NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — 2,875 child care programs in Tennessee have received American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Stabilization support. In Davidson County alone, 357 providers have received these funds.
This support is ending Saturday, September 30. However, it was extended an extra two months through a different funding stream.
"At this point, Tennessee has allocated and distributed all of the ARPA funds," Kylie Graves, Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs at the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, said.
The ARPA stabilization grant funds are gone, but through a different funding stream called the ARPA Discretionary grants, a final opportunity for the stabilization grants is available. Child care programs can apply for this money over the next two months before it is finished.
What does this mean for child care programs and for their children?
According to data from the Century Foundation, a public policy research organization, 89,989 kids are set to lose child care in Tennessee, and 1,199 child care programs are expected to close. At minimum, an additional 3,893 child care jobs are expected to be lost in Tennessee.
Graves said these numbers are an absolute worst case scenario.
"The number that comes with the 1200 that are at risk of closing, that study was based on a survey that they did of child care providers, Graves said. "It asked them, 'had the stabilization grants not been available, would you have closed during the pandemic?' They took the portion of those who said yes and multiplied that by how many are getting the grant now, or got the grant over the course of time."
She continued to say that this means some programs that may have been at risk for closing when the pandemic happened may not be now, so it is hard to say how accurate the numbers from the survey are.
"It is hard to know how much programs and providers have been relying on these funds," Graves said.
Child care programs will have to make a difficult decision if they are negatively affected by the loss of federal money: raise prices to make up for lost money and charge more money from parents, or be unable to keep a full staff because they have to lower wages.
Parents will have to make a difficult decision, too: either pay more for child care, or remove their children from care completely, risking economic insecurity.
What can be done to solve this problem?
Graves said the 2 major issues are availability and affordability. Building up workforce with longstanding wage increases and making child care affordable without raising costs will take time and evaluation.
Tennesseeans for Quality Early Education has some legislation that is looking into tapping some of the sports betting funds newer to the state and creating early childhood scholarships like the ones in higher education.
"I think there's a lot of consensus that we've got to do something about the child care issue, it's just figuring out how do we start to move forward," Graves said. "Part of it will be seeing once these stabilization grants lapse, where are providers at post pandemic."
