Child Care for Low-Income Families Summary of Two Workshops (1995) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
The Structures and Consequences of Child Care Subsidies
The Structures and Consequences of Child Care Subsidies
Pages 34-47
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From page 34... ...
In contrast, an estimated $~.7 billion was spent in 1993 through the four largest federal child care programs that preclominately serve the Towest-income families: chilct care for AFDC recipients, Transitional Child Care, At-Risk: Child Care, ancT the Chilct Care ant! Development Block Grant (U.S.
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From page 35... ...
care subsidies was addressed, as has been done in many states that have established integrated chilcI care subsidy programs, the sheer amount of public resources cledicatec] tO providing child care assistance tO iow-income families would remain a major problem.
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From page 36... ...
36 .~ Cry Ct o a: Cot ._ 1 Ct Lit Lit ¢ o ~4 4= o a; aJ ~ rem V ~ C)
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From page 37... ...
Although fecleral chilc] care subsidies have been greatly expancled in the past five years, overall levels of public assistance at the state level still leave a sizable proportion of the eligible population unserved.
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From page 38... ...
Pressures to keep state costs down and the difficulty of adding outreach activities to already beleaguered state agencies were noted by the workshop participants as contributing to this problem. Among Meyers's random sample of AFDC recipients in Catifornia in 1994, for example, 61 percent were unaware of the AFDC Disregard a benefit that allows AFDC recipients to deduct their child care expenses if they go to work; 85 percent were not familiar with Transitional Child Care subsidies.
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From page 39... ...
Access to care also appears to be especially affected by the relationship between reimbursement rates and local child care prices, and also by delays in payments to proviclers. An Urban Institute survey of resource and referral staff in six communities (Long ant]
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From page 40... ...
Furthermore, scarce funds relative to the population eligible for subsidies, pressures on state budgets that affect their willingness to match fecleral dollars, and fragmentation militate against providing consistent support to families as they shift from nonworking to working-poor status, make it difficult for families to act as informed consumers of care for their children, and also appear tO create perverse incentives to states to unclerutilize some sources of child care support. Some states have done a better job of reducing the negative consequences of fragmented!
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From page 41... ...
broacler issues about how funcling levels and the structure of federal child care subsidies affect families' access to higher' quality chilc! care arrangements and the continuity of their child care.
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From page 43... ...
Furthermore, the relationship between the reimbursement rates reflected in subsidy levels ant! the local price of child care appears to affect families' access tO quality care.
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From page 44... ...
subsidies through programs that either subsidized providers directly or enabled the families to pay providers when fees were due showed substantially higher rates of reliance on center-based and family day care arrangements. Other evidence reported at the workshops also indicates that subsidies, per se, can help low~income families gain access to the same range of quality options that are available to higher-income families.
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From page 45... ...
Christine Ross presented data from the Urban ChilcI Care Assistance Study, which inclucles information from both a telephone survey and in
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From page 46... ...
, support families' transitions across the various subsidy programs more effectively, and appear to broaden parental choice of care arrangements. She also found, however, that effective integrated systems may require smaller caseloads than exist with mixed systems, to enable child care staff to inform parents about their choices and to keep track of parents as eligibility status changes, so they are linker!
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From page 47... ...
The scarcity of funcis relative to the number of eligible families is, however, a more difficult problem for states to solve and one that consolidation is unlikely to address. In addition, the participants were keenly aware that overall levels of public assistance for child care relative to clemand create major tensions at the state and local levels between funding direct services (basic maintenance of effort)
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