EDITORIAL: DHHS pursues child care policies that ignore reality

Bangor Daily News - 7/6/2017

July 06--Maine'sDepartment of Health and Human Services says it's intent on making it easier for working families in rural Maine to find child care and be able to pay for it.

It's a worthy goal.

But in pursuing its chosen strategy, Maine DHHS is playing loose with the law, ignoring the basic reality of where the vast majority of the state's children receive child care, and proposing to relax child care licensing requirements.

In expanding child care access in rural Maine, DHHS' focus is on adding to the more than 1,000 licensed child care providers who look after children in their own homes, although their numbers are shrinking and they look after less than a third of the state's kids in child care.

DHHS says it's focusing on in-home child care businesses -- whose licenses allow them to look after up to 12 children each -- because their rates are lower than those of larger child care centers, and the department says they're more likely to be located in less populated areas of the state.

One prong of DHHS' strategy to encourage the proliferation of home-based, family child care businesses is to relax the licensing requirements they must satisfy.

This spring, the department released revised license requirements that would eliminate a number of rights state rules currently guarantee parents, such as the right to visit their children at any time during the day and the right to be informed of any licensing deficiencies.

Under the new requirements -- which DHHS has proposed but not yet implemented -- in-home child care providers would also be able to take care of more children without expanding their staffs, meaning young children would receive less individual attention from staff members at a key point in their lives for brain and language development.

Another element of DHHS' strategy is to pay more for family child care. So, last month, after opposing repeated attempts to raise the rates child care providers are paid for accepting low-income children whose families qualify for publicly funded child care subsidies, DHHS raised subsidy rates on its own for family child care providers only.

Just last year, the department stated that it couldn't change child care subsidy rates without a change in state law. And earlier this year, officials from the department opposed attempts in multiple pieces of legislation to raise child care subsidy rates across the board.

Child care providers often lose money when they accept subsidized children, so they limit their numbers or accept none at all so they can soften the financial blow. With a higher subsidy rate for family child care providers, the idea is that more will open their doors to children from low-income families.

But as a way to expand access to child care for families that can't afford it, a rate increase that benefits only family child care providers defies common sense.

Statewide, family child care providers account for less than 30 percent of Maine's licensed child care capacity. In the child care subsidy program, only a third of children with subsidies use family child care, according to the most recent federal government data. Over the past decade, as the number of family child care providers has dropped, the number of larger child care centers has increased, DHHS licensing data show. And, as with in-home child care businesses, child care centers also struggle to make the math work when it comes to accepting low-income children.

So, a strategy that helps only family child care providers ignores the establishments that look after many more of the state's young children.

DHHS isn't limiting the subsidy increase to family child care providers because of a lack of money. The department has enough money to raise subsidies for all child care establishments. In each of the past four years, the state has left at least $4 million in federal child care funds unspent. And the department this spring said it planned to devote almost $11 million more to child care subsidies from a large pool of unspent federal welfare funds.

With enough money available, DHHS owes it to Maine's families to pursue child care policies that respond to reality -- and to respect the law.

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