Children, parents and child care workers take part in a 2023 demonstration urging lawmakers to include money in the state budget to support child care. Gov. Tony Evers' request was denied that year, but advocates and the governor are trying again. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Child care advocates and Gov. Tony Evers are campaigning once again for a significant infusion of state money to bolster child care, a little more than a year after their last attempt ended in deadlock.

“The cost of putting two young kids in child care costs more than the average rent or mortgage in Wisconsin and exceeds the annual cost of tuition to send two students to the University of Wisconsin-Madison,” Evers told lawmakers in his State of the State message Wednesday evening.

Evers is calling on state lawmakers to put $500 million in the 2025-27 budget “aimed at lowering child care costs, supporting this critical industry, and investing in employer-sponsored child care.”

The governor’s proposal would use state money to renew and make permanent a child care subsidy that began during the COVID-19 pandemic with federal funds. A previous attempt to extend the support ended in a deadlock in late 2023. Without it, however, providers say they will remain in a crisis that has been building over the last year.

A September 2024 report by the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty for the state Department of Children and Families found that nearly 60% of providers surveyed said they were caring for fewer children than their capacity allowed. Almost half of those said they weren’t able to take more kids because they lacked staff.

The survey found that if child care providers were able to hire enough educators to fill their empty rooms, at least 33,000 more children in Wisconsin could get child care.

Federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funds supported Wisconsin’s Child Care Counts program from 2020 through 2023, granting $20 million a month in subsidies that providers used to raise wages and keep staff without hiking the fees they charged parents.

Evers pressed the Legislature to continue the subsidy program with state funds in the 2023-25 state budget, but the Republican majority rejected their appeals. Evers renewed the proposal along with several others in a special session later in 2023, but the legislators rebuffed him a second time.

Evers subsequently cobbled together $170 million from other unspent federal funds for a scaled-down version of Child Care Counts that will soon run out.

“When Child Care Counts was reduced we saw child care tuition increase by almost 15%,” Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), said in an interview Thursday.

For families whose incomes qualify them for the state’s Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy program, the tuition increases meant that their subsidy would only pay 50% of the market price for child care instead of 75%, Schmidt said, increasing the corresponding copayment for parents.

Without a renewal of Child Care Counts or the equivalent, “some programs may be able to stay open by raising tuition, and some families may be able to afford it,” Schmidt said. “Some programs may raise tuition and lose families, because they’re tapped out.”

During a panel discussion in the Capitol Thursday with lawmakers, providers and parents, Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus provider, said that some providers have closed after raising their rates because they’ve lost parents who can no longer afford their services.

“Until we act, we’re going to continue to shed programs,” said Hendrickson, a cofounder of WECAN, an advocacy group for providers and parents. The name stands for Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed.

Providers say that as rates go up, child care is getting out of reach for people who aren’t well-off.

“If we invest in our child care system, it will not be a system just for the wealthy any more,” said Brooke Legler, co-owner of a New Glarus child care center, WECAN’s other cofounder and a panel participant.

Child care providers play an important role in young children’s brain development and in helping them learn social skills, Legler and Hendrickson said. For that reason, at state-licensed child care centers teachers must meet certain educational requirements.

“This is not a field where you just want a warm body,” said Legler.

 Average wages for child care workers with a high school diploma are 40% less than the average wage for all Wisconsin high school graduates, according to data collected by the Wisconsin Economic Development Commission (WEDC). Early child care workers with a master’s degree have an average salary of less than $36,000 a year, less than half  the average for all master’s degree holders in the state.

To hire and keep qualified child care workers requires paying them “living wages,” Legler said. “We need to treat this field with the respect it deserves.”

Participants in the Capitol panel said that despite the failure to enact a support program in 2023, they believe the case is even stronger this year and with this budget.

“This is one of the most challenging policy problems in our state,” said panel participant Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison). “But we know what to do.”

This week, the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association launched a new division focused on policy research and engagement. Schmidt said that was made possible by the organization’s success at raising private support for the new operation.

It was also aimed at ensuring a bright line between that work and the federally funded services that WECA offers child care providers around the state, assisting with licensure, training and other operational requirements, she said.

The new policy arm is preparing research to further document the condition that the child care sector is in.

“First and foremost, I think everyone in the Legislature, the governor’s office and organizations that are working on this issue understand that there’s no backup plan for Child Care Counts,” Schmidt said.

The forthcoming reports from the new policy arm will further underscore the case, she added: “It’s more compelling this time around than it was when we were doing this a year and a half ago now.”