State Sen. Kelda Roys, holding her toddler, speaks about legislation Democrats are proposing to provide ongoing funding for child care providers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Democratic lawmakers are circulating a draft bill to extend the soon-to-end state child care support program and fund it with $480 million that was stripped from the 2025-27 state budget.

The proposed legislation follows action earlier this month by Republican lawmakers to remove child care support and more than 600 other items that Gov. Tony Evers included in his draft budget.

Both Evers’ proposal and the Democrats’ bill aim to continue support that child care providers have been receiving since 2020 as part of federal pandemic relief.

“This funding has been essential in continuing successful programs that support our early educators, child care providers, parents, and most importantly, our kids,” said state Rep. Alex Joers (D-Middleton) at a Capitol news conference Thursday announcing the legislation.

The $20 million that Wisconsin paid out each month to providers through mid-2023 “kept our early educators in the workforce, held tuition down for parents and provided a direct investment in our children during the most crucial years of their childhood development,” Joers said.

Payments were cut to $10 million a month in June 2023, and the last of those funds will be paid out by early July.

“But with this impending deadline, child care providers and early educators are faced with the impossible decision to either raise rates or have to close altogether,” Joers said. “Without assurance of this funding lifeline, many have already made that decision and have devastatingly shut their doors forever.”

Citing recent reports, Joers said that there are 48,000 children on waiting lists for child care in Wisconsin. In a survey of providers, 78% said they would have to raise fees for infant care — the most expensive age group in most child care programs.

“Altogether, if nothing changes, parents are looking at having to find an additional up to $2,600 in their yearly budget,” Joers said.

First-term Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi), the lead state Senate author on the legislation, said that when she was running for office last year, voters repeatedly shared their concerns about the cost and scarcity of child care.

“We have historically undervalued and underpaid child care and early education professionals,” Keyeski said. “This is no longer tenable.”

She described the plight of one constituent who had to change providers three times after the first and then the second provider went out of business because of financial difficulties or other constraints. The mother told her that her current provider — the third — had rates that are “at the top” of what the family could afford.

Keyeski said the provider has told the woman that unless the state can continue with its support, the center’s rates will go up $40 a week, or $160 a month. For the couple, “this increase is unsustainable,” she said. “Her family is left wondering, what to do next?”

Wisconsin’s rural communities have been especially hard hit, she added: In 70% of them, there are three or more children for every child care opening.

“In my district alone, over 34,000 children need care, but there are only about 26,000 available slots,” Keyeski said.

Child care should be viewed as essential infrastructure, said state Rep. Renuka Mayadev (D-Madison).

“And as a state, we support infrastructure. We maintain roads, we maintain bridges. Why is funding childcare such a fight?” Mayadev said.

Wages of less than $14 an hour are driving child care workers out of the field, she added. “There is no other industry where such high value work is being done at such dismal low wages.”

Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) — accompanied by her toddler son before she took him to his child care provider near the Capitol — said the legislation calls for $480 million in state funds over the next two years.

“But I think the real question is what it will cost the state if we don’t do it,” Roys said. She forecast “continued massive closures” of child care centers.

“Already over 60% of child care providers have classrooms sitting empty or slots that can’t be filled because they don’t have the teachers to fill them,” she added.

Roys said child care was a critical need in order for the state to address persistent shortages of people to fill jobs.

“In critical areas like public safety, in K-12 education, in health care — what is it going to mean if the parents of even more kids can’t get child care?” Roys said. “We can’t afford that. We have to make this investment.”

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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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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