Student is concerned about cost of childcare and looks at New York plan to make it affordable.

 New York Governor, Kathy Hochul, and United States Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, announced that families would be able to apply for child care assistance through an online portal on July 19, 2024. This would make it much easier for families to know if they are able to receive benefits from the Child Care Assistance Program. Before this portal was available, most families in New York had to apply with a paper form. While the state already provides 125,000 children with child care assistance, there are probably many more families that could use the help of the Child Care Assistance Program. Many families who receive benefits from the CCAP have 90 percent of their child care costs covered. Many families will be eligible to receive benefits if the household income is 85 percent of the state median income or below. This portal will help families know if they are eligible to receive benefits and also apply for CCAP. 

I hope this new tool will allow families to get access to the help they need. Child care can be extremely expensive, especially in today’s age, where both parents usually work full-time. One of my friends spends hundreds of dollars a week sending her child to daycare. I feel that this is probably the case for many families. The parents both work forty hours a week and end up spending one of their paychecks on child care. This can cause parents to decide to stay at home with their children because it makes more economic sense for them. I do not think parents should have to choose between their job or child care. Families might not even know that they are eligible to receive child care assistance, and this online portal could help them determine if they should apply. I think this service could really benefit those that live in rural areas. Coming from a rural area myself, I know that there are very few services available in small towns. Many people have to drive 30 minutes or more to reach any sort of service that could help them. When I read that most families had to apply on a paper form before the online portal was active, I was shocked. For many families in rural areas, they might not have access to or know where to go to fill out this form. It might also take months for the paper form to be processed and for the families to get the assistance they need. This new online portal will hopefully speed up the process. In my Human Behavior and the Social Environment class, we talked a lot about free or low-cost child care. Many other countries provide free child care for their citizens. And while I acknowledge that most of these countries have a fraction of the population we have here in the United States, I hope that we can replicate some of those programs. Families in America deserve to have reliable access to affordable child care.

Reference

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-launches-digital-portal-help-new-york-state-deliver-free-or-low-cost-child

Illinois has the goal of providing access to “high-quality early childhood education and care services for all children from birth to age five.”.  There was a commission that looked into how to achieve this, and they had a report out in 2021, and the Governor is following through on the recommendations of that commission.  But, I haven't followed this to see how it is going.

https://www.illinois.gov/news/press-release.27179.html

https://idec.illinois.gov/goecd/governors-early-childhood-funding-commission.html