Report: Subsidy System Delays, Disrupts Access To Child Care – State House News Service
By Chris Lisinski
The state's child care subsidy system "falls short" of a goal to help parents with lower incomes find and hold down jobs, in the process "delaying and disrupting" children and families from accessing the services they need, a new report concluded.
Taking aim at a "complicated and inefficient" facet of the early education and care sector, authors with the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation said both voucher and reserved slot subsidies leave major gaps that fail to cover all eligible children, as evidenced by the roughly 16,000 kids who remained on subsidy waitlists in February 2022.
The newest report published Wednesday focuses on reforms that lawmakers and new Gov. Maura Healey could pursue to improve subsidy access, building on the organization's 2022 research that estimated inadequate child care access more broadly costs Massachusetts $2.7 billion per year in lost wages, productivity slowdowns and replacement costs, and foregone state tax revenue…
Child care looms as an issue area primed for debate in the 2023-2024 lawmaking session, the first featuring Healey in the corner office.
Healey targeted the topic as an early priority in her inaugural speech, calling for Massachusetts to "pledge to be the first state to solve the child care crisis" and referencing the Common Start proposal she endorsed on the campaign trail, which would eliminate child care costs for the lowest-income families, limit those costs to no more than 7 percent of income for other families, and increase early educator pay.
"Let's finally pass legislation in line with Common Start to make sure every family pays what they can afford and that care workers are paid what they deserve," she said. "This is something our families, workers and businesses all agree on."
Buoying the chances of action, both House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka highlighted child care as early priorities.