“It feels like you’re submitting an application into outer space.” |
|
who:
Joanna Lara, a parent of a 3-year-old living in Honolulu, HI speaking about the difficulty of applying for child care financial assistance
where:
|
|
|
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual calculation of the average cost of raising a child hasn’t been updated since 2017. When adjusted for inflation, the cost in 2021 dollars is $267,233, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
|
|
|
Ohio is working to create a pilot with ten school districts in Warren County that could reduce COVID quarantine times for students in an effort to keep them in school as well as provide options to families. As described in a letter from the school districts to the state when pitching the initial idea, options for families could include enforced masking, testing (and negative test results), or adopting the traditional 10-day quarantine. With the contagiousness of COVID’s Delta variant, many schools in Ohio (and the nation) are experiencing high numbers of students being exposed and required to quarantine for 10 days, just days or weeks into the school year.
|
|
Join Center for Health Care Strategies on September 14th from 1-2:30 pm for a webinar on “Engaging Families in Program and Policy Development to Advance Health Equity”. Register.
The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center is hosting the second annual Ohio Family Engagement Leadership Summit on September 17th. The Summit will feature interactive presentations from family engagement leaders, researchers, and practitioners in four learning tracks: family engagement and mental health, family engagement and student transitions, opportunity for all, and family engagement leadership. Anneliese Johnson, principal of our partner school, will present a learning session on “Bridging early childhood education and kindergarten transition: Best practices for preschool, elementary school and family partnerships.” Learn more and register.
|
|
Idaho’s State Board of Education voted to recommend funding for full-day kindergarten, which would cost $42 million annually. It’s the latest demonstration of policy support to expand state funding for it; currently, the state funds half-day kindergarten and Idaho lawmakers have introduced legislation to expand this.
Here’s an interesting read about full coffers in New Mexico’s “trust fund” for early childhood, which was set up last year in order to finance spending by the state’s early childhood agency.
$105 million in unspent federal funds are going to child care providers serving low-income communities in Michigan. The funds will provide a “retroactive 40% increase in state payments for their work over the last year.” The bill appropriating the funds also requires the state to pay providers based on enrollment rather than attendance from June-September 2021, a practice which many states adopted during the pandemic.
|
|
This piece in The Atlantic describes how many child care workers are leaving the industry, further exacerbating the child care needs facing families, as described by Fatherly in this article.
A report from the Center on Law and Social Policy (CLASP) calls for program administrators and researchers to expand their data strategies “beyond disaggregating outcomes by race/ethnicity.” Specifically, those working with data should do a better job engaging communities of color in meaningful ways, integrating data across state agencies, and making the data usable and accessible for families and practitioners as well as researchers and policy makers.
|
|
Research from an OSU assistant professor of social work investigated the concerns of foster families during the pandemic. Using an interesting study method, which involved 11,000 Reddit comments and machine learning to help analyze them, researchers compared discussions from before and after COVID-19 in order to learn about families’ evolving concerns and anxieties for the foster children in their placement.
On the topic of pandemic-induced stress, Hechinger Report breaks down new research on what happens to children’s brains when they face stress. Published in Plos One, the longitudinal study found, unsurprisingly, that rates of childhood anxiety and depression have been “unusually high” during the pandemic and can have serious consequences on learning. Solutions identified by researchers include giving children structured daily routines, limiting passive screen time, getting a full night’s sleep, and limiting exposure to pandemic-related news coverage (especially for 7- to 10- year olds).
|
|
This edition written by: Jamie O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Communications & Policy Specialist |
|
|
|
|
|
|
