Vision for Child Care

Dear Colleagues,

Please read and review and comment on components. What can we do in Indiana to help move this important Vision forward. Indiana was one of the first states to receive the original Act for Better Child Care funds - Child Care Development Block Grant. And, now we have a chance to jump in and speak up.

http://www.naccrra.org/policy/docs/ChildCareReauthorizationVision.pdf

Please feel free to comment and I will forward your comments.

Carole Stein

WHAT WOMEN WANT AND NEED

These poll findings are very relevant and critical as we are moving into some unchartered waters for employment and for women raising families. Please read and connect when possible.

What Women Want Poll Findings: Women Are Worried About the Future and Believe Government Must Act According to a recent poll by the National Women's Law Center, women feel the impact of economic insecurity and rising food, energy, education, and health care costs more deeply than men – and see government as a key to the solution. Women want: A better health care system An end to the wage gap Affordable birth control, comprehensive sex education, and protection for Roe v. Wade Access to high-quality child care Improved economic security for women and their families A solution to the dropout crisis A fair and independent judiciary For more details on the poll, read NWLC's press release, the fact sheet, or the complete Interested Parties memo on the poll results. A Platform for Progress The National Women's Law Center also released A Platform for Progress – an agenda to address the unmet needs of women and their families in the areas of education, employment, economic security, health, and legal rights. What's Your Take? What's your take on the issues addressed by this poll? Tell us what you think. Media Coverage The polling data has been featured in: Huffington Post Politico Womenstake.org

EDUCATION - an election issue

The Long Thompson approach to education reform:

Jill Long Thomson, a former college professor brings a unique commitment to improving the state's education system. In order to grow Indiana's economy and keep businesses here, I feel it is crucial that Indiana reforms its education policy to better equip the workforce for the future.
I have encouraged Jill Long Thompson to establish a priority of early childhood education. That is where it starts.

Jill Long Thompson has a plan but I am suggesting that another priority be established within her framework and it recognizing the value of high quality early childhood to allow women to enter the workforce and support their young families.

• Early Childhood Education and Care: The child care needs of American women and their families have increased dramatically as women with children have entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers. Yet high-quality child care is too often unaffordable or simply not available. Women and their families thus have a tremendous stake in public policies that will help make high-quality child care available and affordable to those who need it. That is why I am working together with the National Women's Law Center to improve the quality, affordability, and accessibility of child care, with a special emphasis on ways to expand public and private financing of the changes needed to achieve these goals.

The Long Thompson administration will do the following:

• Create a public private partnership to offer free books to all Hoosier children from birth through age five: Modeled after Tennessee's partnership with Dolly Paarton's "Imagination Library." Children who enter kindergarten with the skills and love of reading are far more likely to graduate from high school and become productive and successful in the workforce.
• Reduce the high school dropout rate by putting more flexibility into our schools and personalizing education: Jill Long's approach will restructure the high school experience, provide more options and opportunities so that more students, including special education students, graduate with the ability to succeed in future endeavors.
• Improve access to higher education and lifelong learning opportunities by creating a seamless education system that allows easier transfer of credits and courses: Jill believes we need to make college level courses for credit more available to students in their junior and senior years of high school and transferable to any public post-secondary institution in Indiana, at no additional cost to the students or families.
• Expand the 21st Century Scholars Program: Jill will seek to expand the program to embrace a large percentage of lower and middle income families. She will research new ways of accessing college funding mechanisms.
• Create a Higher Education Fund for additional 21st Century Scholarships. She will immediately work to create its own higher education foundation to tap billions of dollars available in philanthropic aid just as other municipalities have done, and use these funds to pay for expanding the Scholars program so more deserving students can attend college.

• Please log on to http://www.collegeloanmarket.com/for new and innovative ways to assist families access lending for college.

There is much to do - and with some ingenuity, we will prevail.

Carole Stein

New Child Care Agenda - National Women's Law Center

October 8, 2008

Dear Friend of Child Care,

Over the past several months, a group of national and state organizations has been working to craft a shared agenda or “blueprint” for the future of child care, and we are now asking national, state, and local organizations to endorse this agenda. This historic collaboration has been a comprehensive process that has engaged a broad group of voices across the country. Most importantly, it has produced a solid framework for guiding the reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and other opportunities for child care improvements in the new Administration and new Congress that take office next year.

We are pleased to share the product of this historic collaboration -- Developing America’s Potential: an Agenda for Affordable, High-Quality Child Care. The Agenda recognizes that high-quality child care helps children, families and communities prosper. It helps children learn and develop skills they need to succeed in school and in life. It gives parents the support and peace of mind they need to be productive at work. It also helps our nation stay competitive, by producing a stronger workforce now and in the future. But for many families – especially, but not only, low-income families – high-quality child care is unaffordable or unattainable. This Agenda for Affordable, High-Quality Child Care proposes comprehensive reforms to ensure safe, healthy and affordable child care that promotes early learning. It has five key objectives and proposes increased federal funding to meet these objectives:

· Children will be in healthy and safe child care settings.

o States will develop specific minimum health and safety standards for all child care providers caring for children not related to the provider for a fee on a regular basis.

o States will require these providers to have comprehensive background checks that include an FBI fingerprint check, participate in 40 hours of appropriate health and safety pre-service training and 24 hours of annual training.

o States will inspect child care settings at least twice a year, once on an unannounced basis.

· Children will be in child care settings that promote early learning.

o States will develop a Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). The QRIS will rate providers on the quality of care they offer, beginning at the level of quality needed for providers to become licensed and regulated, and increasing to nationally recognized high standards.

o States will make grants available to help programs achieve and maintain the higher standards of the QRIS, including to assist providers in obtaining training, credentials, and degrees, as well as to increase providers’ compensation commensurate with their education. Programs and providers serving low-income children will receive priority for these grants.

o Grants and loans will be available for facility renovation and construction, with a specific focus on providers in low-income areas.

· High-quality child care for infants and toddlers will be expanded.

o States will administer grants to top-level QRIS providers to provide high-quality, comprehensive child care and development services.

o States will support organizations that operate family child care networks and provide technical assistance to other infant and toddler providers in their communities, including relative caregivers.

o States will support a statewide network of specialists to provide training and consultation on high-quality infant and toddler care.

· More families will have help paying for child care.

o States will double the number of children in low-income families who currently receive child care assistance.

o States will set a one-year, assistance-eligibility period for families.

o States will reimburse providers who serve children receiving assistance at no less than the 75^th percentile of currently valid market rates; and will develop strategies to increase the supply of care for underserved children including, such as children with disabilities and other special needs, children in limited- English-speaking families, and children whose parents work non-standard hours.

o The Dependent Care Tax Credit will be made refundable to help low-income families, the sliding scale for determining the amount of the credit will be expanded to help middle-income families, and the credit will be indexed for inflation to preserve its value to all families.

· A strong infrastructure will provide both research to guide policy development and technical assistance to states to improve the quality of care.

o States will conduct studies on compensation and other characteristics of the child care workforce.

o Technical assistance will be provided to states on conducting valid market-rate surveys and developing QRIS.

o Collaboration will be encouraged across early childhood programs.

The Agenda provides concrete policy proposals to achieve these objectives.

Your support is important to our success.

As many important issues compete for attention in the new Administration and a new Congress, a strong, collective voice will be a key component to our success. To strengthen the call to action on child care, we are asking our partners across the country to show their support for this comprehensive Agenda. (A list of the partners that have already endorsed the Agenda is attached.)

We are hosting a webinar on Monday, October 27^th at 2 pm EST to discuss the content of the Agenda and its relationship to new legislation. Future webinars and conference calls will focus on strategies for moving the Agenda forward in the coming months.

To join the growing list of local, state, and national organizations supporting Developing America’s Potential: an Agenda for Affordable, High-Quality Child Care, please register your support at our website. Your endorsement is an important contribution to making child care a top priority for policymakers.

We are eager to work with you, and your endorsement is the first important step in this shared campaign to make the Agenda a reality for children and families.

If you have any questions, please contact me at hblank@nwlc.org or (202) 319-3036.

Carole Stein, The Stein Group and Helen Blank, NWLC

child care tax credits

Comment: Consider what it took for the government to act on such recommendations from all children's care national and state organizations. Please be certain to pass this information to your colleagues. Carole Article from the October 9, 2008 edition of the CHN Human Needs Report: Child Tax Credit Improvement Enacted in Financial Rescue Bill On October 3, its final day in session, Congress passed and the President signed into law a major improvement in the Child Tax Credit that will help 13 million low-income children. The provision makes families with earnings of $8,500 or more eligible for a partial Child Tax Credit although they don't earn enough to owe federal income taxes (called a “refundable” credit). Approximately 2.9 million children will become newly eligible for the credit and 10.1 million will receive a larger credit. Without the improvement families would have had to earn at least $12,050 in 2008 to be eligible for the partial credit. The reduced earnings requirement was enacted for one year; although advocates have hopes it will not be too difficult to persuade Congress to extend it. Seventy percent of the children who benefit from the change in the Child Tax Credit live in families in which a parent works 30 or more hours per week year around, and nearly one in ten of the children live in families where either a parent or child has a disability. Many of the parents who would be assisted work in low paying and difficult jobs providing critical services, such as health care to the elderly or ill and teaching young children. For state-by-state estimates of the number of children who will benefit from the Child Tax Credit expansion see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report at: http://www.cbpp.org/5-15-08tax.pdf . A tax package which included changes in the Child Tax Credit, an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) ‘patch,' renewal of expiring annual tax credits often referred to as ‘extenders,' and a number of new tax incentives for the production and use of renewable forms of energy for months had been caught up in a standoff between the House and Senate. House Democrats insisted that the entire cost of the package should be paid for (offset) by raising revenues elsewhere in the tax system. Senate Republicans opposed paying for the AMT and expiring credits; they only supported partially offsetting the remaining provisions. They stymied efforts to bring the fully paid-for House bill, H.R. 6049, to the Senate floor by preventing it from receiving the 60 votes needed to move forward. See Human Needs Report for July 1 for more details: http://www.chn.org/humanneeds/080701b.html . It looked as though Congress would recess without passing the tax package until the financial rescue bill provided a potential vehicle for passage. After the rescue bill failed in the House, the Senate revised the bill by adding the stalled tax package plus tax benefits for regions of the Midwest, Texas, and Louisiana affected by Hurricane Ike and major flooding. The Senate gambled that the increasing pressures on the House to pass a rescue plan plus the desire by many House members to adopt some or all of the tax cut/disaster relief package would overcome House opposition to the Senate approach. It worked. Ultimately the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (H.R. 1424) easily passed the Senate by a vote of 74-25 and garnered enough votes in the House (263-171) to become law. The partly offset tax provisions have a net 10-year cost of $110 billion, added to the $700 billion potential price tag for the bailout.

How and are we protecting our children?

Issue: Child Abuse and Neglect - No Family Left Behind: Where are the Families? Who are the Families?

The rate of reported and substantiated abuse, neglect and fatalities is not being reduced. All families identified at risk of abuse and neglect need a level of prevention service before an intervention is indicated.

Current Statistics and Problems:

Lack of a multi level comprehensive Abuse and Neglect Prevention approach to reach all families at risk of abuse and neglect.

# 1.

If 50% of all newborns screened meet the risk factors for eligibility for HFI and only 20% are offered or accept participation in the home visiting program, where are the other 30% of at risk infants?

# 2.

Are the abuse fatalities found in Hoosier families who met the risk factors but were not offered home visiting services?

# 3.

Does Indiana have a follow along process to track those 30% of at risk infants and families?

Prospective Solution:

Create unique identifiers for families screened and identified as at risk but not offered home visiting services. Place these families in a confidential and discrete file where outreach efforts could be systematically offered for purposes of breaking the problems of isolation and depression and the myriad of social issues faced by these families.

Creative Opportunity:

HFI, the home visiting service provider will partner with Prevent Child Abuse/The Villages, Inc., the education and outreach specialist and become a state of the art integrated multi level abuse and neglect prevention service model for the state and the nation.

How:

The integration of Prevent Child Abuse into The Villages, Inc. can serve as the vehicle to offer outreach opportunities to the 30% of infants and families.

· PCA has public awareness skills, networking experience and access to contacts in local communities.

· PCA has credibility in conducting workshops, preparing written materials, developing audio visual and information sessions for young families.

· PCA can offer in-service trainings to early childhood program providers. Workshops assisting child care providers in early identification and recognition.

· PCA can develop and facilitate the skillful approach to parents without shutting the child out of the program. This has been requested by providers for many years.

Prepared by Carole Stein, The Stein Group