Child care providers, parents and advocates arrive at the state Capitol Wednesday, April 16, 2025, for a rally in support of child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Hundreds of child care providers and parents rallied outside the state Capitol Wednesday, then headed inside to buttonhole lawmakers of both parties, urging support for a $480 million provision in the next state budget for Wisconsin’s child care providers.

“Child care is not a luxury, it’s not a nice-to-have,” said Claire Lindstrom, an Eau Claire parent who addressed the rally. “It is infrastructure.”

“We’re here today because the people who are doing this very important work can no longer afford to hold up a broken system,” said Toshiba Adams, an instructor and instructional chair in early childhood education at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

The rally and afternoon visit with legislators followed a morning gathering of the participants at the nearby Concourse Hotel that included talks by lawmakers, parents and providers. At noon 350 or more people — the largest action by child care advocates in recent memory — marched from the hotel to the rally, with chants of “Kids first, families first, invest in child care now.”

The crowd massed on the Capitol building’s west steps for a half hour of speeches.

Lindstrom broke down the average cost for child care. A single parent paid the minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, “would have to work 43 full-time weeks just to cover one year of infant care,” she said. A family making the median income in Wisconsin — about $75,000 a year — will probably spend 20% of their earnings on care for a single child.

“If they have two kids, an infant and a 4-year-old, they’re spending over a third of their income just to go to work,” Lindstrom said. “This is not a personal budgeting issue. That’s a broken system.”

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed $480 million in the state’s 2025-27 budget that would go to licensed child care providers, replenishing the state’s Child Care Counts program funded from federal pandemic relief. Without that, Child Care Counts will expire for good in June.

At its height between 2021 and 2023, Child Care Counts was credited with stabilizing Wisconsin’s providers, who shared in payments totaling $20 million a month. Providers reported that with the money they were able to raise wages for child care workers while holding down increases in the fees that parents paid.

“Our early childhood educators are trained in how to support brain development, emotional regulation, and school readiness,” Lindstrom said. “We expect them to do this important work and yet we pay them less than workers at Kwik Trip and Culver’s.”

Evers, a Democrat, was unable to persuade the Legislature’s Republican majority to extend the program in the state’s 2023-25 budget. He repurposed other federal funds, and the total payment was reduced to $10 million a month. That will run out in June.

Providers, advocates and early childhood education experts have argued that only with an ongoing investment like Child Care Counts can providers pay child care workers adequately without pricing care out of reach for the average family.

“We need child care for our communities to function,” Lindstrom said. “We can no longer afford to treat this like a personal problem. It’s a public domain. And the solution is clear. We need to fund child care.”

A survey report released April 10 found that up to 25% of Wisconsin providers said they might close without continued support along the lines of Child Care Counts. More than one-third said they might have to reduce the number of children then could serve for lack of staff.

Large majorities said they might have to cut pay and that they expect to have more difficulty recruiting workers. More than half said they expect some employees to quit and that providing high quality care would become more difficult.

“We will see dramatically less care available in virtually every single county in the state,” Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told the crowd. “Is that acceptable?”

“No!” the crowd roared back in reply.

“Is it acceptable that moms will have to consider leaving the workforce in record numbers because you cannot work if you cannot afford or find child care? Is it acceptable that stressed out parents doing the best they can will have no support from the state to ensure that they can work and contribute to our tax base?”

With each question the rallygoers responded with resounding shouts of “No!”

Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, told the crowd that businesses should support state funding for child care.

His company pays employees with young children $400 a month toward their child care costs, he said. When the crowd applauded, he thanked them, then added, “but I also feel very embarrassed. … That’s so little, and the cost of child care is, you know, several thousand dollars a month, and this is just barely scratching the surface.”

Shivaram pointed out the state manufacturing tax credit that his company receives, along with all Wisconsin manufacturers.

“And guess what? We have to do absolutely nothing to get that tax credit,” he said. “We don’t have to invest in any capital equipment, we don’t have to train any workers, we don’t have to give back to the community, nothing. You know, how about we make that tax credit contingent on helping the child care situation?”

In an interview after the legislative visits Schmidt of WECA said the hundreds who took part went to almost every state Senate office and about 90% of the Assembly members’ offices as well. WECA organized the event along with Wisconsin Head Start Association and Raising Wisconsin — an advocacy campaign that WECA and allied groups launched in 2022.

“We really wanted this to be nonpartisan,” Schmidt said — “just an opportunity to tell stories and share, from a real perspective, from the heart what’s going on with this industry.”

Some of those conversations — with leaders in the Legislature who advocates have already spoken to about the budget request — were “not necessarily a surprise,” she acknowledged.  

With other lawmakers, she added, including some of the 30 first-term Assembly members elected in November as well as others who have not served on committees where child care has been an agenda item, “there was a lot of interest in just learning,”

The visits were an opportunity for personal testimony to reach lawmakers and their staff, Schmidt said. “The power of having parents tell their stories, and the power of having educators tell their stories about how they’ve been using the public funding when it’s available — it was very compelling.”