHs in February 2020. That number was down to 1,096 in March 2025, the last data before the end of stabilization grants. Now there are 1,052 FCCHs across the state.
While licensed child care centers have also experienced a net loss since February 2020, the trend has been less linear.
Graphic by Katie Dukes/EdNC
There were 3,879 licensed centers in February 2020. When EdNC began tracking in June 2023, the number was slightly higher at 3,881. From then on it fluctuated, with net gains in some quarters and net losses in others. There are now 3,868 licensed centers statewide.
While the net loss of centers remains small, the effect of a single center closing is huge — especially in rural communities.
Families on Hatteras Island are learning this firsthand. The only licensed child care program on the island is scheduled to close at the end of the year. With no licensed FCCHs and no clear way to save the sole licensed center, families are trying to figure out how to keep their businesses open and remain in their communities without access to child care.
Access to high-quality, affordable early care and learning is crucial to child and family freedom and well-being. It enables parents to participate in the workforce or continue their education without concern for the safety of their children. It also puts North Carolina’s youngest residents on a path to future success.
Graphic by Lanie Sorrow
Trends among subgroups
In addition to monitoring overall licensed child care trends, EdNC zooms in on trends among three subgroups of counties each quarter.
In the counties that make up the area covered by the Dogwood Health Trust (Avery, Buncombe, Burke, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Swain, Transylvania, and Yancey), the number of licensed child care sites is 5% lower than before the pandemic. These counties had a net loss of eight programs from July through September 2025, the largest single-quarter decrease since EdNC began tracking.
In the majority-Black counties (Bertie, Edgecombe, Halifax, Hertford, Northampton, Vance, Warren, and Washington), the number of licensed child care sites remained relatively stable during and after the pandemic. But in the most recent quarter, these counties had a net loss of nine programs, putting them 4% lower than before the pandemic, a sudden and dramatic shift in circumstance. As with the Dogwood counties, this represents the largest single-quarter decrease since EdNC began tracking.
In Robeson and Swain, which both have large Indigenous populations, the number of licensed child care sites had also remained relatively stable during and after the pandemic. In the most recent quarter, for the first time since EdNC began tracking, the number of licensed child care programs in these counties has dipped just below pre-pandemic levels.
Editor’s note: The Dogwood Health Trust supports the work of EdNC.
by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report November 1, 2025
The first hint of trouble for McKinley Hess came in August.
Hess, who runs an infant and toddler care program in Conway, Arkansas, heard that the teen moms she serves were having trouble getting their expected child care assistance payments. Funded by a mix of federal and state dollars, those subsidies are the only way many low-income parents nationwide can afford child care, by reimbursing providers for care and lowering the amount parents have to pay themselves.
In Arkansas, teen parents have long been given priority to receive this aid. But now, Hess heard, they and many other families in need were sitting on a growing wait-list.
Hess had just enrolled eight teen moms at her central Arkansas site, Conway Cradle Care, and was counting on state subsidies to pay for their children’s care. As the moms were stuck waiting for financial assistance, Hess had two options: kick them out, or care for their infants for free so their mothers wouldn’t have to drop out of school. She chose the latter.
Just a month later, another hit: Arkansas government officials announced they were going to cut the rates they pay providers on behalf of low-income families. Beginning Nov. 1, Hess will get $36 a day for each infant in her care and $35 a day for toddlers, down from $56 and $51 a day respectively. She’s already lost out on more than $20,000 by providing free care for 8 infants for the past two months.
“Financially, it really is going to hurt our day care,” Hess said. But the stakes are also high for the parents who need child care assistance, she said: “For them to be able to continue school, these vouchers are essential.”
As states face having to cut spending while bracing for fewer federal dollars under the budget bill President Trump signed in July, some, including Arkansas, view early learning programs as a place to slash funding. They’re making these cuts even as experts and providers predict they will be disastrous for children, families and the economy if parents don’t have child care and can’t work.
The same families face other upheaval: The ongoing government shutdown means states may not receive their Nov. 1 shares of federal money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, meaning families may not get that aid. Across the country, more than 100 Head Start centers, part of a federally funded preschool program that provides free child care, may have to close, at least temporarily, if the shutdown drags on as expected and they do not get expected federal cash by the start of next month.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Elsewhere, Colorado, Maryland and New Jersey recently stopped accepting new families into their child care assistance programs. In June, Oregon’s Democratic-led legislature cut $20 million from the state’s preschool program for low-income families. In September, Indiana joined Arkansas in announcing reductions in reimbursement rates for providers who care for low-income children. This summer, the governor of Alaska vetoed part of the state’s budget that would have given more money to child care and early intervention services for young children with developmental disabilities. Washington state legislators cut $60 million last month from a program that provides early learning and family support to preschoolers. Additional cuts or delays in payments have cropped up in Ohio, Nevada and the District of Columbia.
“Almost every state is facing a very, very, very significant pullback of federal dollars,” said Daniel Hains, chief policy officer at the D.C.-based National Association for the Education of Young Children. “It does not help families when you cut provider reimbursement rates, when you cut funds going to providers, because it makes it less likely that those families are going to access the high-quality child care that they need.”
This trend could further devastate America’s fragile child care industry, which has been especially slow to recover since the pandemic due to a lack of funding. Child care programs are expensive to run and, with limited public support, providers rely heavily on tuition from parents to pay their bills.
In many parts of the country, parents already pay the equivalent of college tuition or a second mortgage on child care and have little ability to pay more. Yet child care staff generally make abysmally low wages and have high turnover rates. There’s often little wiggle room in program budgets.
One of the only sources of federal funding for child care centers comes from the federally funded Child Care and Development Fund. Each year, Congress sets the level of block grants to states, which add matching funds. Arkansas officials said recent cuts to their subsidy program are in response to an unexpected $8 million decrease in federal CCDF funding this year after post-pandemic changes to the way state payouts are calculated.
In September, Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva told lawmakers that without cutting rates to providers, the state would be unlikely to be able to sustain the program. “The last thing I want to do is set up a reimbursement rate that at Christmas we have to call everybody and say we’re done, we spent all our money,” he said during a hearing.
In addition to cutting payments to providers, the state increased family co-payments, the amount parents must pay toward child care in addition to what their subsidy covers. It’s far from a perfect solution, Oliva told lawmakers. “But we have to do something.”
During the pandemic, child care programs and states received a fresh infusion of public funds from the American Rescue Plan Act and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, helping to stabilize those businesses. Many states used the influx to bolster their subsidy programs, allowing more children to use them and increasing what providers were paid.
As that aid expired over the last two years, some states found money to sustain that expansion, but others did not. Indiana was left with a $225 million gap between the cost of its child care subsidy program and the state money dedicated to filling it. In October, officials cut reimbursement rates by 10 to 35 percent, saying in a statement that “there is only one pot of money — we could either protect providers or kids, and we chose kids.”
Experts and child care directors say, however, that in the child care business it’s impossible to decouple kids from providers. The decision to cut reimbursement rates will ultimately hurt both, they insist, especially as providers find it hard to keep their doors open. Already, some programs have shuttered or announced plans to close by the end of the year. At others, families have left in search of more affordable care.
Cori Kerns, a senior staff consultant at Little Duckling Early Learning Schools in Indianapolis, said that now that schools are receiving less money from the state, parents must make up the difference. Since the changes were announced in September, Little Duckling has lost 26 children — nearly 18 percent of its enrollment — because parents cannot afford that increase.
“That could be a tank of gas to them, that could be some groceries, that could be school supplies or medical needs. Some of them have had to literally stop and stay home with their child in order to survive and also not pay for child care,” Kerns said. “Those kids are suffering” as they stay home with stressed parents who are worrying about lost income, she added.
As families pulled their children, Kerns merged two buildings of her program into one, creating larger class sizes and new teacher assignments. That’s led to challenging behavioral problems for children who must adjust to new environments. Kerns anticipates losing teachers now that the work environment has become more stressful.
Experts warn this trend in some states of scaling back early childhood investments is widening an existing nationwide disparity in the availability of affordable, high-quality child care. While states like Arkansas and Indiana pull back, a handful of others are moving the opposite direction, putting more money toward early learning. In New Mexico, for example, the nation’s first free universal child care program will launch on Nov. 1, paid for by oil and gas revenue that is routed to the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Fund. In 2023, Vermont passed a payroll tax to increase child care funding in the state, while Connecticut established an endowment this year to route surplus state funds into early learning programs.
States have already been diverging in their approach to the child care industry since the pandemic. Rather than invest in more qualified workers, some states have opted to deregulate child care and bring teenagers in to care for young children. At the same time, places like the District of Columbia have increased qualifications for child care providers.
“This is what happens when you don’t have public federal dollars in the system,” said NAEYC’s Hains. In states that are clawing back child care funds, “it’s going to result in lower quality care for children, or it’s going to result in families pulling back from the workforce and facing greater economic insecurity,” Hains said. “We’re going to see a real harmful impact on children and families as these investments are pulled back.”
In Mooresville, Indiana, Jen Palmer calculated that her program, The Growing Garden Learning Center, will lose about $260,000 from its annual budget because of cuts in state contributions to care for children from low-income families.
“If nothing changes as of today, I can sustain for a year,” Palmer said. “Past that, I’m going to start dipping into my retirement savings.” She’s hesitant to discuss closing the program, one of highest-quality centers in the area. “I believe in this place. What we do is amazing. We just have to make it through this.”
The lower subsidy rate is just the latest of a series of changes that Palmer has endured. Last December, Indiana stopped accepting new applicants into the care aid program and instead launched a waiting list. Palmer stopped getting calls from parents who wanted to enroll their children, as they couldn’t pay for care on their own.
Earlier this year, Indiana also announced cuts to reimbursement rates for its pre-K program, which is run in schools and child care programs throughout the state. Palmer now receives about $148 a week for each pre-K student she serves, down from more than $300 a week last year. Over the past three months, she’s had to lay off seven teachers and has taken over teaching in a pre-K classroom in the mornings. “We’re going to do our darndest that the kids don’t feel the impact,” she said.
She hasn’t been able to completely shield them. One toddler in her program recently shocked and delighted his teachers when he said his first word in English: a bold “no.” Concerned that the child had language delays, they were thrilled that he was starting to make progress.
Then the child’s family pulled him out of the program. His mother, who works as a delivery driver, had previously qualified for free child care paid for by state. With the state now paying less, her tuition jumped to $167 a month.
Instead of interacting with other children and teachers, playing and learning new skills, the toddler is now “sitting in mom’s car in a car seat driving around all over the county while she delivers for Uber,” said Palmer. “That just set that little guy years back. When he enters school, he’s no longer going to be on par with his classmates. That’s not fair. That can’t be the answer.”
Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or [email protected]
This story about child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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For families in more than a hundred Head Start programs across the country, November could mark the beginning of some hard decisions.
On Saturday, 134 Head Start centers serving 58,400 children would normally receive their annual federal funding, but the ongoing government shutdown has put that money in jeopardy. The federally funded Head Start provides free preschool and child care for low-income families, and is particularly important to rural communities with few other child care options.
At the same time, the federal government has said that because of the shutdown, it cannot distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that families also expect on the first of the month. Plus, a program that provides extra money for families to buy milk, baby formula, and fruit and vegetables is also running out of $300 million in emergency funding provided to it earlier this month.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
All this means low-income families are facing upheaval on multiple fronts, said Christy Gleason, the vice president of policy, advocacy and campaigns for the nonprofit group Save the Children. Families in Head Start often receive other federal benefits, so they could simultaneously be facing a disruption in child care — and the meals provided there — and public food assistance.
“You’re going to end up with parents and caregivers who are skipping meals themselves, because that’s the way they put food on the table for their kids,” Gleason said. Save the Children manages Head Start programs in rural Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, but its programs are not among those affected by the Nov. 1 annual funding deadline. Head Start has 1,600 programs that receive their yearly funding throughout the calendar year.
There are still a few days left to avert the crisis, Gleason said. More than two dozen states are suing the government to force it to use a pot of money that had been set aside for paying SNAP benefits in an emergency. President Donald Trump also said this week that the food aid situation would be fixed, but didn’t offer details. Federal lawmakers have also introduced different proposals to keep food assistance money flowing. A handful of states said they will continue to pay for the supplemental milk and formula program, known as WIC. Head Start programs may be able to tap local money, but that isn’t expected to last long.
“The clock is ticking,” Gleason said. “Every hour that goes by is an hour where the stress for these families grows, but it’s not too late for government action to change course and make sure children are not the ones to suffer the consequences of political decisions.”
New data quantifies child care gaps
Nearly 15 million ages 5 and under in the United States have “all available parents” — both adults in a two-parent household, or one if the child has one adult caregiver — in the workforce. The country has about 11 million licensed or registered child care slots.
That leaves about 4 million children whose families may need child care — a hard-to-grasp number that obscures the fact that some parts of the country may have greater needs than other regions because child care providers are concentrated in some areas and sparse in others.
The Buffett Early Childhood Institute, based at the University of Nebraska, is trying to address that problem. It has created a map that it says will give a more accurate view of where child care is needed the most, down to the congressional district.
The map captures the number of children with working parents and the number of available spots in licensed child care. What it cannot capture is demand — not every family needs child care, even families with parents in the workforce — but the map does allow policymakers a starting place for a more nuanced evaluation of their community’s needs.
“We know the limitations of the data, but we also know in order to address the gap, this needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces,” said Linda Smith, director of policy at the Buffett Institute.
This story about the government shutdown was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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Minister Burke addressed the National Press Club on Thursday. Picture: Martin Ollman
The federal government will crack down on actors using international students that come to Australia as a means to fund child exploitation, human trafficking and drug trade efforts.
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Hello! This is Christina Samuels, the early education editor here at Hechinger.
By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to read my colleague Jackie Mader’s story about the important role that Head Start plays in rural communities. While Jackie set her story in western Ohio, she also interviewed Head Start parents and leaders in other parts of the country and collected their views for a follow-up article.
In a fortunate bit of timing, the advocacy group First Five Years Fund published the results of a survey it commissioned on rural Americans and their feelings on child care access and affordability. Like the people Jackie interviewed, the survey respondents, more than half of whom identified as supporters of President Donald Trump, said they had very positive views of Head Start. The federally funded free child care program received positive marks from 71 percent of rural Republicans, 73 percent of rural independents and 92 percent of rural Democrats.
The survey also found that 4 out of 5 respondents felt that finding quality child care is a major or critical problem in their part of the country. Two-thirds of those surveyed felt that spending on child care and early education programs is a good use of taxpayer dollars, and a little more than half said they’d like to see more federal dollars going to such programs.
First Five Years Fund was particularly interested in getting respondents to share their thoughts on Head Start, said Sarah Rubinfield, the managing director of government affairs for First Five Years Fund. The program has been buffeted by regional office closures and cuts driven by the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“We recognize that these are communities that often have few options for early learning and care,” Rubinfield said.
In the survey, rural residents said they strongly supported not just the child care offered by Head Start, but the wraparound services such as healthy meals and snacks and the program’s support for children with developmental disabilities. Though Head Start programs are federally funded, community organizations are the ones in charge of spending priorities.
“Rural voters want action. They support funding for Head Start and for child care. They want Congress to do more,” Rubinfield said. Though the “big beautiful bill” signed into law in July expands the child care tax credit for low-income families, survey respondents “recognized that things were not solved,” she added.
The First Five Years Fund survey was released just a few days before a congressional standoff led to a government shutdown. The shutdown is not expected to touch Head Start immediately, said Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director of the National Head Start Association, in an interview with The New York Times. The 1,600 Head Start programs across the country receive money at different points throughout the calendar year; eight programs serving about 7,500 children were slated to receive their federal funding on Oct. 1, Sheridan told the Times. All should be able to continue operating, as long as the shutdown doesn’t last more than a few weeks, he said.
“We’re watching with careful concern but trying not to panic,” Rubinfield said. “We know the impacts may not be immediate, but the longer this goes on, the harder the impacts may be for families and programs.”
This story about rural Americans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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From her home-based day care in Washington, D.C., Alma peers out the door and down the sidewalks. If they’re clear and there are no ICE agents out, she’ll give her coworker a call letting her know it’s safe to head in for work.
They have to be careful with the kids, too. Typically, she took the five children she cares for to the library on Wednesdays and out to parks throughout the week, but Alma — who, like her coworker, does not have permanent legal status — had to stop doing that in August, when President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the district. Now, two of the kids she cares for are being pulled out of the day care. The parents said it was because they weren’t going outside.
Trump has deployed the National Guard and a wave of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into the district. ICE arrests there have increased tenfold. The situation has thrust the Latinas who hold up the nation’s child care sector into a perpetual state of panic. Nationwide, about 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrants, but in D.C. it’s closer to 40 percent; about 7 percent nationally lack permanent legal status. Nearly all are women.
Many are missing work, and others are risking it because they simply can’t afford to lose pay, providers told The 19th. All are afraid they’ll be next.
“What kind of life is this?” said Alma, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her identity. “We are not delinquents, we are not bad people, we are here to work to support our family.”
Alma has been running a home-based day care for the past decade. She’s been in the United States for 22 years, working in child care that entire time. With two kids being pulled, she will have to reduce her staffer’s hours as she tries to find children to fill those spots.
Her four school-age children also depend on her. This month, she had to write out a signed document detailing what should happen to her kids if she were to be detained. Her wish is that they be brought to detention with her.
“I can’t imagine my kids here without me,” she said.
She said she understands the president’s approach of expelling immigrants with criminal convictions from the country, but teachers who are working with kids? Who haven’t committed any crime?
By targeting them, she said, the administration is “destroying entire families.”
The Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association in D.C., which works with Latina child care providers, has seen this panic first hand for the past couple of weeks as more and more Latinas in child care have stopped coming into work. The center also helps workers obtain their associate’s degree in early childhood education, and since the semester started in mid-August, many teachers have asked for classes to be offered virtually so they don’t have to show up to campus at night.
Latinas have flocked to the child care industry for multiple reasons: Families seeking care value access to language education, and Latinas have a lower language barrier to entry, said Blanca Huezo, the program coordinator at the Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association.
“In general, this industry offers them an opportunity for a fresh start professionally in their own language and without leaving behind their culture,” Huezo said.
The changes, coupled with increased enforcement, has fostered fear among Latinx people regardless of immigration status. That fear among workers is deepening a staffing crisis in an industry that already couldn’t afford additional losses, Huezo said.
“There is a shortage — and now even more,” she said. “There are many centers where nearly 99 percent of teachers are of Hispanic origin.”
Washington, D.C., has been a sanctuary city since 2020, where law enforcement cooperation with immigration officials was broadly prohibited. Earlier this year, however, Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed repealing that law and, in mid-August, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department Police Chief Pamela Smith gave officers leeway to share information with ICE about individuals they arrested or stopped.
“There was some peace that living in D.C. brought more security,” Huezo said. Now, “people don’t feel that freedom to walk through the streets.”
Several child care workers are afraid to go to work in DC, now that President Trump has removed restrictions on ICE conducting enforcement at schools and daycares. (Getty Images)
Child care centers are also no longer off limits for ICE raids. The centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office. While reports have not yet surfaced of raids in day cares, ICE presence near child care care centers, including in D.C., has been reported.
A similar story of fear and surveillance has already played out in Los Angeles, where ICE conducted widespread raids earlier in the summer. Huezo said her organization has been in touch with child care providers in L.A. to learn about how they managed those months.
In the meantime, the best the organization can do, she said, is connect workers with as many resources as possible, including legal clinics, but the ones that help immigrants are at their maximum caseload. The group has put child care workers who are not leaving their homes in touch with an organization called Food Justice DMV that is delivering meals to their doorsteps. Prior to last month, people who needed food could fill out a form and get it that same week. Now, the wait time is two to three weeks, Huezo said. For those in Maryland and Virginia, it’s closer to a month.
Thalia, a teacher at a day care, said her coworkers have stopped coming to work. It’s all the staff talks about during their lunchtime conversations. When she rides the Metro into work, she looks over her shoulder for the ICE agents, their faces covered, who are often at the exits.
“They are hunting us,” she said.
Thalia, whose name has been changed because she does not have permanent legal status, has been living in the United States for nine years and working in child care that entire time. Like her, many of the Latina teachers she works with have earned certifications and degrees in early childhood education.
“We are working, we are cooperating, paying taxes,” she said. “We are there all day so other families can benefit from the child care.”
As a single mother, Thalia has also had to consider what would happen to her three children if she was detained. This past month, she retained a lawyer who could help them with their case in case anything were to happen. Her school-age kids know: Call the lawyer if mom is detained and get tickets to Guatemala to meet her there.
This is what she lives with every day now: “The fear of leaving your family and letting them know, ‘If I don’t return, it’s not because I am abandoning you.’ ”
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The U.S. military faced a new threat to national security toward the end of the 20th century. This threat affected the recruitment and retention of our nation’s armed forces, reducing their capacity to defend the denizens of the United States and our interests overseas.
The threat wasn’t the Cold War; it wasn’t tension in the Middle East; and it wasn’t international or domestic terrorism.
The threat was a lack of affordable, accessible, high-quality child care.
The makeup of the armed forces changed following the shift from a national draft to an all-volunteer military after the war in Vietnam. More service members had families in the late 1970s and 1980s — many of them with young children. And many more of those families included two working parents than in previous decades.
The child care crisis faced by the military 40 to 50 years ago was similar to the one civilians face today. More families with working parents increased the demand for child care. Thousands of children languished on waitlists, forcing families to consider forms of supervision that lacked consistent standards for safety, teacher training, student/teacher ratios, and curricula. Teachers were poorly compensated, and turnover was high.
Back then, as now, parents couldn’t afford the fees necessary to cover the costs of addressing these challenges, and limited public investment wasn’t enough to fill the gap.
Graphic by Lanie Sorrow
Because the child care crisis was seen as a threat to the collective future of Americans, elected officials took action. Congress passed the Military Child Care Act of 1989, which put a priority on affordability, accessibility, and quality in child care for service members.
With the end of child care stabilization efforts that were undertaken during the pandemic, North Carolinians now face a similar threat to our own collective future. The military’s approach offers lessons for where we can go from here, in our communities and across our state.
An experiment in universal child care
The Military Child Care Act wasn’t the first time the military had taken the lead on child care. During World War II, women entered the workforce in massive numbers, filling the roles of men who were drafted to serve in the military. This raised the question of who would care for children when both parents were working outside the home to defend American interests.
Congress responded with the Lanham Act of 1940, creating a nationwide, universal child care system to support working families with children through age 12. Federal grants were issued to communities that demonstrated their need for child care related to parents working in the defense industry.
The program distributed $1.4 billion (in 2025 dollars) between 1943 and 1946 to more than 600 communities in 47 states. The grants could be used to build and maintain child care facilities, train and compensate teachers, and provide meals to students.
In his 2017 analysis of the Lanham Act’s outcomes for mothers and children, Chris M. Herbst, of Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, found that “the Lanham Act increased maternal employment several years after the program was dismantled.”
An image of Rosie the Riveter from a 1943 issue of the magazine Hygeia (published by the American Medical Association) demonstrating the need for child care.
Herbst also found that “children exposed to the program were more likely to be employed, to have higher earnings, and to be less likely to receive cash assistance as adults.”
One lesson Herbst took from his research was that the Lanham Act was successful because of the broad support it received from parents, advocates for education and women, and employers. He noted: “Each group was committed to its success because something larger was at stake.”
Today’s military-operated child care model
While the Lanham Act was a short-lived national experiment that hasn’t received much study, the military’s child care program since adoption of the Military Child Care Act of 1989 has become a widely acclaimed model for publicly subsidized early care and learning, serving about 200,000 children each year.
Four categories of child care are available through military-operated child care programs: Child Development Centers (CDCs), Family Child Care (FCC), 24/7 Centers, and School Aged Care (SAC). The official military child care website describes each program type:
Child Development Centers (CDCs) — CDCs provide child care services for infants, pretoddlers, toddlers, and preschoolers. They operate Monday through Friday during standard work hours, and depending on the location offer full-day, part-day, and hourly care.
Family Child Care (FCC) — Family child care is provided by qualified child care professionals in their homes. Designed for infants through school agers, each FCC provider determines what care they offer, which may include full-day, part-day, school year, summer camp, 24/7, and extended care.
24/7 Centers — 24/7 Centers provide child care for infants through school age children in a home-like setting during both traditional and non-traditional hours on a regular basis. The program is designed to support watch standers or shift workers who work rotating or non-traditional schedules (i.e., evenings, overnights, and weekends).
School Aged Care (SAC) — School age care is facility-based care for children from the start of kindergarten through the end of the summer after seventh grade. This program type operates Monday through Friday during standard work hours. SAC programs provide both School Year Care and Summer Camp.
Requirements for military-operated child care programs are typically more stringent than state requirements. For one thing, they must be accredited by one of the following: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), National Early Childhood Program Accreditation (NECPA), the Council on Accreditation (COA), or the National Accreditation Commission (NAC).
For context, the requirements for licensed child care in North Carolina are relatively stringent compared with other states, but still fall below the requirements for NAEYC accreditation, which is widely recognized as the national standard. Only 110 programs in our state are NAEYC-accredited — many of which are Head Start or military-operated programs — out of about 5,300 total state-licensed programs.
Military-operated child care programs offer families hourly, part-day, full-day, extended, or overnight care, plus afterschool and summer programs.
The maximum rate is on par with the national average for civilian child care in 2023, meaning that almost every family using military-operated child care programs is paying less than the national average for typically higher-quality early care and learning.
The Department of Defense budgeted about $1.8 billion for child care in 2024 — about 0.2% of its $841.4 billion total budget.
Military child care in North Carolina
In addition to military-operated child care programs, service members may be eligible for Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood (MCCYN), a fee assistance program for families who can’t access military-operated child care. MCCYN pays a portion of the cost of enrolling children in early care and learning programs that meet the military’s high-quality standards in their community.
North Carolina is one of 19 locations where military families may be eligible for MCCYN-PLUS, which expands the MCCYN program to child care programs that participate in state or local Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) in places where nationally accredited care is not available.
Both programs rely on the availability of high-quality child care in civilian communities. That’s a challenge in North Carolina, which was already facing a child care shortage before the pandemic. Our state has lost almost 6% of licensed child care programs since February 2020, with more expected to close because stabilization grants have ended.
According to the NC Military Affairs Commission, there are 12 military bases and more than 130,000 active-duty military members in North Carolina, giving us the fourth-largest active-duty military population in the nation.
In January 2025, Fayetteville Technical Community College hosted the state’s first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit, organized by the North Carolina Department of Military and Veteran Affairs (NCDMVA) to discuss the problem that military communities are having with access to community-based child care.
The first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit in January 2025.( Katie Dukes/EdNC)
The summit culminated in a screening of Take Care, a documentary about North Carolina’s child care crisis produced by the state Department of Health and Human Services and featuring EdNC’s early childhood reporter, Liz Bell.
The issues of spouse resilience and child care are inextricably linked for Angie Mullennix, who works for The Honor Foundation at Fort Bragg, helping members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) transition to careers in the private sector after their military service.
Mullennix served in the U.S. Army for four years after high school and has previously worked for the Department of Public Instruction as the state military liaison. Her husband recently retired from the SOF himself. They have two teenage children.
“If you look at the number of military spouses in North Carolina who have degrees and credentials and could be in the workforce, from nurses to lawyers, lots of them are staying at home,” Mullennix said.
“A big reason why about 40% of (military) spouses do not work is because of child care not being available to them,” Mullennix said, noting that lack of child care is also a barrier to workforce participation among the civilian population.
When Mullennix’s children were under the age of 5, she used hourly child care on base, which was available at no cost when her husband was away on assignment.
“You ask any parent in the world, I don’t care who they are, there’s nothing more important than their child’s safety — then their education,” Mullennix said. “And yet, the two things we think are the most important, we put (their providers) at the lowest pay and ask them to do quality care.”
That’s what sets military child care apart from civilian early care and learning for Mullennix: high quality standards and higher pay for early childhood educators, including benefits. She sees lessons in this for North Carolina.
“You gotta pay them to keep them, there’s no secret behind that,” Mullennix said. “If you pay them high, you can also set the standards really high.”
And because workforce participation — and military readiness — is directly tied to the accessibility and affordability of high-quality child care, not investing in it threatens our collective future.
“North Carolina, or any state that doesn’t offer child care, is shooting itself in the foot,” Mullennix said.
Lessons from military child care
Policymakers at every level who are seeking to end the child care crisis can learn much from the military child care model. One report on the topic offers these lessons:
Do not be daunted by the task. It is possible to take a woefully inadequate child care system and dramatically improve it.
Recognize and acknowledge the seriousness of the child care problem and the consequences of inaction.
Improve quality by establishing and enforcing comprehensive standards, assisting providers in becoming accredited, and enhancing provider compensation and training.
Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies.
Expand the availability of all kinds of care by continually assessing unmet need and taking concrete action steps to address it.
Commit the resources necessary to get the job done.
Both agreed these are the right takeaways for policymakers across North Carolina to consider.
Lesson 1: Do not be daunted by the task
Gale Perry said the top lesson for her is: “Start where you are, know that change is possible, and have a goal post in mind.”
She pointed out that the military’s goal wasn’t a fully publicly funded child care system. It was a system that acknowledged Americans’ values around the role of parents in raising young children — and paying for their care and education. But also that their employers and the government “have a role in offsetting that cost, so that we can ensure that child care is quality, and it is stable, and that the families can actually afford it.”
Smith said there was no “silver bullet” when she and her colleagues were tasked with solving the military’s child care crisis in the 1990s — and there isn’t one for the civilian child care crisis today.
We had to redo the standards, we had to look at the workforce, we had to look at the health and safety issues, we had to look at the fees and how we could bring those fees down. We had to look at the infrastructure of all of it. We’ve got to start thinking about the interconnectedness of all of these things if we’re going to be successful in this country.
Smith said people think that because she worked for the secretary of defense, “I could just tell all the bases what to do, and that would magically happen, which is so not true. It wasn’t just like we could give an order and everybody jumped.”
She said you just have to start where you are, and move up.
Lesson 2: Acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and the consequences of inaction
“The military understood very early the link between people getting to work and child care,” Smith said.
As the military shifted away from relying on conscription and became a more welcoming workplace for women, the need for child care became evident. Smith described working on a base where children were routinely left in cars when their parents were unexpectedly called into work.
“So (military leaders) really got the connection to their guys going to work very quickly, and I think that we still haven’t all understood that in this country,” Smith said, though she notes businesses have started making that connection since the pandemic.
“The other thing the military understood was that a pilot is every bit as important as the mechanic who works on the plane, and so they invest in all of their people,” Smith said.
She and her team had to design a program that worked for everyone, or it wouldn’t work for anyone.
Lesson 3: Improve quality
Smith said quality was of critical importance when she was designing the military’s child care system in the 1990s, especially after child abuse and neglect scandals that came to light in the 1980s.
She and her team studied the child care standards of all 50 states and created a set of military standards that fell squarely in the middle. Then they set about training the 22,000 early childhood educators they already had — most of whom were military spouses — to meet those standards.
That was a six-month training program. Then there was an 18-month training to get them to move beyond those standards toward national accreditation. They hired highly qualified trainers to work with educators at each site.
“And if you didn’t do it, guess what? You’re fired!” Smith said.
There was an incentive to participate in the training, beyond keeping their jobs — higher compensation.
“Maybe some were grumpy about it, but we didn’t have to fire people,” Smith said.
North Carolina already has some tools in place to help educators advance their education and improve their compensation, specifically through the WAGE$ and TEACH programs — both of which were highlighted in the report that identified these lessons.
“(The military) realized they had to get serious about quality and quality standards. And I would say that’s a lesson for us now, particularly in a climate that is deregulatory,” Gale Perry said. “And while I’m for sensible regulatory reform, I think we have to be really thoughtful about not wanting stacks of child deaths in child care sitting on a desk waiting to be investigated.”
Lesson 4: Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies
Smith said that while designing the military’s child care program, she and her team figured out that there was no way parents could afford the actual cost of high-quality child care. So they set up a subsidized system that would provide a 50% match — on average — to parents’ fees, paid directly to child care programs.
“We had to, on average, match parent fees dollar-for-dollar, with the higher-income people paying more and the lower-income paying less,” Smith said. “So a major, for example, would pay two-thirds of the cost, and a private would pay one-third, but the average was 50/50.”
Smith pointed out that we’re already subsidizing child care in ways that are hidden — through the public benefits and social programs that early childhood educators often rely on because of low compensation, and through lack of workforce participation.
Lesson 5: Expand the availability of all kinds of care
Gale Perry said the military’s model really stands out to her for its ability to assess unmet needs and take action to improve.
“In the early 2000s when there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a lot of deployments of National Guard and Reserve who did not live on post and did not have access to on-post child care,” Gale Perry said. “That is really when the military got in the business of thinking about, how do we help build capacity and make child care accessible for military families off post?”
That’s when the MCCYN came about, subsidizing high-quality early care and learning in a broader array of settings in the communities where service members live.
Smith said that the Military Child Care Act was originally targeted toward child care centers, but she recalls briefing the assistant secretary of defense on the potential effects of that strategy when they were designing the system:
I remember saying we need to apply all of this to family child care, to school-aged care, to part-day preschools, because if we don’t, all the parents are going to have a demand on these centers that we can’t meet, right? Because if you lower the cost in the centers and you improve the quality, why would somebody go to another place when they get it cheaper and better over here?
She made the case for educators in every setting getting the same access to training and the same level of compensation, because that’s what would work best for everyone.
“Everything applies to everybody,” Smith said. “And I think that was one of the smartest policy decisions we made.”
Lesson 6: Commit the resources necessary to get the job done
“There was this perception that we just had a lot of money and we threw it at” child care, Smith said. But that wasn’t the case.
“When they passed the Military Child Care Act, it didn’t come with an appropriation,” Gale Perry said. “So they had to fight equally hard for the funding, and a lot of the funding actually ended up coming from local base commanders making the decision to invest in child care.”
Now the military submits a budget request to Congress each year, and depends on those appropriations.
For state and local policymakers seeking to solve the civilian child care crisis without public investment, the woman credited with solving the military’s own child care crisis 35 years ago has a message.
“It’s gonna cost. There’s no way it doesn’t cost,” Smith said.
Despite having some of the most resources and economic support, a recent national study ranked Indiana’s early education system 42nd in the country — and second-to-last when it came to accessibility.
The WalletHub story, shared earlier this week, is simply the latest confirmation for Hoosier parents that Indiana’s child care market is struggling. Experts, business leaders and politicians agree that Indiana needs more child care, but can’t seem to agree on the best way to meet the moment.
Facing budgetary pressures and depressed revenue forecasts, state leaders opted to trim funding and narrow eligibility for early learning and child care resources earlier this year. Seats for state-funded preschool, known as On My Way Pre-K, have been halved while vouchers for subsidized child care have more 21,000 children on a waitlist.
One federal program, Head Start Indiana, hopes to help close the gap left by vanishing state funding, but faces its own challenges with flat federal funding.
“We are the quietest, most successful 60-year old program in the federal government’s history,” boasted Rhett Cecil, the organization’s executive director. “… (our programs) are going to support their families and children. They’re allowing families to work or get job training or further education. And our services — that child care and early education — are free for those families.”
Just under 13,000 families in all 92 counties utilize the program, which receives roughly $181 million in federal funding annually. That budget line was briefly threatened by the Trump administration, which walked back proposed cuts in favor of flat funding — which does mean services will be lost as inflation and other costs eat into the bottom line.
The second-term president also eliminated the federal Head Start office covering Indiana back in April — though the federal Administration for Children and Families announced it would dedicate one-time funding to Head Start locations earlier this week explicitly for nutrition, but not for other programming costs.
Additional federal support could allow it to expand to meet the need following state cuts, leaders hope, and continue employing almost 4,000 Hoosiers.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, we get $100 million more dollars. How many more teachers and classrooms could be opened?” Cecil mused. “How many kids could we serve off that waitlist?”
In Indiana, the shortage of child care options costs the state an estimated $4.2 billion annually, over a quarter of which is linked to annual tax revenue lost.
The 2024 study from the Indiana Chamber of Commerce emphasized the need to free up parents, mostly women, who’ve left the workforce “as a direct result of childcare-related issues.”
“There’s some data out there that one in four Hoosier parents leave their job over child care gaps, and it really impacts talent and workforce,” said David Ober, the chamber’s vice president of taxation and public finance. “It’s hindering economic momentum in the state and so it is a huge deal for us.”
For the last few years, tackling the state’s child care crisis has been a top legislative priority for the organization, which represents the interests of thousands of Hoosier employers. Ober said the chamber is working to plan a child care summit later this year to identify potential solutions.
According to Brighter Futures Indiana, average full-time weekly care costs families $181 per week — with even higher prices for infants and toddlers. That doesn’t factor in type of care or quality, and prices vary by community.
Families can spend more on their young children’s care than on a college education — if it’s even available in their communities. Rather than pay the price, many Hoosier parents simply drop out of the workforce at the same time that employers are scrambling to hire talent.
Ober highlighted recent legislative efforts to expand child care, including one that expanded a tax credit for employers directly providing their employees with child care resources. Other bills have tweaked staffing ratios and created a pilot program for so-called microcenters.
But workforce remains a challenge, even for Head Start centers, earning its own legislative study carveout. Over 20% of Indiana’s child care workers left the field during the pandemic — a shock that “has not really fully healed,” Ober said.
“If you ask any provider in the state, workforce is the hardest problem,” Ober said. “… How do you get educators and keep them? There’s so much more work to be done there and it’s challenging.”
Traditional market forces struggle to balance affordability for parents against costs for child care, a gap sometimes covered by government subsidies.
But Ober insisted that “child care is infrastructure,” especially for the businesses reliant upon employees who are parents. Changing funding is “going to just exacerbate underlying problems,” he added.
“Those numbers are pretty stark,” Ober said. “And then when you add in changes at the state and the federal level, it creates new problems that we all have to come together and work on,” he concluded.
Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: [email protected].
Selina Likely, a child care director in Columbus, Ohio, understands the desperation that parents feel when they can’t find a good placement for their children with disabilities. When Likely’s daughter was a child, the little girl was abruptly kicked out of her daycare center for biting, leaving her mother with little recourse.
“I was so angry and mad at the time,” said Likely, whose daughter is now an adult. “How are you going to kick out a 1-year-old?”
Thanks to a new state initiative, Likely and other child care providers like her can now receive additional training on how to support children with disabilities, who are far more likely than other children to be expelled from child care programs. Some states have similar programs, with the ultimate goal of creating more child care slots where young children with disabilities and delays can thrive.
How Hechinger inspired a bill
Earlier this year, my colleague Sarah Carr published a piece revealing that in Illinois and other states many families of premature babies are leaving the hospital with no information or guidance on critical therapies they are entitled to. In June, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill that would require hospitals to distribute detailed information on early intervention — those required therapies for babies and toddlers with disabilities and developmental delays — to most families with severely premature infants. The new law was proposed by state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr after Sarah’s story was published.
The bill, which awaits action by the governor, would also require the state’s early childhood systems to prioritize, in a public awareness campaign, the early identification of infants who automatically qualify for the therapies because of their low birth weight.
This story about children with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story about children with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Selina Likely became director of the Edwards Creative Learning Center six years ago, she knew there was one longstanding practice that she wanted to change. For as long as she had taught at the thriving child care center, it had turned away many children with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome. The practice was even encoded in the center’s handbook as policy.
Likely, the parent of a child with a disability, wanted to stop telling families no, but she knew that to do that she and her staff would need more support. “I said, ‘Let’s start getting training and see what we can do.’”
Not too long after, her effort received a big boost from a state-funded initiative in Ohio to strengthen child care teachers’ knowledge and confidence in working with young kids with disabilities and developmental delays. That program, Ohio PROMISE, offers free online training for child care workers in everything from the benefits of kids of all abilities learning and playing together to the kinds of classroom materials most helpful to have on hand. It also offers as-needed mentorship and support from trained coaches across the state.
Related: Young children have unique needs, and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Child care providers across the country — including large, established centers and tiny home-based programs — struggle to meet the needs of children with disabilities, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. More than a quarter of parents of children with disabilities said they had a lot of difficulty finding appropriate care for their kids. And even those who do find a spot regularly encounter challenges, like having their children excluded from extracurricular activities such as field trips and even academic instruction.
“It’s really hard to find child care for this population, we heard that loud and clear,” said Elizabeth Curda, a director on the GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security team and a coauthor of the report. Even the most well-resourced centers report that they struggle to meet the needs of children with disabilities, according to Curda.
There’s a lot of desire at the grassroots level to change that. Ohio PROMISE and a few other recent initiatives provide models for how to expand the capacity — and the will — of child care centers to serve the more than 2 million U.S. children age 5 or below who have a disability or developmental delay.
Cards on the walls at Edwards Creative Learning Center display the signs for different letters so students — whether nonverbal or not — can all learn sign language. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
In Vermont, for instance, officials hope to soon unveil a free, on-demand training program aimed at helping child care teachers have more inclusive classrooms. And officials in Ohio’s Summit County, home to Akron, report growing interest from other counties in creating programs based on Summit’s more than decade-old model that provides in-person training for child care operators in inclusion of children with disabilities.
“We’re helping to create child care centers that feel they can handle whatever comes their way, especially when it comes to significant behavior concerns,” said Yolanda Mahoney, the early childhood center support supervisor for Summit County’s disabilities board.
The federal government until recently encouraged the creation of such models. In 2023, the federal Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services issued a joint statement urging states to take steps to support inclusion in early childhood settings, including strengthening training and accountability.
Under the current president, federal momentum on the issue has largely stalled. While the administration of President Donald Trump hasn’t directly attacked inclusion in the context of special education, the president has criticized the term more broadly — especially when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. That can create uncertainty and a chilling effect on advocates of inclusion efforts of all kinds.
Funding for some inclusion efforts is also in jeopardy. States rely on Medicaid, which faces nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, to pay for early intervention programs for children birth to age 3 with developmental delays and disabilities. Trump has also proposed eliminating Preschool Development Grants, which states such as Vermont and Illinois have used to expand support of young children with disabilities.
That means over the next few years, progress on inclusion in child care settings could hinge largely on state and local investment. It helps that there’s a “real desire” among providers to enroll more children with disabilities, said Kristen Jones, an assistant director on the GAO’s education, workforce and income security team, who also worked on the report. “But there’s also a concern that currently they can’t do that in a safe way” because of a lack of training and resources.
In Ohio, the idea for Ohio PROMISE came after an appeal in 2022 from Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. He reported that families were coming to him saying they couldn’t find child care for their kids with disabilities.
“He said, ‘Come to me with ideas to solve that problem,’” recalled Wendy Grove, a senior adviser in the Ohio Department of Children and Youth who spearheaded development of the program.
Grove and her colleagues had already been working on a related effort. In 2020, Ohio won a federal grant that included help exploring how well — or not — children with disabilities were being included in child care and early education settings. DeWine liked the idea Grove’s team presented of morphing that work into a state-led effort to strengthen training and support for child care teachers. They also proposed more direct support to families, including the extension of child care vouchers to families with incomes above the poverty level, with a higher reimbursement rate for children with disabilities.
The training, which debuted about two years ago, is provided in three levels. Jada Cutchall, a preschool teacher at Imaginative Beginnings, an early learning center just outside of Toledo, recently completed the third tier, which for her included customized coaching. Cutchall’s coach helped her create communication tools for a largely nonverbal student, she said, including a board with pictures children can point to if, for example, they want to go to the bathroom or try a different playground activity.
As a result, Cutchall said, she has watched kids with disabilities, including those with speech impairments and autism, engage much more directly with their classmates. “They have the courage to ask their peers to play with them — or at least not distance themselves as much as they usually would,” she said. All of the children in the classroom have benefited, she added, noting that kids without disabilities have taken an interest in learning sign language, strengthening their own communication skills and fostering empathy.
Child care programs where one teacher and one administrator have completed some of the training earn a special designation from the state, which may eventually be tied to the opportunity to get extra funding to serve children with disabilities. In Ohio PROMISE’s first year, 1,001 child care centers — about 10 percent of the total number in Ohio — earned that designation, according to Grove.
For the last six years, Selina Likely has overseen the Edwards Creative Learning Center, where she’s steadily tried to enroll more children with disabilities and developmental delays. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
The effort costs a little over $1 million in state dollars each year, with most of that paying for several regional support personnel who work directly with centers as mentors and advisers. Over the last two years, Ohio has seen a 38 percent increase in the number of children in publicly funded centers who qualify for the higher voucher reimbursement rate for children with disabilities, which can be double the size of the standard voucher.
Grove hopes that ultimately the effort plays a role in narrowing a critical and stubborn gap in the state: about 27 percent of children without disabilities show readiness on state standards for kindergarten; only 14 percent of children with disabilities do. Since so few disabilities exhibited at that age are related to intellectual or cognitive functioning, “we shouldn’t see that gap,” said Grove. “There’s no real reason.”
One goal of the new efforts is to reduce the number of young children with disabilities who are expelled from or pushed out of care. Those children are frequently asked to leave for behaviors related to their disability, the GAO report found.
Several years ago, a child care center in Columbus expelled Meagan Severance’s 18-month-old son for biting a staff member. The boy has several special needs, including some related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Severance brought him to Edwards Creative Learning Center, where not too long after Selina Likely shifted into the role of director. The boy also bit a staff member there — not uncommon behavior for toddlers, especially those with sensory sensitivities and communication challenges.
Likely was determined to work with the child, not expel him. “They put in time and effort,” said Severance. “The response wasn’t, ‘He bit someone, he’s gone.’”
Likely empathized. Decades earlier, her own daughter had been expelled from a child care center in her hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, for biting.
“I was so angry and mad at the time — how are you going to kick out a 1-year-old?” she said. The center director didn’t think at all about how to help her child, Likely recalled, instead asking Likely what might be happening at home to make the child want to bite. She said she got no notice or grace period to find a new placement. “That left me in a disheartened place,” she said. “I was like, ‘I still have to go to work.”
Seventeen years old at the time, she was inspired by the injustice of the situation to quit her job in a factory and apply to be an assistant in a child care program. She’s been in the industry ever since, gradually trying to make more space for children like her daughter, who was later diagnosed with autism.
Meagan Severance, a parent and teacher at the Edwards center, has worked in recent years to make her classroom more inclusive for children with all different abilities. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
As director, Likely displays the nameplate “chaos coordinator” on her desk. And she’s taken the stance that the center should at least try to work with every kid. She and some of her teachers have completed the first two tiers of the Ohio PROMISE training, as well as some related sessions available from the state. Likely estimates that about 10 percent of the children in her center have a diagnosed disability or developmental delay.
Liasun Meadows, whose son has Down syndrome, chose Edwards several years ago for her then 1-year-old over another program better known for its work with children with disabilities. She has not been disappointed.
Parents of kids with disabilities watch their children like a hawk, she said. “There are certain things you notice that you don’t expect others to notice, but they do at Edwards. They’ve been growing and learning alongside him.”
Severance, whose son is now 8, works at the center these days, leading the 3-year-old room, which includes two children who are largely nonverbal. She’s made the classroom more inclusive, adding fidget toys for children with sensory issues, rearranging the classroom to create calming areas, providing communication books to nonverbal children so they can more easily express needs and wants, and teaching everyone some sign language.
“For a while there was segregation in the classroom” between the kids with disabilities and those without, Severance said. But that’s lessened with the changes. “Inclusion has been good for the kids who are verbal — and nonverbal,” she said.
As in Ohio, state officials in Vermont turned to online training to help ensure young children with disabilities aren’t denied quality care. The state should soon debut the first parts of a new training program, focusing on outreach to child care administrators and support for neurodivergent children. The state wanted to focus on center leaders first because “directors that are comfortable with inclusion lead programs that are comfortable with inclusion,” said Dawn Rouse, the director of statewide systems in Vermont’s Child Development Division.
One tool for supporting and calming children with sensory issues is keeping a healthy supply of fidget toys and Pop-Its on hand. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
Vermont also pumped millions of dollars into a separate program, known as the Special Accommodations Grant, that supports young children with disabilities. Since 2009 the state has set aside $300,000 a year that child care centers can tap to provide services for individual children with disabilities. It might help buy specialized equipment for a child with cerebral palsy, for instance, or be used to hire a full- or part-time aide.
The $300,000 has been maxed out every year, Rouse said. And after the pandemic, the need — and the number of applications — surged.
As a result, the state allocated some federal American Rescue Plan and Preschool Development Grant dollars to increase spending on the program by about sevenfold — to between $2 million and $2.5 million annually — an amount Rouse still describes as a “Band-Aid.” Without access to the grants, “we see a lot of children being asked to leave programs,” Rouse said. “That’s not good for any child, but for children with specialized developmental needs it’s particularly bad.”
Over time, Likely hopes, her Ohio center can play a small role in reducing that instability, although the center hasn’t yet been able to work with all such children it wants to. Likely recalls one toddler with a severe disability who climbed up anything he could. There wasn’t enough money to pay for what the child really needed: a full-time aide. “It’s hard when you know you’ve tried but still have to say no,” she said. “That breaks my heart more than anything.”
On one June morning, the center’s teachers acknowledged and celebrated several milestones in its work on inclusion, big and small. One child in the 3-year-old classroom with fine and gross motor challenges was drinking independently from a bottle. The preschool classroom held its first graduation ceremony, translated partly into sign language. All of the kids, no matter their challenges, were set to go on field trips to Dairy Queen and the zoo.
Likely dreams of someday running a center where about half of the children have a disability or delay. It may be years off, she said, but as with the milestones she sees scores of children at the center reach every day, “There’s a way — if there’s a will.”
Sarah Carr is a fellow at New America, focused on reporting on early childhood issues.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
