The Need For Affordable And Safe Child Care

Child care for working parents is essential to families here in Maine and around the country. For years, the Child Care and Development Block Grant Program (CCDBG) has assisted low-income parents in affording child care. The support provided by this program enables parents to obtain safe, reliable, and affordable care for their children while they work or go to school to improve their own skills and education.

Twenty-six hundred children from 1,800 families in Maine receive federal child care subsidies through the CCDBG program. Particularly during these difficult economic times, this program goes a long way in helping so many families. That is why I was pleased to recently support Senate passage of a bill to reauthorize this important program, which received overwhelming bipartisan support.

I have seen first-hand the impact of high-quality early learning on a child's ability to succeed in school. Educare Central Maine, located in Waterville, which I have visited, is a state-of-the-art early learning center that serves more than 200 mostly low-income children from birth to age five. Almost half of those children come from families that are eligible for assistance, and many rely on the CCDBG voucher to help cover the cost of tuition. Educare is a great example of quality child care in the State of Maine, and of the real impact of CCDBG funds at work in our communities.

As I saw at Educare in Waterville, the CCDBG vouchers that allow parents to choose the best child care setting for their children is an important aspect of this program. Vouchers give parents the flexibility they want to make the best decisions about the kind of care they want - whether that is at a child care center, at a family care home, or with a relative or friend. The voucher program helps keep these decisions in the hands of parents.

I am also pleased that the Senate reauthorization bill would require coordination among the Early Learning Advisory Councils and Head Start and IDEA programs. Aligning these systems will help improve the quality of all services offered for infants, toddlers, and preschool aged children.

High-quality early learning experiences help ensure that children are well-prepared for school. This bill improves the current program by making sure those providers receiving CCDBG funds are qualified, receive training, and are regularly inspected and monitored.

The bill also includes provisions from the Child Care Infant Mortality Prevention Act, a bipartisan bill that I coauthored last year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, half of the approximately 4,500 sudden infant death syndrome cases in the United States are entirely preventable with effective training and implementation of correct sleep practices. The CCDBG Reauthorization Act includes sudden infant death syndrome prevention and safe sleeping practices among the new health and safety training topics for CCDBG providers.

Child care is not only important to the developmental health of children, but also to the well-being of their parents. When parents know that their children have a place to go where they will be safe and where they will learn, then the parents have the peace of mind and opportunity to earn a living to support their family.

Balancing the need to work with the need for child care can be very difficult. At times, a parent's salary could be almost completely offset by the cost of child care, and this burden is particularly heavy for low-income families. This bill will help more parents get the support they need while reinforcing the need for high-quality child care in healthy and safe environments.