CUMBERLAND — Both Allegany and Garrett County community agencies are struggling with maintaining child care programs, resulting in the loss of day care options for area families.
At the end of June, the Allegany County Human Resources Development Commission had to close its child care programs in Mount Savage and Frostburg.
“The decision to close these programs was entirely based on funding. Since the programs opened, funding was difficult to obtain from year to year and, going into the last fiscal year, we were operating on reserves in hopes that additional funds would be identified elsewhere through state resources,” said HRDC Executive Director Courtney Thomas. “When that didn’t seem possible, we began having discussion on what could be done and, in March, began discussing closing.”
However, HRDC was able to place all the program’s children in centers elsewhere in the county and also had jobs for all the staff who worked in the program.
“Delegates have always been very involved in identifying state funding to keep the program operating, it’s just always been a struggle for us to do so,” Thomas said. “And, with the state cuts already and services such as the Wellmobile and others that provide access to health care being cut, there is little extra money left in the state that can be identified to fund the child care program.”
Thomas said it is difficult to run child care programs that are center-based and funded by organizations. She said an organization can’t charge a family the true cost to run such a program. That, added with salary and benefits for employees, creates a very expensive endeavor that HRDC, and state funding, was not able to support.
Garrett County Community Action Committee is also experiencing strain with running child care programs in Oakland and Grantsville.
“We run a program similar to HRDC’s that essentially provided wrap-around services for children zero to 12 years of age. The issue at hand, and what HRDC faced, is the increasing difficulty it is to run these services,” said Duane Yoder, president of the Garrett County Community Action Committee. “We operate the center at a pretty high quality in terms of staff training, degrees and curriculum. It’s more than just a day care in the sense there’s a lot of child development programs and tutoring and homework assistance for the older children. That makes the cost of this service higher to operate.”
Yoder said there is a voucher system that assists with the costs to families, but the state’s system didn’t recognize the difference in quality of care until about two years ago.
“There are four tiers and, if we can get to tier four, we could probably operate these programs based on those voucher rates,” Yoder said. “Right now we’re at tier three and our goal is to get to that fourth tier, but it takes a while to get staff trained and properly certified, and get the facility upgraded as needed, to meet that highest tier.”
He said the agency believes it can do this if given a year.
“From our point of view, this is a very difficult situation right now in terms of keeping these programs going, but we want very much to do so,” he said. “If we just have some time we think we can get our programs to reach that top level.”
Yoder said the programs are running on some reserve funds and if they cannot reach the highest tier or find additional funding, then the agency will have to start looking at whether it can continue its operations.
The agency is working to encourage parents who qualify to enroll in the voucher program, making sure to get reimbursements from that program and cutting down on expenses that are not absolutely essential.