Herrera Beutler seeks $100M to combat child care drought

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Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler is hoping that a bill in Congress can secure $100 million in funding for child care, something that local parents and officials feel has turned into a crisis.

Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, sat down from those representing the childcare industry as well as local parents to talk in a roundtable format at the YWCA Clark County in Vancouver March 19. She was there in part to promote House Resolution 1488, the “Child Care Workforce and Facilities Act” which, according to information provided at the event, seeks to solve the issue of “child care deserts” in Southwest Washington and across the United States.

What’s a child care desert?

The event’s information defined a child care desert as “any census tract with more than 50 children under age 5 that contains either no child care providers or so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots.” In Washington state, 63 percent of people live in such a location.

The bill, sponsored by Herrera Beutler alongside Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minnesota, would allocate $100 million in funding for a grant program aimed at bringing relief to the deserts, through educating and training the workforce, enhancing retention and providing resources to build, renovate or expand facilities.

The bill’s requirements for grants made applicants show how they would help workers get needed credentials, strengthen retention efforts and increase “availability and affordability” across the board but including non-traditional hours for their service, according to the information.

Regarding the childcare desert concept, Educational Service District 112 Executive Director of Early Care & Education Jodi Wall said that in Southwest Washington from 2003 to 2019 the number of licensed child care programs dropped from 550 to 300. Locally, parents have felt the effects of a lack of options.

Local effects

Chris DiPalma, father of two currently in daycare, related his naivete going into finding where to place his first son.

“The first call was a wakeup call,” he said, learning there was a two-year waiting list. Subsequent calls to other facilities were much of the same.

Eventually, DiPalma and his wife were able to place their first son and had luck when their second child was of childcare age, but “now comes the daycare bill” which he said was greater than state college tuition.

Another parent, Leah Scouller, had a similar experience to DiPalma with her daughter, calling it a “shellshock” when she searched for a facility while on maternity leave. Living in Woodland at the time and working in Vancouver, she said the only place she could find was in southeast Portland where her mother happened to work.

“I had these visions of going to tour the facilities and finding the best one,” Scouller said. “You literally get what you were given.”

Scouller was able to eventually find a daycare in Ridgefield, though she added at the Portland location she was paying the equivalent of a mortgage payment for childcare monthly.



Herrera Beutler said she had put her own daughter on a waitlist for child care in Washington, D.C., before she was born, but she never got in.

“We’re all in this together. A shortage is a shortage,” Herrera Beutler remarked.

What brought the drought?

Officials cited a number of factors into what has lead to child care droughts, one of which was the cost of necessary certifications for workers. Laura Sampson, representing Lower Columbia College Early Learning Center, explained that paying for criminal background checks, tuberculosis tests, food handler’s certifications, and others add up. 

“It falls back on the employee to pay,” Sampson said, noting that the State Department of Early Learning has “portable” screenings that follow the individual for three years. The need for those certifications is exacerbated by the high turnover of the field, fueled by low pay and quality workers being promoted out of caregiver positions.

Many of the Early Learning Center’s employees were also continuing their education, Sampson explained, which leads to turnover upon completion of degrees when the job doesn’t match the expected pay for the level of education the employee has.

Support for Early Learning and Families (SELF) Executive Director Debbie Ham also talked about the workforce issue, noting that early childcare wasn’t as valued as highly as K-12 or higher education was. She explained the median wage of childcare workers in Southwest Washington was $12 an hour, the current minimum wage, while the median wage for the region for all jobs was $21.37 hourly.

Ham noted increasing subsidy payments could be a benefit, explaining that 40 percent of the market rate for childcare was covered by subsidy payment, leading to a 60 percent gap.

“It just went up to 40 percent,” Ham noted, as recently federal funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant increased. Wall noted that prior to the increase less than 30 percent of child care was subsidized.

Though the state has some of the highest childcare quality standards in the country, Wall said it comes at a cost. Those costs along with problems in workforce retention have led to the current child care desert crisis.

‘A beachhead’ bill

Currently, HR 1488 has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Labor. The child care officials generally praised Herrera Beutler’s taking on of legislation that could steer more funding to facilities. 

Herrera Beutler said that even with the bill there was still much work to do, but it provided “a beachhead, a first place to start” on the child care issue. While issues like the opioid crisis have been a focal point in recent years she felt that supporting the child care industry had fallen by the wayside.

“It feels like this is a 20th Century problem, not a 21st Century problem,” Herrera Beutler said.