Mass. lawmakers step up child care funding with $1.5 billion proposal – WGBH
By Hannah Reale
With this year’s budget, state lawmakers will codify nearly half a billion dollars more in funding for child care providers than in the pre-pandemic era.
Massachusetts spun up a program known as C3 — Commonwealth Cares for Children — using federal pandemic relief dollars in 2021. It created an entirely new way of subsidizing child care in Massachusetts: providing direct grants to child care facilities to help with operational costs. Now, 9 in 10 providers take those grants to offset costs.And for this fiscal year, lawmakers are setting aside $475 million to support it…
Advocates with the Common Start Coalition — organizations across the state that have banded together to push for more affordable and equitable early education — applauded the move last week.
“Making the state’s C3 operational grant program for providers permanent will provide lasting support to Massachusetts’ early education and child care programs, allowing them to invest in educator compensation and increase their capacity to serve more children, while avoiding major cost increases for families,” Common Start Coalition Director Deb Fastino wrote in a statement…
The budget also outlines that families at higher income levels should be eligible for vouchers and subsidies, moving the benchmark from $73,000 for a family of four to $124,000 or even higher. (That’s going from 50% of the state’s median income to 85%, a proposal carried over from an ambitious standalone bill approved in the Senate.)