When Nickol Lowry applied for a government subsidy to pay for her son's child care several months ago, she learned that her own pursuit of a college education while working would be held against her.
Lowry, who works part time at Wegmans while studying criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was recently denied financial assistance, with Monroe County saying that RIT is "not an acceptable program of study" to qualify for a subsidy.
Being rejected for child-care subsidies has become more common in Monroe County. A new Center for Governmental Research study, Access to Subsidized Child Care in Monroe County, NY, shows that the rejection rate of applications jumped from 11 percent to 50 percent over the past six years. At the same time, the number of children in the county benefiting from child-care subsidies dropped 38 percent — from 13,575 to 8,400.
County Human Services Commissioner Kelly Reed said that it's in the county's best interest to make subsidies for child care available to low-income residents, since child care helps keep them employed and off public assistance. "We want to try to make people more self-sufficient," Reed said.
Various studies, as the center's report notes, have also shown that using quality child programs is an investment that brings big returns in better educational performance and fewer behavioral problems.
Still, with the county denying about half of about 5,400 applications for child-care subsidies last year, the report estimates that more than 12,000 children from working poor families in the county are in need of child care but aren't getting subsidies.
Monroe County has not taken steps that some other localities have taken to reduce the denials, such as seeking a waiver to the 2004 requirement that has made many applicants seek child support as a condition for a child-care subsidy.
Unlike 20 other counties and New York City, Monroe County officials have also decided that, though a working parent enrolled in a two-year community college can get government help for child care, she or he can't get a subsidy if attending a four-year college.
"I'm trying to better myself. You would think going to school would be acceptable," said Lowry, who ended up taking out a loan, thus going deeper in debt, to cover the $216 a week to keep 2-year-old Emanuel Griffin at Rochester Childfirst Network.
Nor is the county willing to assign workers to child-care and community centers to help process subsidy applications, even though experts cite the applications process as a needlessly complicated obstacle.
"If you make the process more accessible, you will reduce the denial rate. You will change the climate — the expectations — and the goals," said Donald Pryor, the Center for Governmental Research staff member who wrote the report.
The need to make child-care subsidies available to the working poor became clear a decade ago, when federal welfare legislation forced many public assistance recipients into low-paying jobs and in need of child care. State allocations to counties are supposed to help the working poor pay for child care, which can run between $5,000 and $10,000 per child per year.
In 2002, then-County Executive Jack Doyle changed the eligibility criteria. A family could make no more than 140 percent of the poverty level to qualify for a child-care subsidy — $21,360 for a family of three. Previously, a family could make as much as 200 percent more than the poverty level and qualify for a subsidy.