Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Battle Creek series.

The pandemic exposed a growing crisis in Early Childhood Education (ECE) and childcare that continues to escalate, and the Michigan League for Public Policy (MLPP) made it the focal point of its 2024 Kids Count in Michigan Data Profiles.
 
The Kids Count in Michigan project is part of a broad national effort to improve conditions for children and their families. The Annie E. Casey Foundation based in Baltimore, Maryland, created the annual Kids Count report and released its first Data Book in 1990. The series has since evolved to track 16 indicators across four focal areas: economic well-being, health, education, and family and community. 
 
The MLPP is the State of Michigan’s Kids Count organization. Its Kids Count Policy Director, Anne Kuhnen, says, “We put a focus on [early childhood education] both in the Data Release and the Brief because this is one area where we saw huge disruptions during the pandemic. For many years, the need in this area has not been met.”
 
Data collected in 2023 for the most recent Kids Count, shows that 772 out of a total of 9,139 infants to 5-year-olds in Calhoun County were receiving childcare subsidies and 39.6% of 3 and 4-year-olds were attending preschool. The data compared these most recent numbers to those collected in 2017 which showed 700 receiving subsidies and 40.3% in preschool.
 
“There are a number of administrative barriers preventing families from participating,” Kuhnen says. Among these is a 10-day window to submit necessary paperwork after which applications are either closed or denied, and proof that they’re working which is a major obstacle if parents don’t have access to childcare they can afford.
 
Anne Kuhnen, Kids Count Policy Director“Even families facing homelessness are required to meet work requirements,” she says. “These kinds of barriers, whether they’re administrative or something else, make it hard for families.”
 
Governor Gretchen Whitmer has made access to safe, affordable, quality childcare and ECE a priority through programs including MiLEAP which prioritizes education from preschool through postsecondary with a focus on preparing children for kindergarten and helping more people earn a skill certificate or degree to help them get a good paying job. This was created to address the provision of preschool for the state’s children, but Kuhnen says lawmakers need to do more.
 
“I would like to see the state take seriously the fact that the childcare industry is underfunded and figure out how we can be investing more public resources because we know families rely on this,” she says. “The state has opportunities to remove or lessen these barriers like getting rid of work requirements if they’re facing homelessness” similar to what has been enacted in Minnesota.
 
Families experiencing homelessness in that state have three months after they apply to submit documents and be in an activity such as work, school, or employment plan activities.
 
The State of Minnesota joins several states that have developed meaningful steps to address their childcare and ECE needs.
 
In 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to make childcare free to the majority of its families. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that New Mexico would waive childcare subsidy copays and expand eligibility to make carefree for one year for nearly all residents.

In Kalamazoo, the Kalamazoo Community Foundation recently announced Rx Kids Kalamazoo, its first citywide cash prescription program for mothers and children which allots $1,500 in pregnancy and $500 each month for the first year of the child's life, money that may be used for early childcare. The program was first launched in Flint in January 2024, and Kalamazoo was selected as the expansion site.
 
A women-led effort is also underway in Iowa through the Iowa Women’s Foundation, an organization “structured to represent and support the diversity of women in Iowa, and discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated.”  IWF serves the full spectrum of girls and women in rural and urban communities throughout the state of Iowa.
 
Under this umbrella is “Building Community Childcare Solutions”, which focuses on bringing parents, business leaders, educators, political representatives, and childcare providers together to find solutions that alleviate the childcare barrier in Iowa IWF. The IWF is also providing financial resources.
 
“There are several organizations committed to helping solve Iowa’s childcare crisis, but most struggle to secure the necessary financial support,” says information on the IWF website. 

“As a grantmaking foundation, IWF is well aware that funding plays a crucial role in helping nonprofits accomplish their missions. For that reason, the Iowa Women’s Foundation established the Child Care Solutions Fund. These funds are invested in organizations and institutions that focus on strategies to increase women’s economic security by decreasing the workforce gap through access to quality, affordable childcare.”
 
Pulse (formerly BC Pulse), a partner, advocate, and coach improving early childhood development in Michigan operating under the umbrella of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, was launched in 2012 to support systems change in Battle Creek. In 2023, Pulse was charged with developing a comprehensive early learning and care plan for seven counties in southwest Michigan — Berrien, Branch, Cass, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph, and Van Buren.
 
The organization created a Roadmap to serve as a useful guide for employers for ways to support their employees, specifically those with families.
 
“We are exploring what it would take to mimic an innovative Childcare Solutions Fund similar to the one in Iowa,” says Kathy Szenda Wilson, Founder and Co-Executive Director of Pulse. “We may do it at the regional level. We’ve got it in the ear of several people at the state level in Michigan.”
 
John GrapKathy Szenda Wilson is the co-director of Pulse in Battle Creek.Without this type of funding format, she says, “If tomorrow one of our employers says they’d like to invest in this work, we don’t have a mechanism to take these funds. Something similar to the Iowa program would.”
 
Iowa’s childcare and ECE work is divided into different regions throughout the state. The funds are used to focus on the individual needs identified in the regions. One region realized they weren’t able to increase staffing at childcare and ECE facilities and used the funding to increase wages as a way to attract more workers while another region put the money towards building new facilities to meet increased demand.
 
“Those are big wins,” Szenda Wilson says.
 
Pulse has had some “wins” of its own with the addition of trained facilitators in every county in Region 8 who will shepherd public/private partnerships in the childcare and early learning space. This was made possible through a $250,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
 
The facilitators will carry out recommendations in Pulse’s regional plan.
 
“Each of them is relatively new to this space,” Szenda Wilson says. “We are providing them with their data to understand how their county is working on this. We are the first region in the state to launch this.”
 
Leading up to the launch, Pulse hosted 13 CEO Roundtables throughout Michigan to raise awareness of its Roadmap. State officials have asked the organization to do corporate engagement in the childcare space and Szenda Wilson says they will talk with any business or corporation that wants to explore what can be done for their employees with families.
 
In addition, they have told the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) that its Community Redevelopment Ready Communities program should include childcare.
 
“[The MEDC] has added a toolkit so that all communities across the state know how to be childcare-friendly when they negotiate with big employers that may be ready to move into our communities,” Szenda Wilson says. “They have provided technical assistance to any community wanting zoning reviewed for childcare-friendly policies.”
 
There also was buy-in from the U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo who said that “Childcare is infrastructure.”
 
“That is a powerful statement if we think of childcare in the same light because it allows the economy to thrive and we need to fund it as infrastructure,” Szenda Wilson says.
  
Not a quick fix
 
As a state, Kuhnen says, Michigan should be doing more to give every family access to safe, quality, affordable childcare and early learning opportunities and ensure that workers in this sector are paid wages that allow them to have a good quality of life.
 
Among the reasons for low wages, Kuhnen lists several. “We’ve historically relied on women to provide free or very low-cost labor. This is an area dominated by women with most earning less than $15 an hour. It’s disproportionately dominated by women of color,” Kuhnen says. “When you start to look at the real cost of care, it’s very expensive. There needs to be dedicated funding. It’s not something that the free market alone can freely address. There’s a little bit of sticker shock that it’s going to require a lot more than we’ve been spending.”
 
Szenda Wilson says there are deeply entrenched biases about whose job it is to take care of children and what that looks like.
 
“Lawmakers think it’s ‘women’s work’. We had a local doctor say ‘My wife stayed home with our kids and she stays home with our grandkids so our daughter could work.’ That is not everyone’s reality. We need to appreciate the many ways people live their lives.”
 
Kuhnen says her organization uses the information in Kids Count reports to lay out several policy recommendations and opportunities that the state of Michigan has to improve outcomes for its children and their families.
 
“We really want to see adoption of a state Child Tax Credit. This was expanded during the pandemic and we saw the enormous impact it had on reducing child poverty, but lawmakers didn’t extend beyond 2021. This has been one of our priorities when data from the pandemic showed what a proven effective method it was.”
 
The reality, she says, is that the increased state and federal funds available during the pandemic to address these areas are no longer there.
 
“Our ECE and childcare system really is severely underfunded at the state level. We spend just $210 per child six and under for every $1,000 we spend on school-age children. About 85 percent of the funding we have for childcare really comes from federal dollars. The state’s not meeting the need.”
 
Kuhnen says this is coupled with only 6% of the state’s eligible children receiving scholarships to cover the cost of their care and early learning. Their families qualify because they are at 200% of the Federal poverty level which is $31,200 annually for a family of four.
 
The number of families receiving cash assistance has declined and while this may seem like a good thing, Kuhnen says it’s really a sign that families are facing challenges accessing these assistance resources. This means that these families living in poverty are missing a critical piece of the safety net in Michigan.
 
“It’s often more expensive to pay for childcare than it is to pay rent or a mortgage which makes it hard for families to want to grow,” Kuhnen says. “There’s more that we can be doing so families have access to paid or medical leave. When employees are not guaranteed paid time off it makes it harder.”
 
As someone who has been working on these issues for several years, Szenda Wilson says she’s grateful to Kids Count for placing a focus on it. At the same time, she expresses optimism that different factions working on childcare and ECE around the state are coming together around advocacy and messaging.
 
“We are willing to do work on the ground to do collaborative work on a geographic level, but the same thing needs to happen at the state level,” she says. “This work is generational work. It’s going to take patience.