Editorial: Cuts to child care funding hits Marin hard

A little more than a decade ago, then-President Barack Obama outlined a promising investment in early childhood education.

Today, local providers of that important schooling are fearful the Trump administration is walking back that promise.

Obama’s strategy bears repeating:

“Study after study shows that children who get a high-quality early education earn more over their lifetimes than peers who don’t,” he said at the 2014 White House summit on early education. “They’re more likely to finish school. They’re less likely to go to prison. They’re more likely to hold a job. … Early education is one of the best investments we can make not just in a child’s future, but in our country.”

Less than 12 years later, the White House’s efforts to freeze funding to California and four other Democrat-led states that administer the funding is tied up in court, but local providers are justifiably worried.

“Devastating,” is the word Aideen Gaidmore, the Marin Child Care Council’s executive director, used to describe the potential loss of federal funding. “We know our child care system is fragile already. This could be detrimental not only to the families, but the system itself.”

Loss of funding would impact the training, hiring and retention of child care workers.

It also means that local workers, whose jobs depend on having affordable child care, could lose the vouchers that they rely on to pay for those programs. Gaidmore estimates that if the cut is allowed, the council could lose 25% to 50% of its federal funding for local child care programs, large and small.

The council already doesn’t get enough funding vouchers for the number of applications it receives. Gaidmore estimates that 566 Marin children are on the waiting list for vouchers.

The Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center, for example, could potentially lose almost a third of the federal funds the 95-child program receives.

The White House put a freeze on those funds after welfare fraud schemes were uncovered in Minnesota. The federal Department of Health and Human Services has also voiced concern about federal child care benefits being provided by those five states to ineligible undocumented immigrants.

Eliminating affordable child care for children and families that need and rely on it is not the right strategy to root out fraud. Neither is requiring citizenship.

It is shortsighted, punitive and penurious.

It is a strategy – and threat – that has been temporarily suspended, not eliminated. The judge blocked the White House’s orders in order to give the administration and the state challenging that federal edict time to prepare their cases.

That tenuous fate simply underscores local efforts to bring back a proposal for a quarter-cent sales tax increase to provide local funding for affordable child care.

A similar proposal was on the 2016 ballot. Although it received a 63.2% majority of the vote, it fell short of the two-thirds majority required at that time and was defeated.

Its opponents argued that the affordable child care would be a magnet for low-income families, adding the demand for housing, and that the funding could instead come from the Buck Trust or by the county reining in its workers’ pension benefits.

Most of the voters didn’t buy that argument.

Meanwhile, a similar sales tax measure was approved in Sonoma County. It received a 62.8% majority, more than enough to win given the recent change in state law requiring a simple majority vote for victory.

Removing the need for a supermajority threshold and recent threats to funding have revived the push for a Marin measure.

In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama spoke about studies showing that early learning promotes youngsters growing up more likely to read and do math, graduate from high school, hold jobs and establish stable families.

“We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind,” he said.

It is a social investment that pays important dividends.

It’s not politics. It’s not partisan.

It is an equation that makes sense. It made sense in 2013 and it makes sense today.