EXCERPT FROM: The Post and Courier
By Yvonne Wenger
COLUMBIA -- Five months and 100-plus job applications after Tamara Townsend's boss laid her off from her full-time job with a steady paycheck, the 30-year-old single mother finally found work in May. But this job is commission-only selling alarm systems.
Some weeks she doesn't clear a dime. Whether she scores a sale or not doesn't change the fact that she has to pay for full-time day care for her 7- and 4-year-old daughters.
Townsend moved back into her parents' West Ashley home after she lost her job at a car dealership that went under in December. She was able to secure a scholarship to help offset her weekly bill at Preschool Academy.
Still, juggling the cost of child care and a job that isn't paying the bills makes it hard to justify working. But Townsend doesn't want to give up trying. It's a matter of pride and not wanting to set a bad example for her girls.
Townsend has joined the growing ranks of middle- and low-income families that can't afford child care. The Great Recession and lingering economic slump have left many parents to choose between work or staying home, depending on one income or turning to government assistance.
Cash to help parents pay for child care provides the cornerstone for self-sufficiency, not government dependency, according to numerous studies and child care advocates. Simply put, government investments in child care assistance can keep parents working and off a host of other costly social welfare programs such as cash assistance, food stamps and housing vouchers.
In South Carolina, though, 80 percent of the families that qualify for state-run child care subsidies can't get it because there is not enough money to go around.
Left behind
About 20,000 children are served by ABC Vouchers, a program administered by the state Department of Social Services and paid for primarily with federal cash. Left behind are another 80,000 kids who qualify because their parents earn less than $21,855, $27,465 for a family of three and $33,075 for a family of four. Parents must work to receive an ABC Voucher, according to Leigh Bolick, director of child care services for the Department of Social Services.
Only the "poorest of the poor" can get help because there isn't enough money to go around, Bolick said.
A handful of other programs help fill in the gap, including the federally funded Head Start and Early Head Start programs that provide care for another 11,450 children. The quasi-state agency First Steps to School Readiness provides scholarships to another 200 to 400 children depending on the year, which is what provides Townsend with her child care assistance. First Steps uses some public dollars to leverage private donations and federal grants, among other forms of contributions.
Public schools provide 22,500 seats in 4-year-old kindergarten classrooms, and church and center-based scholarships also provide a small amount of aid.
All together, the child care subsidies go to roughly 55,000 children. The need for aid greatly outstrips the assistance available. The state is home to 340,000 children younger than 6, and about half are born to parents on Medicaid and a quarter have mothers without high school diplomas.
Earlier this month, a U.S. House subcommittee recommended increasing funding for child care subsidies by $700 million, the biggest proposed increase since 2000, and adding another $866 million to Head Start, to open more slots for children. The proposal now goes to the full House committee.
But just as child advocates feel hopeful about the possibility that access for more children might become available across the country, more bad news hits close to home.
Georgetown County First Steps Director Carol Daly found out Thursday that as many as 100 of the roughly 180 children who receive local scholarships are at risk to lose the assistance because of a loss in grant funding. Daly said the agency on Monday is going to start evaluating which families are most in need and determine who might lose their scholarships.
But more than that, she said the at-risk children served by the First Steps-approved programs might lose any head start the children have gained, and fall behind. If that happens, the state loses the investment it already has made in the children, Daly said.
Living on the 'cusp'
The vast majority of the subsidies are available only to the poorest of the poor, leaving to fend for themselves the working poor, victims of the bad economy who were bumped to a lower income bracket and young professionals with meager earnings.
Samantha Ingram said she is one of the families on the "cusp." She makes too much in her job as an administrative assistant at First Steps to qualify for child care assistance but not enough to easily pay for her daughter Avery, 3, and her 1-year-old son, Gabe Jr., to be in full-time child care.
She and her husband, Gabe, both work full time and she attends college part time. During the workweek, the children spend most of their time under the care of someone else. Ingram knows that the quality of the care is important to her children's success in the future, so she's trying to find a center they can afford that meets Avery and Gabe Jr.'s education needs. Ingram said that based on her search in the Columbia area, a quality center will cost about $240 a week, minimum.
Ingram said her family teeters right above the government's poverty line, and doesn't qualify for any sort of child care assistance. She said it is extremely hard to pay for care.
"Then comes the question, are we working just to pay for child care? For my family, we are," Ingram said. "The solution is to have one parent stop working and keep the children at home in order to avoid a sky-high child care bill every month. But then we become a one-income family.
"Ironically, if we become that one-income family, we would then qualify for assistance for child care and groceries every month. To me, that doesn't make any sense. My family doesn't need or want 100 percent help, just some help. I want my husband and I to stay working and to set a good example for our children by showing them to work for what they want in life."
S.C. First Steps Director Susan DeVenny said starting a family, even for young professionals, is a "carefully orchestrated responsibility."
"To me, it's a make or break, if you are a young mother," DeVenny said. "If she had to make a choice between work or her children thriving, she is going to choose her children thriving if she can find a way of sustaining her family."
Child care can be as expensive as college tuition, and many parents just can't afford it. Full-time child care costs $3,400 to $15,900 a year, according to the National Women's Law Center.
Parents in South Carolina pay, on average, $6,032 a year to have an infant in a day care center full time, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Administration for Children and Families. The average cost for home-based care is a little less expensive at $4,940. Care for infants costs the most.
Other parents pay a neighbor or friend or family member to watch their child in an unregulated environment for just $25 or $50 a week. That still adds up to $1,300 to $2,600 a year, but such care comes with risks. Child advocates urge parents to evaluate the setting and whether the sitter is meeting their child's important early-education needs, rather than, for example, using a television for long periods of time as entertainment.
When times were better, advocates went to state legislators to propose tax credits for child care as a way to help middle-income parents pay the bill and put themselves on better financial footing, DeVenny said. The higher quality the program ranked, the higher the tax credit.
That idea fell by the wayside when the economy tanked, despite economic evidence from multiple studies that the economics of child care contribute to a thriving society.
Data from the Women's Law Center and elsewhere shows that access to reliable child care keeps parents working. Parents who use licensed child care centers collectively earn more than $100 billion each year. Likewise, the law center found that unreliable child care costs businesses an estimated $3 billion a year because of workplace disruptions and loss of productivity.
In South Carolina, Coastal Carolina University economist Don Schunk found that 75,000 parents who have children in day care collectively earn $2.4 billion annually. The child care industry's economic impact is worth $787 million, according to Schunk's 2006 study that he produced while working at the University of South Carolina.
The human factor
Besides the economic implications of affordable and accessible child care, the human stakes are high and carry long-term consequences. Because of the way a child's brain develops, the care the child receives by the time he or she is 4 years old will have lasting effects, DeVenny said.