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News / Northwest

WA child-care advocates rally at state Capitol to push for changes to ‘shaky’ system

By Simone Carter, The News Tribune, Tacoma
Published: January 24, 2025, 10:57am

The child-care industry in Washington is struggling with both staffing shortages and high costs for care, advocates say. It’s why parents from across the state met on the steps of the Legislative Building in Olympia on Wednesday afternoon.

The Child Care for WA roundtable, composed of more than 20 state early learning groups and organizations, hosted a rally Jan. 22 to urge lawmakers to focus on improving the situation.

Genevieve Stokes, director of government relations for Child Care Aware of Washington, said the industry is full of amazing, hardworking providers. Yet they’ve had to work for too long on low wages and no benefits.

“We have a very shaky system that sees providers have a lot of turnover because they can’t afford to pay their staff what they need, and they can’t afford to charge parents more because parents can’t afford to pay more,” Stokes told McClatchy. “So, we have a system that is held together by duct tape in some ways.”

Other child-care advocates echoed those concerns.

Bronti Lemke came to the rally with her 6-year-old, Ashton, in tow. She said her family was on a wait-list for the state’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) for more than a year before she was able to enroll Ashton four years ago in the early learning center at Tacoma Community College.

“I was incarcerated for a good part of my early 20s, and after having my son, I completely turned my life around,” Lemke said. “… I got into the ECEAP program, got into college — which I graduate in March now — and the ECEAP program really allowed us to grow as a family.”

This legislative session, Child Care for WA is backing a bill that would update reimbursement rates for the Working Connections Child Care (WCCC) program. The bill was sponsored by then-state Rep. Emily Alvarado, a West Seattle Democrat who has since been selected to replace former state Sen. Joe Nguyen, who now leads the Department of Commerce.

Alvarado on Wednesday pressed the importance of investing in the state’s kids.

“And the investment we need to make right now is in a child-care system where kids have high-quality education, where families have affordability and access, and where providers get paid a fair and living wage so that they can do the hard work that is raising and caring for our kids,” she told the crowd.

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The families of some 323,000 kids — those up to age 5 who aren’t in school yet — require child care, according to the Department of Children, Youth and Families. Yet less than 30 percent of those kids are served by preschools, licensed child care and/or subsidized child care.

DCYF Secretary Tana Senn, who up until recently served as a state representative, told McClatchy on Wednesday that Washington is facing a challenging budget deficit. Still, she said, “we cannot go back by any means.”

Looking ahead, Senn said she has faith that the state will keep making strides in ensuring the affordability and accessibility of child care.

“We know so many industries rely on their employees having access to child care, whether it’s construction or health or teachers, education,” she said. “So we need to continue to provide child care so we can help our economy, we can help our families.”

Roughly 63 percent of Washingtonians live in a child-care desert, according to the Center for American Progress.

Gov. Bob Ferguson said during his gubernatorial campaign that too many parents in the state leave work because of the burden of child-care costs. That, he wrote in an August Facebook post, is “unacceptable.”

Stokes with Child Care Aware of Washington noted that the child-care topic is a bipartisan issue. Everyone can appreciate its value, she said. Providers and families are affected, but so are small businesses in need of workers.

“It impacts the agriculture industry, it impacts the medical industry,” Stokes said. “Everyone is impacted by this issue, and this is something that we need to work on and lift up together.”

This year Child Care for WA is asking lawmakers to:

  • Continue the promise of the Fair Start for Kids Act, including by boosting eligibility for the WCCC subsidy program to 75 percent of state median income, according to a campaign fact sheet.
  • Make sure that WCCC rates align with the real cost of offering care, including benefits and living wages, by ensuring the state uses the “Cost of Quality Care Rate model to set subsidy rates.”
  • Raise child-care capacity by adding more funding to the Early Learning Facilities Fund.
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