By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
The Kansas Early Childhood Transition Task Force was in Hays Wednesday to discuss how Kansas can better meet children's and family's needs.
Child care funding and oversight are very fragmented in the Kansas government. The task force has been directed to evaluate if child care needs to be under the oversight of a single agency in Kansas in order to reduce duplication and bureaucratic complexity for families and providers.
The listening session in Hays was one of a series across the state of Kansas. The board room at Rockwell Administration Center was filled to capacity Wednesday with about 40 people broken into eight groups.
Each group was asked to discuss three questions:
• What are the challenges, gaps or barriers your community has faced?
• What services and programs are working and are bright spots?
• How would you evaluate the state's efficiency in providing support to you and your community?
Participants expressed concern about a gap between what child care providers charge and what some families can pay. Families should be paying no more than 7 percent of their income for child care, according to a staff member from Child Care Aware.
Jennifer Hecker, an Ellis County Child Care Task Force member, said although cost is a challenge for many families, wages for child care providers remain low. This has resulted in child care workers leaving the profession in droves, she said.
Child care providers have been able to receive pandemic sustainability funding, but that is now ending.
Brett Schmidt, owner of Learning Cross Child Care in Hays, said he is concerned as that pandemic funding disappears, communities like Hays will see a sharp decrease in providers.
Mason Ruder is a Hays city commissioner and his wife runs a child care home. During the pandemic, all providers participating in the Children and Adult Care Food Program received the same level of funding.
With the end of the pandemic, that funding has gone back to a tiered system. Tori Ruder, Ruder's wife, is now receiving less food funding even though food prices have increased significantly.
Infant care is not sustainable in for-profit models, Schmidt said. This has led to extreme shortages in most communities in the state. The state requires small staff-to-infant ratios, which drive up costs.
The going rate for care for an infant is $1,000 per month.
Group members also expressed concerns about a lack of care for children with disabilities or mental health issues. Care is also lacking for parents who do shift work.
The inability to find quality child care spills over into the workforce, participants said.
When a child care home closes because of illness, a worker may have to take a leave of absence to care for a child. Workers who can't find or afford child care, including potential paraprofessional educators, nurses and teachers have to remove themselves from the workforce to take care of their children, a participant said.
The participants pointed out some bright spots in the child care system. Some of these included intergenerational child care programs, the Ellis County Child Care Task Force, cooperative programs with businesses to provide child care and new professional development opportunities for child care providers.
The participants gave the facilitators multiple suggestions on how state oversight could be improved.
Participants said opening a new child care center or home was a lengthy process that required approval of multiple officials.
They said the Kansas Department of Health and Environment website is difficult to navigate.
Although some participants said the background check system had become easier, but others said it historically had been a slow and expensive process.
One participant said she needed three different background checks for her job.
One of the facilitators said because different certifications have different requirements, they can't use the same background checks for each certification.
Kyle Carlin, director of the West Central Kansas Special Education Cooperative, said each funding source has different requirements. This results in more administrative costs for the entities that receive the funding.
Sarah Wasinger, facilitator for the Ellis County Child Care Task Force, said applications for state funding have had short turnaround times. She also expressed frustration that the criteria for the programs have been changed in the middle of the application process.
Hecker also added grant funds are often based on population, which means rural areas of the state are left out.
"We can't compete body-wise," she said. "I would hope that they could look a square mileage."