The Kentucky Senate Families and Children Committee passed House Bill 6 this week, legislation aimed at improving child care for children with disabilities and lowering costs for families.
Alicia Haynes, who has owned a child care center in Western Kentucky for the past several years, said she agrees with many of the actions outlined in the bill, such as requiring three hours of annual training for working with kids with disabilities. However, she added that it still doesn’t address attracting more workers to the field or retaining quality employees.
"I have many different children with different levels of special needs," she said, "and we do need some certified people for certain specific types of disabilities, and we need the funding to get the proper training."
Most state-funded preschool programs lack minimum standards for assistant teachers, according to a report from the National Institute for Early Education. The bill now heads to the full Senate.
House bill 6 would also allow the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to change the way it calculates child-care subsidies for low-income families. Haynes said many child-care businesses feel they are in the dark on how federal and state funding are allocated to providers through different programs, such as the state’s Employee Child Care Assistance Partnership Program.
"We just want to know where the funding is coming from," she said, "and we want to know where it's going to, because it's not coming to us."
According to Kentucky Youth Advocates, House Bill 6 would increase transparency by requiring the state to provide data to the General Assembly and local child care communities on child-care supply, demand and cost. Nationwide, the cost of child care has now outpaced inflation, and the industry continues to struggle with rising prices and worker shortages, according to the Century Foundation.