The definition of insanity
BY DENYNE COLBURN, CEO of CAPPA
Low reimbursement rates, delays in release of family child care stipends, and now an extended tax deadline to October 2023 for most Californians are adding up to devastate a critical workforce teetering on extinction. The workforce? California’s family child care home providers and centers.
Decades of neglect of low reimbursement rates that have not kept up with meeting the most basic of needs has subjected individuals that have chosen early learning and child care as their vocation to a life of poverty, uncertainty and no plan of a retirement. The erosion of new workers into the field coupled with reimbursement rates that do not come close to paying for the true cost of providing child care has put California’s economy in further jeopardy of realizing any meaningful recovery. This is a crisis that has been ignored yet is one that has been playing out in plain sight.
For decades, child care providers have suffered from low reimbursement rates and wages well below other industries, and more often than not well below the state’s minimum wage. In January 2023, California’s minimum wage increased to $15.50 per hour. Yet, on average, a licensed child care provider makes approximately $11.54 per hour and unlicensed roughly $5.00 per hour.
During the height of the pandemic, when child care was deemed an essential and critical to fund in order to keep our state open, finally a spotlight was shone on the superheroes in this profession. Reimbursement stipends and supplemental pay was secured, funding to help cover cleaning and operational costs was provided, and promises to lift up this core workforce moving forward were made.
However, this week as the Legislature begins hearings on this issue, we are exactly at the same place we have been for over a decade. Childcare is still fighting to catch up and to have the family child care home providers and centers be funded at a level that values their critical role in keeping families working, keeping employers able to attain workers, and strengthening California’s economy.
What’s the quote by Albert Einstein, “The definition of insanity is doing the same think over and over again and expecting different results.” California must stop doing the same thing over and over. Once the child care delivery system collapses, it will be decades and billions of dollars to rebuild.
