Brynne Schieffer is a child care provider in Cameron, Wisconsin. She addressed a gathering outside the state Capitol on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

After a week at the state Capitol to draw attention to their demand for a robust state fund for child care providers, advocates will spend the next couple of weeks back home to amplify their message.

Child care centers will reopen this week after closing their doors for all or part of the past week as providers sought to underscore the urgency of additional support for child care.

Providers will focus on raising more awareness in their local communities, said Corrine Hendrickson, co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), a coalition of providers and parents. Federal pandemic relief money that has bolstered providers since 2021 will run out completely by early July.

This week, WECAN is encouraging providers to do “larger [local] community actions to help inform the community,” Hendrickson told the Wisconsin Examiner. “We’re also going to be calling other child care programs, making sure they even know this funding’s ending.”

WECAN organized the week of action in Madison, calling it “State Without Child Care.”

A small group of providers shut down for the week to dramatize the loss of child care that they contend will be inevitable without strong state support. Others closed for a day or two, and still others opted to stay open while also endorsing the funding demand.

Earlier this month leaders of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee removed a $480 million child care funding provision from Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed 2025-27 state budget, along with more than 600 other items.

On Friday, Hendrickson and WECAN cofounder Brooke Legler were joined by parents and other providers in front of the Capitol to reiterate their case for restoring the funds.

“My family still currently pays 25% of our monthly income towards child care, and honestly that’s just after-school care and then summer camps,” said Katy Dicks of Sun Prairie, who has a 10-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. When the children were younger, child care accounted for a third of the family’s income, she said — while “it has been suggested that 7% of a family’s income is what is affordable.”

Dicks leads the Wisconsin chapter of Mother Forward, a national advocacy group for child care, paid family leave and other policies to support families.

“We need policy that works for all families,” she said. “The quality of care for children approximately 3 months to 5 years should not be based on a child’s parents’ income.”

Also at the Capitol were Rochelle Navin and her husband. They have a 2-year-old daughter, and Navin is expecting twins. Their daughter is usually at Legler’s New Glarus child care center, The Growing Tree, while her parents work, but they juggled home care arrangements to support Legler’s decision to close the center for the week.

Navin told the Wisconsin Examiner it was disruptive to their routine, but the couple understood why Legler took that step.

“There’s two sides of it, right?” Navin said. “You fully understand why it’s gotten to this point, and why the extreme [response] needed to be taken, while at the same time being scared about what the future looks like.”

Evers’ proposal was to extend the Child Care Counts program, originally funded by federal pandemic relief money. The subsidy — originally $20 million a month, then cut back to $10 million a month in mid-2023 — enabled providers to raise wages without having to increase the fees parents pay for care.

A statewide survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty found that 25% of providers said they might close if the revenue isn’t replaced.

Hendrickson said in the coming weeks she and other providers who have been active in campaigning for the support will reach out to operators with messaging guidance for talking to parents as well as to their local lawmakers.

“This week was definitely about coming together as a group in solidarity and really standing up for ourselves and for our children and our families and our communities,” Hendrickson said Friday.

Over the course of the week at the Capitol, “we visited almost every single office, dropped off information, talked to staffers and really helped them see who it is that they’re hurting,” she said.

The providers who engaged in those conversations also aimed to show legislators “that their constituents actually know what they’re talking about — we know what we’re talking about with our businesses, we can speak to it and the reason why we need the funding, and it’s not a handout,” Hendrickson added.

In the Institute for Research on Poverty study, up to 40% of rural providers said they might close if the additional funding stops. That’s  nearly twice the projected closure rate of urban providers.

Brynne Schieffer operates a child care program in the community of Cameron, near Rice Lake in Northwestern Wisconsin.

“I have spent the entirety of my adult life caring for not only my own children, but other people’s children, raising them, raising them to be kind human beings that will hopefully one day go out and be carers themselves,” Schieffer told the group gathered on the Capitol steps Friday.

“The funding runs out in July, and to avoid closure we have to raise our rates between $35 and $50 per child per week. Whose pocketbook can handle that?”

Hendrickson told the Wisconsin Examiner that if rural providers have to raise their rates, they’re more likely to lose families who can’t afford the increase, with no one to replace them. In cities, she said, moderate- and low-income families will be hurt by the loss of child care, but there are likely to be more high-income families able to keep up with rising costs, so fewer providers would have to close.

All but one of the providers who made the trip to Madison last week were from rural communities around the state, Hendrickson said.

“People drove four or five hours to get here,” she said. “It’s because they don’t feel listened to [back in their districts]. And that’s what they said — ‘I’ve had to come all the way down here to get them to listen to me.’”

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Pinwheels posted at Tree Top child care center in Ashland represent the families on the waiting list for the program. (Photo courtesy of Theresa Fredericks)

Theresa Fredericks grew up in the world of child care.

Her mother founded a child care center in Ashland 52 years ago, when Fredericks was just 5 months old. Fredericks started her career in early education as a teacher there, then took over management and ownership of the program, Tree Top Child Development Center and Preschool.

Fredericks has been proud of the center’s reputation in the community. Tree Top currently is licensed for 33 children at a time. With schedules staggered for some children, there are a total of 39 currently enrolled.

The waiting list is nearly twice that size: 72 children. This week Fredericks put up one pinwheel for each waiting list occupant on the law in front of the center, along with some signs. “Child care wanted,” one sign said. “Quality child care should be a right” said another. “Not a luxury,” said a third.

On Tuesday Fredericks was 300 miles away, at the state Capitol in Madison. Tree Top was closed, and Fredericks says it will be closed again on Wednesday and the rest of this week.

It was a tough decision, she said — but one she and her staff felt was necessary to make a point to Wisconsin lawmakers.

“Without state investment the parents can’t afford to pay rising tuition and staff can’t afford to stay at low wages,” Fredericks told the Wisconsin Examiner. “With investment, we will see a rise in teachers going into the field, we will see an increase in available programs.”

That’s why she and her staff decided to join the statewide strike called by child care providers.

Balancing better wages, affordable fees

The strike is a response to action May 8 by the Republican majority on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to strip $480 million from Tony Evers’ proposed budget. The money would provide child care centers with an ongoing monthly stipend, continuing support first provided through federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funds.

Child care providers have credited the money for enabling them to increase the wages of child care teachers while avoiding increases in the fees that parents pay.

“I know that there are many people who think that because we care for very young children that we don’t count as teachers,” said Tree Top teacher Betsy Westlund at a combination press conference and rally on the Capitol steps Tuesday. “But the work we do is highly skilled and deeply critical to our society, the economy, and our communities.”

She described a common suggestion that child care providers hear when they talk about funding shortfalls: increase tuition and expand enrollment.

“Never mind the tuition is already so high that so few can afford it, and never mind how difficult it is to find teachers willing to work for low wages with no benefits,” Westlund said.

“No one considers supporting the quality of child care by supporting skilled teachers because they assume anyone will do,” she added. “And that hurts. Man, does that hurt — because I know how much I have to put in to become educated in early childhood.”

Republicans favor expanding employer child care tax credit; providers skeptical

“We are not just babysitting — we are laying the foundation for lifelong learning,” said Amber Haas, a fellow Tree Top teacher.

The organizers of the strike are calling it “State Without Child Care.” They’re doing it “so that our elected representatives, especially on the Joint Finance Committee, can actually have an idea of what is going to happen this summer,” said Corrine Hendrickson, co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN) and the operator of a family child care center in New Glarus.

At the Assembly’s floor session Tuesday afternoon, child care providers sat in the overhead gallery. On the floor, Rep. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) introduced some by name, adding that they “are here in the Capitol to advocate for $480 million in the budget for living wages for teachers in early childhood education.”

While some providers are going all in with the strike, many say they cannot — but they are equally concerned about the issue.

Assessing the risk

Angela Norvold has grown her child care program in Hudson from a family day care  serving eight children to two centers, each licensed for 43 children. One is for younger kids and the other for older children, including 4-year-old kindergarten.

“We thought hard and as a team,” about closing for the strike, Norvold said in an interview. She and the center’s administrators decided to send a letter to parents asking for their input. “They agreed that we should stay open, and my fear was that if we closed we would lose those people for good,” she said.

There’s a child care shortage in Hudson, Norvold said. At the same time, she added, there are several providers in the area to choose from, but many have rooms that aren’t in use because they cannot find teachers.

“I don’t know that [closing] would be making a statement where we are,” Norvold said. At the same time, though, “we did have some parents volunteer to keep their children home so that we could come [to Madison] today and tomorrow.”

Norvold said that her centers were once more affordable than those in Minnesota, drawing families who moved across the border to make their home.

“They didn’t just come for lower prices, they came for quality care, educated staff that wanted to stay, and a community that values raising children well,” she said in a brief speech at the rally.  

The funding providers received during the pandemic “didn’t just help families, it helped providers,” Norvold said. “It helped us retain and educate staff, it helped us keep costs down without sacrificing quality. It helped us build futures.”

If the support doesn’t continue, “we’re looking at yet another tuition increase — at least $30 per child per week,” Norvold said. “That will push our infant care to a level that is not sustainable for most working families. It is not sustainable for us either.”

Families show support

Families of children enrolled at Tree Top in Ashland have gotten behind the center’s decision to join the child care strike .

“Our families support us,” Fredericks said. “They know that we have done everything. We’re contacting our legislators, they’re contacting our legislators —over and over again, telling them how important it is.”

Tony Singler is the father of three children who have gone through Tree Top’s program, from the age of 3 months though 4-year-old kindergarten. His youngest child is now nearing graduation from the 4-K program.

“Everything that Theresa does there is just more in-depth and more one-on-one,” Singler said in a telephone interview Tuesday. For his kids, he said, the center has been an ideal place to help their children through their first years.

“There’s a lot of research and support that the early years are very important to the children,” Singler said. “Our pediatrician supports that, and it’s a choice we make to give our children the best chance they have.”

Singler is a certified public accountant; his wife is a nurse. “We’re not teachers,” he said. “We don’t know how to teach kids at that young age.”

Now they are juggling schedules and turning to friends for help while hoping their child can return to Tree Top soon.

“It’s tough,” said Singler, but he says he understands the position that Fredericks and the center’s employees are in.

“It’s been a very good center,” he said. “And if they don’t have the funding, and they lose the teachers because the teachers have to go somewhere else, and they have to cut the enrollment and people get cut — then you don’t have the opportunity to put your child into the center like that, give them the best chance forward in their early development.”

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Corrine Hendrickson, child care provider and advocate, waits to speak at a rally in front of the state Capitol Tuesday, May 13. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Republican lawmakers have filed a proposed bill expanding an existing state business development tax credit related to child care. Child care providers who want to see a permanent state investment in their work said the bill was an inadequate gesture.

The state’s current business tax credit for child care applies only to capital expenditures for an employee child care program. The proposed bill would expand that to include other costs, including operating a child care program for employees, reimbursing employees for child care costs and other costs related to child care benefits.

“These changes will increase the number of available child care slots and provide more options for families,” wrote Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) and Rep. Karen Hurd (R-Withee) in a memo seeking cosponsors. “While not a silver bullet, these changes are another step in the right direction to address the child care issue in Wisconsin.”

Critics dismissed the measure as inadequate.

In a press release Rep. Randy Udell (D-Fitchburg) sent out after the Assembly’s floor session Tuesday, he noted that last week the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee “shot down 612 budget items including $480 million in childcare funding, and they proposed a childcare tax credit in its place that would benefit corporations instead of childcare providers under threat of closure.”

Shawn Phetteplace, national campaigns director for Main Street Alliance, sent a memo to lawmakers Tuesday also dismissing the proposal.

“Providing a 15% refundable business tax credit for businesses providing child care benefits will not appreciably increase access to child care for Wisconsin workers,” Phetteplace wrote. “It will simply be another tax break for large corporations. A similar credit exists at the federal level, the 45F credit, which is widely regarded as not achieving the goal of increasing affordability and accessibility to childcare for employees.”

Corrine Hendrickson, co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), said at a Capitol rally Tuesday she would like to meet with Marklein, who cochairs the finance committee, as well as Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam) the other cochair.

The business tax credit is refundable: The credit recipient receives the full value of the credit back from the state, even if it is more than what the recipient owes in taxes. Hendrickson criticized the lawmakers for “refusing to do the same for our hard-working families with the child and dependent tax credit.”

The state’s child and dependent care tax credit for families, which was expanded in legislation enacted in March 2024, is not refundable. That effectively makes the tax credit worth much more to people with higher incomes than to those with lower incomes, as the Wisconsin Examiner has previously reported.

“We are not going to accept anything more that will entrench the wealthy and well connected into our system of having success in life,” Hendrickson said.

Born issued a statement this week that declared Republicans were focusing on other alternatives to the proposal for $480 million in subsidies for child care providers.

“Legislative Republicans have consistently supported a targeted approach to helping families afford child care, build provider capacity, and support recruitment of child care professionals,” Born said. “Parents are best equipped to make decisions about the needs of their children and Legislative Republicans are committed to providing parents with options, helping families directly make child care more affordable.”

Born said the Legislature spends “almost $1 billion” for child care. 

Hendrickson said that virtually all that money is from the federal government and simply passes through the state budget. Only about $24.4 million comes from the state as a required match.

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Children play at The Growing Tree child care center in New Glarus. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For more than two years Wisconsin child care providers have been warning that failing to provide ongoing support will mean their fees will go up and their numbers shrink drastically.

Starting Tuesday, some providers will try to give lawmakers and the public a taste of what that could look like — by staging a strike.

Their goal is to persuade Republican leaders on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to commit to including in the state budget a significant child care support program.

Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed $480 million child care measure was among more than 600 items the committee removed on Thursday, May 8, from the draft budget Evers proposed for 2025-27. The motion to remove the items passed 12-3 with only Republican votes.

“We are demanding that the Joint Finance Committee guarantees they will put $480 million of state dollars back into the budget” for child care support, Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider and advocate, told the Wisconsin Examiner Monday.

Until they get such a guarantee, some providers have decided to close their doors, Hendrickson said.

Providers who intend to shut down their operations on Tuesday will go to the state Capitol for a press conference organized by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), which Hendrickson cofounded. They plan to remain at the Capitol at least through the rest of this week, she said.

“The goal is that Republicans and Democrats will stop by and talk to us about our concerns,” Hendrickson said. She added she was hoping for “a real conversation” about measures that child care providers favor as well as proffered solutions that they oppose — “since they keep leaving us out of these conversations.”

Hendrickson said Monday afternoon that about 100 participants — providers, child care workers and parents in support of their actions — were expected at the Capitol Tuesday. She said there was not a count yet of how many child care centers might close.

Organizers have established a donation portal with Community Change Action to raise funds that will be used to offset lost wages for child care workers and providers who take part in the walkout, Hendrickson said.  

‘Day Without Child Care’ events

The action planned to start Tuesday follows events across Wisconsin Monday for “A Day Without Child Care” —a national campaign to draw attention to the need for child care programs and their need for stronger financial resources.

At a rally Monday morning in New Glarus, parents, state officials both elected and appointed, education leaders, local economic boosters and child care providers took turns championing the need for a state investment that would strengthen child care providers.

“Whether you’re a parent, an employer, an educator or a policy advisor, child care affects each and every one of us and it touches our future as well,” Cortney Barry, director of the New Glarus Chamber of Commerce, said at the rally. “The current system is not working, especially in small communities like ours. It’s just stretched too thin. It’s fragile, and it’s scary to think just how close we are to a true crisis.”

Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski said business leaders she met with in central Wisconsin last week told her that child care was a pressing need for them to be able to hire locally rather than going out of state, and that they could not find workers “not because people don’t want to work for [them] — they can’t find a place to send their kids.”

Democratic lawmakers and parents have since 2023 pushed to continue the monthly Child Care Counts support program that Wisconsin began with the help of federal money during the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds bolstered child care providers’ revenues so they could raise wages without charging parents more for care.

“We lost 6,000 [child care] programs between 2010 and 2019,” Hendrickson said at the New Glarus rally. “You know what stopped [the decline]? COVID — when we started getting money. All of the sudden we had more programs open at the end of the year than we had at the beginning of the year. It worked.”

A proposal to continue Child Care Counts with state funds was stripped from Evers’ 2023-25 budget, and the Legislature’s Republican majority repeatedly rejected attempts to restore the funding. The Evers administration was able to continue a reduced support program, but that will end with the final payment to child care centers early this summer.

That has escalated a campaign to keep the program going with state funds. In a state survey released in April 25% or more providers said they might close without continued support at the level Child Care Counts provided.

Hendrickson said at the New Glarus rally 54% of providers in Green County in the survey expected to close after the state funding program ends. Half of providers will have to raise tuition, she said — including her family child care business, which cares for eight children.

Even with fee increases totaling $50 a week phased in over the months of August and September to replace lost Child Care Counts revenue and higher expenses, “I will still be taking a pay cut,” she added.

Brooke Legler, the other WECAN cofounder and operator of The Growing Tree child care center in New Glarus, said shutting down to protest starting Tuesday is “our last effort — it’s the only thing we have as a community, as a profession, that we can say, like, ‘No, I’m not going to subsidize the economy off of my pay, off of the teachers that work there.’”

Providers who can’t shut down

Other child care providers who took part in Monday’s Day Without Child Care campaign across the state said they cannot shut down in protest this week, but they support providers who choose to do so.

In Waupaca, Tracy Jensen, director of Sunny Day Child Care, used the day as a teach-in for parents. “We  were raising awareness about the true cost of child care and how important it is to have child care in our community,” Jensen told the Wisconsin Examiner.

About 75 parents came through the center Monday, and Jensen said she plans to continue the opportunities for more such parent education through the week.

Sunny Day is the largest center in Waupaca County, Jensen said, with a license for 292 children at one time. There are 350 families with children enrolled currently, and a waiting list of 70 families, she said.

Jensen said that given the center’s size it won’t take part in the organized shut down. She said she told employees that if they want to go to Madison Tuesday to voice their concerns they can do so, and she has tried to organize staffing to make that possible.

Tricia Peterson directs Future All Stars Academy in Juneau. On Monday she closed the center for a day and took 11 employees to an event in Waunakee, where providers, staff and parents rallied.

Peterson won’t close Future All Stars for the walkout starting Tuesday, however.

“I’m not in a position right now to do that,” she said, “But I will say I will do everything I can in support of that.”

The center’s long-term future will depend on the state budget, however.

“I’m one of those centers that if funding doesn’t come forward in June, we’ll have to close,” Peterson said. She’s already notified parents about that possibility.

“They understood where we were coming from,” Peterson said. “We didn’t have one parent complain.”

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