Assembly Select Committee on Child Care Costs

Hello. Hi everyone. I apologize. We're going to start here in a couple minutes. We have a couple of our Members that are running over in the heat. Soon as they arrive, we'll start. This is a pretty exciting time for all of us to have this conversation. So I appreciate those of you here so far.

And I will start up in a couple minutes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for your patience. As you know, I'm Cecilia Aguiar Curry. I'm honored to be here today. I'm honored to help lead this along.

Thank you so much for all of you for your hard work and that we all know we're trying to do the right thing for our children and our families. Welcome to our first hearing of the California State Assembly Select Committee on Child Care Costs.

We are excited to welcome all of you here to discuss the State of our child care system. The role of this Committee is to examine the current State of child care and find solutions that improve access and affordability. Child care is a critical support for working families and for our economy.

Here in California, it is the infrastructure that allows parents to work while their children are in a safe learning environment. But today, child care is unaffordable or even unavailable to many families. For married couple earning the medium income of 138,000, infant childcare takes up 16% of their income.

And for a single parent earning the median income of $45,000, infant care takes a it takes a full half of their income. Families are struggling with the high costs of raising children. California's birth rate has already dropped 28% in the last 20 years and is expected to continue to decline.

Parents cannot afford to pay more and providers cannot afford to stay when their wages are so low. Without public intervention, the system will continue to fail families and providers alike. Over the past decade, the state has worked to expand access to child care and improve pay for providers.

Much of that progress has been supported by the pandemic relief funds from the Federal Government which have now run out. California needs a long term strategy to stabilize our child care system and lift up working families. Today we will hear directly from families, providers and experts about their experiences and their ideas for strengthening the system.

Before I get started, I will provide an overview of the rules for conduct of the Select Committee hearing. As we begin testimony and public comment, I want to remind everyone that the Assembly has rules to keep our hearings orally efficient and fair. These rules apply equally to all participants, regardless of viewpoints.

They are meant to protect everyone's rights and ensure effective deliberation during the hearing. We will not permit talking or loud noises from the audience. I know it's hard not to clap, but hold back. Public comment will be allowed only at the time designated by myself and Assembly Member Nguyen as co chairs of the Select Committee.

Comments must relate to the subject of today's hearing. Disruptive or threatening behavior will not be tolerated. After your testimony, you may exit the room or return to your seat. Violations of these rule may result in removal or other enforcement actions. We thank you very much in advance for your cooperation and participation.

Before we move on, I'd like to introduce some. Member Nguyen, would you like to say a few things?

Thank you. Really excited to be a part of this Select Committee. When I was asked to co chair, it was an automatic yes. As a mother to two girls, I know that when I share my concerns, when I thought about getting pregnant and having kids, it was who's going to take care of my kid?

I have to work. And many of us go through that right now. And that's probably one of the biggest topic of whether or not folks decide whether they should start a family or not because you can't afford child care these days. As a matter of fact, here In California, we're ranked 4 4th as the highest in childcare.

Many of us pay as much as what our mortgage, if not even more to provide childcare for our kids. And so we have to do something. We have to do something to ensure that not only we lead the way, but that there is a future for our kids as well too.

And so I'm really excited to be a part of this Select Committee. Looking forward to the conversations and what's being shared, what's going to be shared today with the different panels and those that are experts in this.

And the hope is that we walk away from here with a solid plan, a solid plan that's going to allow us to not only ever question the fact whether or not we can afford to have kids, because a lot of that is going to depend on childcare or whether or not we should go to work or stay at home and take care of our kids, or whether or not this is an area that we need to invest more in.

Right? And I've always been at the belief that this is an area that we need to absolutely invest more money in because this is our future. And so I want to thank you all for being here. Thank you, Madam Co Chair, for allowing me to be a part of this with you.

So Member Hadwick, would you like to say something?

I just want to say thank you for having me. I'm also honored to be on this Committee. I represent a very rural district of Northern California from the Oregon border down to Alpine and Amador counties, 11 counties in all. And child care is a constant crisis for us in rural communities.

So very eager to learn and see what we can do to help and make sure we are part of the solution.

So, so thank you. Great. Thank you very much. To get us started, we will open our hearing with testimony from Californians who are living with and working in our childcare system every day. I'd like to invite Quinn Chung, a Parent Voices leader from San Francisco, to come up here. Yeah.

And Anita Vaisini, a licensed childcare educator from Tuolumne County. Welcome. Just have a seat. Take a deep breath. We're really nice. We like children. Right? So we're good? We're good. Thank you. I appreciate you starting us out today. Either one or. Which one? Want to go? You're good? It's working. Yeah. Okay. Can you hear me? Yep.

Put it right by your. Perfect.

Good afternoon, Member of the committees. Thank you for having me today. My name is Quinn Chung. I'm a leader with Pan Voices. I'm here today with my daughter. We live together with her dad in San Francisco.

I'm here today to share what my experience has been like I'm here today to share what my experience has been like without having childcare. People think that San Francisco makes it so easy, but the truth is, it's hard here, too. About.

I'm going to share with you a story about 14 years ago when my sister was a baby. So my mom left her with a babysitter so that she could go to work later that day. When she came to pick her up, she had seizures. Like, episodes of seizures. It's not just one time. It's like episodes of it.

She had, like, vomiting. She couldn't keep food down. They took her to the hospital. They took an mri, and they found out that she had a brain hemorrhage. They came from the hospital for three weeks to treat her, and CPS got involved. CPS removed her from my mom carefully and place her in foster care.

And it took me a while to have her back to be her legal guardian. Thank God my sister ended up being okay, but it was really traumatizing for my family. I still live with that trauma until this day. I don't want the same thing happen to my daughter.

So for me, my ideal child care provider would be a family Member or someone I know personally or trust. I need to make sure my daughter is in a safe environment, I applied for family friend and neighbor care in San Francisco, but it's a long waiting list. I don't know when I'll be able to come off of.

Doesn't seem fair that, you know, this type of childcare is considered worse by so many people. If you're wealthy, it's okay to leave the kids with a nanny, but with people like us, you know, without a lot of money, we don't get to choose the care we feel is best for our kids.

I do enjoy the time I get to spend with my daughter, and I'm grateful for the memories that we made since she was born. My daughter loves to cook, so, you know, I. We do cooking classes together. We go to the botanical garden. We play in the mud kitchens. She likes to get her hand dirty.

We find caterpillars and we raise them and, and raised them in our home. We just released some butterflies after watching them go into cocoons. I really do cherish these memories with my daughter, but at the same time, it's been really hard financially.

I was a nurse before my daughter was born, and I thought I would at least have the option to go back to work, but that never happened. It's been five years since I last worked. It's hard to survive on just one income. In San Francisco.

My family has lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars that I could have made by working because we didn't have childcare. I also worry about getting a job because who would hire me after so many years out of practice? I feel like I lost my nursing skills and I just cannot pick up where I left off.

In some ways, it feels like I have to start my career over again just because I had a child. These first five years are so critical in agile life. Around 90% of agile brain development happens by the age of five.

So like I said, I love being able to be there with my daughter, but it's been really frustrating to not have childcare. I hope that this Committee really brings some solution for child care affordability for families like mine.

There are thousands, if not millions of families in our state with a similar story about not being able to afford child care and sacrificing their careers to make it work.

We deserve to have a child care system that invests in us and our kids, that allow us to choose the child care that we know is right for our families and that pays our child care providers what they deserve.

Thank you. Thank you very much for your testimony.

Good afternoon. My name is Anita Vicini and I am a large licensed child care provider out of Tuolumne County, so a rural county. I'm a very proud Member of CCPU and the bargaining team. Throughout bargaining we continue to talk about the true cost of care, the alternative methodology.

But I want to open your guys eyes, like really open your eyes to what that means for providers. I would like to take just a few minutes of your time and give you a breakdown of my actual cost of care, how little I get paid and how I manage to to gap between the two.

During the summer months I have 14 children in care. Holy snot, right. 14 kids in care that use state subsidy program. Once school starts back up, which for our county it started back yesterday, I lose two of those kids completely and three will become after school kids only which will lower my monthly income drastically.

After school care is considered part time care and the rates are minimal. I will lose $791.82 per full time child that is entering the UPK system and will not be attending my child care after school. And I will lose another $155.26 a month per school age child that will be attending child care as their after school program.

That total is $2,049.42 a month that I will be losing starting September. Let's take a moment to break it down. I'm going to get real. I'm going to get real real and tell you guys exactly what my costs are every month and exactly what I made over the summer months.

So this month I received payment for the work I did in July. My check was $12,276.42 for 14 full time children in my care. My monthly expenses. So I grouped them okay, but I did a breakdown so you guys, I'll be happy to share the breakdown with you later.

Housing $2,701 utilities $1,470 $62 groceries averages $2,600 a month. Transportation $1,280. An employee that works three days a week $2,800. Business expenses $1,239. This all adds up to $12,082 per month.

So I came out ahead this month by $194 which means I can use that money towards a field trip or towards conferences that I want to attend to strengthen my child care knowledge and my business. Now my food bill will change. It goes down about $700 a month during the school year.

But again my income drops by 2000 to make up the income that I'm losing. I work most weekends. I teach CPR classes to other child care providers in my county, to businesses and to to the community. And I teach classes for our CCPU training fund.

This allows me to cover the gap during the school year and to buy items that need to be replaced, like high chairs and play pins. As you can see, I don't have a lot of extra to put into savings for emergencies.

God forbid something breaks down, something major that I have to pay for or I have a family emergency and I have to take some time off. I don't have the money for that. Through collective bargaining, we secured a 1.3% COLA that will be added to our cost of care, plus payment.

That comes out to an extra $12 per child per month. So if you have 14 children on subsidized care, that means a whole extra $168 a month. Lots, huh? While we greatly appreciate this additional pay, it does not cover what we actually need or what we deserve.

I am blessed that the union has secured the health care benefits for another three years. That helps me pay for all my Doctor's appointments and medication that I need to take daily as a diabetic, saving me around $600 a month.

Without that fund, I would have to pay all that medication out of pocket and my bottom line would be even harder to meet. Child care providers across California are lucky to have such strong advocates on our side, like Members of the Selective Committee.

And we value and greatly appreciate all the work that you are doing on our behalf. We hope that by working together, we can get to the true cost of care in the near future. Thank you guys for your time and your support.

Thank you very, very much. We appreciate you kicking this off to bring this reality right to our face. We would appreciate when you get a chance to share your numbers as well, if you don't mind.

Zero, absolutely.

And we have two people behind you, Selema and Shannon, that will be more than happy to take that. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I just want to welcome Assemblymember Pellerin to, would you like to say a few quick words while you're here?

Sure. You know, definitely. Everything we can do to make sure we have quality, affordable childcare in the State of California is absolutely essential for families to thrive, for children to get that. That good foundation for them to thrive in their lives.

And, you know, I was struggling with these issues back when I had children, and they are 27 and 30 now, and the fact that we are still fighting these battles Today tells me that there's not enough people listening, there's not enough people acting.

And I do believe with our Legislature now under the leadership of our majority floor leader, who's also the chair of our Women's Legislative caucus, we are 58 women strong and this is a top priority for us.

I believe we will get to parity in the next round, but we like to remind everybody that we gave birth to all of them. So I think I saw that line from Selling Member Nguyen there. So. But thank you all for being here and you've got our attention, You've got our commitment. We stand in solidarity with you.

Thank you very much. Assemblymember. Okay, so let's go ahead and do the overview of the State of child care and I want to thank everybody. We have three panelists today.

Our first panel, which is an overview of the State of childcare in California today we have with us Jennifer Troia, Director of California Department of Social Services, Laura Pryor, Research Director, California Budget and Policy Center, and Alexa Frankenberg, Executive Director of the child care providers.

And if you could kind of keep your comments maybe just three minutes or something and if that's fair. If we. Need to go a little bit longer. But I think we better kind of keep this in mind that we probably have people here, child care providers need to go take kids home.

So thank you very much for being here. Indeed, it's a pleasure. Good afternoon. My name is Jennifer Troia. I'm the Director of the California Department of Social Services. We are deeply committed at CDSS to our mission to serve, support and protect Californians who are experiencing need and vulnerability.

I want to thank you for your leadership in this space and for the shared progress that we've made in recent years. We're very proud of our programs at CDSS that provide a variety of state subsidized, direct service and voucher based child care services, quality improvement activities and technical assistance and support.

The purpose of these programs is to provide equitable and stable access to child care and development services for lower income children and families.

When we hear from parent advocates and from providers like those we've already heard from today, we often hear their stories and their challenges and it reminds us how much work we still have to do to support children, families and the workforce across the state.

We agree with you in your opening remarks that the reality is that the demand for affordable, high quality child care surpasses the available resources. Nearly half of parents who couldn't find child care site affordability as the top reason. And I know that's why we're here today.

At the same time, I do want to acknowledge and celebrate that we have together prioritized this issue and made some very significant progress in recent years. In the last five years together, we have nearly doubled the total funding for child care and development programs from 3.3 billion in 2019-20 to 6.4 billion total funds in 24-25.

We've increased the maximum number of children served through the subsidy program from 294,000 in 2019-20 to more than 378,000 in 24-25. We've negotiated our first and subsequent MOUs between the state and the Child Care Providers United Union, who are also here today.

And on August 8th, we recently reached a new three year tentative agreement which you already heard referenced some the agreement includes additional progress toward implementing an alternative methodology for how we set rates and a single rate structure and it builds on commitments we've made to providing health care benefits, retirement and professional training.

It also includes a cost of living adjustment to the cost of care plus rate payments and a one time stabilization payment to be issued by January 1, 2026. That agreement is tentative and pending formal ratification by both parties.

We've also taken some initial steps to unify our reimbursement rate structures, which were historically divided between the way that we manage them on the voucher side through the regional market surveys and the standard reimbursement rate which was applicable to direct contracted programs.

And we've taken some initial steps recently toward reforming the structure of the CalWORKS child care stages by launching a consolidation work group to clarify responsibilities and identify how to establish a more coordinated system and manage the continuity of care.

We're proud of all this progress and we know that there is a lot of work that remains to be done so that the supply of affordable quality child care is more readily available to parents in our state.

The Committee did also ask me to touch on the impact of HR1 or the Big Beautiful Bill, the reconciliation bill at the federal level. I will very briefly just say that most of the impacts on child care related to HR1 are more indirect.

There are not provisions related to childcare in a way that there are for Medicaid or the SNAP program, the CalFresh program here in California.

That said, we recognize that the bill will make devastating cuts to the safety net and that those Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts, among others, will result in really significant losses of benefits for families that create additional hardships and impacts to health well being.

Rates of poverty, rates of child welfare involvement and that the bill also results in really significant cost shifts from the Federal Government to the state that will destabilize and create challenges for our state budget.

We are working to implement the provisions of that bill that impact CDSS programs directly in whatever ways we possibly can to mitigate harm, and look forward to working with you related to the impacts to the state's budget. So in closing, I just want to say thank you again for all of our work together on this critical issue.

I know that none of us can address these challenges alone. It's takes partnership to achieve our vision of affordable, high quality child care for all Californians and we look forward to working with you to make that vision a full reality.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the comments.

Great Chair and Members, Good afternoon. My name is Laura Pryor and I am the Research Director at the California Budget and Policy Center. We are a nonpartisan research and analysis nonprofit that uses our budget expertise to advance public policies to improve the lives of Californians.

We appreciate this opportunity to join this important conversation around childcare access and affordability. The most recent fiscal outlook from the Legislative Analyst Office identified child care expansion as one of the key drivers of state spending growth.

While this may lead some to believe that the state has been adequately prioritizing child care, my remarks today explain why this is not the case. I'll do so by elaborating on the following three points. First, the cost of child care is too high.

Second, the state has not funded the supply of affordable child care anywhere close to the demand. And third, the state continues to pay child care providers low wages, further straining our programs. Before diving into these three points, I want to provide some important context when the state faces a shortfall.

Our early childhood programs, otherwise known as our ECE programs, are one of the first to be cut. For example, California's ECE system weathered severe cuts as a result of the Great Recession, slashing thousands of subsidized spaces and wages for providers over the past 16 years.

In response to tireless advocacy, state leaders have incrementally restored spaces and approximately now the amount of funding for child care. The amount of spaces is 50% higher than prior to the Great Recession.

So while it is true that funding for the system has increased, it has not been enough to undo the negative consequences of past deep cuts to these ECE programs that provide vital support for children and help parents go to work.

Funding increases have not equated to comprehensive improvements given the three reasons that I mentioned, which I'll now elaborate on. First, the cost of child care is too high.

Specifically, our recent analysis at the Budget center showed that for a single mother with an infant and a school age child, she will spend 62% of her income on child care loan without access to a state subsidy. This issue is further exacerbated for women of color who continue to face persistent wage gaps.

For example, the the cost of care for an infant and school age child is nearly 71% of the median salary for Latinx single mothers. Given these unsustainable costs, access to state subsidized child care is absolutely critical.

Due to the incredible work from many of the people in this room, family fees for state subsidized child care were reformed in 2023. This eliminated family fees and making child care free for families below 75% of the state median income and cap fees at 1% for those between 75 and 85% of the state median income.

However, to get this low or no cost child care, there has to be room in the system. Which brings me to my second point. The demand for subsidized child care spaces far exceeds the supply.

Our analysis in 2022 showed that mainly due to the lack of supply, only 11% of children eligible for CDSS child care and development programs were actually enrolled. A year later in 2023, this number did go up to 14%.

However, while these numbers are trending in the right direction, it still means that only one in seven children eligible for subsidized child care actually receive it. Therefore, the reality is that thousands and thousands of families are still left on waiting lists confronting the exorbitant cost of child and forced to make impossible decisions.

Additionally, we know that this issue further widens racial inequities in our state. Namely, we know that Latinx Native and Black children are disproportionately eligible for state subsidized child care, meaning that when the state underfunds our system, these families are hit the hardest, perpetuating existing structural inequities in our state. With the gaps to access clearly laid out.

Let's not forget that even if the state were to Fund 100% of the unmet need for child care, we need a workforce to be able to meet that need. This brings me to my third point. Despite being essential, child care has remained one of the lowest paid professions.

In fact, aside from the cost of care supplement, state leaders have only updated voucher based payment rates for child care providers three times in the past nine years. More specifically, our recent analysis at the Budget center showed the following disappointing trends. First, increases in rates remain far below the increase in the minimum wage.

So because providers have to pay their staff a minimum wage, this mismatch further cuts into providers pay, making it even harder to expand access. In fact, we have heard anecdotal evidence that this low pay has has resulted in higher co pays for families despite the family fee reform that happened in 2023.

Secondly, despite often having the same qualifications and working with the same age groups as elementary and middle school teachers, wages for ECE professionals are far from parity with school based teachers. Specifically, ECE professionals make only 39% of the kindergarten through 8th grade median hourly wage.

If trends continue, it will take nearly 60 years for ECE professionals wages to catch up to the median wage of all workers Median hourly earnings for ECE professionals are less than parking attendance.

If pay continues on this trend, we will continue to lose valuable skilled and qualified providers to other sectors, further exacerbating the access and affordability issues our state currently faces. And let's not forget that this is a primarily women of color workforce.

Paying this essential workforce low wages is the direct result of racist and sexist stereotypes that devalue caregiving work and exacerbate the gender wage gap. In summary, despite recent increases in funding for the system, families still can't find affordable care and the supply providers is at risk of dwindling, perpetuating racial and gender inequities in our state.

If budgets are statements and values of our priorities, then and we value a child care system that is supportive and equitable for families, children and providers, it's time for the state to make different choices, including raising revenue through reducing tax breaks for corporations and raising taxes on those who are getting a windfall of tax cut from the Trump Administration.

It is critical for state leaders to present a different vision for this state than the one Trump has laid out. By not fully funding affordable child care, the California Legislator is hurting California families and our state's economy.

This is a policy area where California is falling behind, presenting an opportunity for our state to improve how we value our children and families by expanding access to affordable care and paying providers a fair and just wage. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate that. I must say I hear Delane Easton in the background telling me this, so I just want to let you know she's here in the room, so beware. Okay. We will go ahead and have you speak. Thank you very much. Alexa, do I need to turn this? No, you're good. Okay.

Good afternoon, chair, co chair and Members of the Select Committee. My name is Alexa Frankenberg. I'm the Executive Director of Child Care Providers United, a union that represents 70,000 family child care providers throughout the State of California.

We are in all of your communities throughout the state, including we have a great leader up in your district, Assemblymember Hedwick, Anita, who you heard from earlier, as well as Mirin, who you will hear from and all of the folks in yellow shirts.

Here are some of the many providers that I have the honor of working with every day. And on behalf of them, I want to thank this Committee. I want to thank the Assembly at large for your continued prioritization and championing of this issue. And there is more work to do, as everyone has said.

I will talk briefly about RTA that Director Choia mentioned, but then I will mostly focus on the work we still have ahead. So within the last couple of weeks CCPU reached a tentative agreement or Ta with the State of California that upon ratification will be our union's third contract with the State.

This agreement, like two prior contracts, makes improvements and advances in improving pay, benefits and working conditions for home based child care providers who play an essential role in serving families like Quinn and families around California.

Child care investment is essential both in strong economic times and and lean times as inflation tariff and Federal Government cutbacks to name a few things that families are facing squeeze working families and providers alike. RTA is a collective victory.

This Ta secures providers hard won benefits, increases current rates, provides the one time stabilization payments and other significant improvements that the Director mentioned earlier. It's important to celebrate our work, but there is more work ahead and so I want to spend my time outlining that work because as everyone here has said, the status quo is not okay.

As you heard from Laura, the needs are immense and our work continues. Centuries of unjust treatment and pay cannot be undone in a few contracts or a few years. CCPU providers stand committed to securing a cost of care structure that meets providers needs, enabling them to stay open to serve families throughout California.

As you heard from Anita, cost of care is not a concept or a theory. It is a reality. It is dollars and cents. While the conversations can get complicated, the idea is simple. Connect child care provider rates with the cost of providing child care for us. This has several priorities that I want to touch on briefly.

First, pay providers a fair wage. As the Chair mentioned, providers cannot afford to stay in this industry. It is a revolving door if providers can pay themselves and as you heard, it's a big if. Providers earn currently as little as $7 per hour.

So the important work of educating and caring for young children demands a fair pay rate. One that is far above where it is right now, which is currently less than half of minimum wage. Second, we need rates that value all the hours worked.

We need to pay for prep time, cleanup time and all the hours worked that are above 40 hours a week. Third, we need meaningful time off and we need to reform some of the antiquated rules that allow providers time away from their home.

I want to just briefly touch on a story that actually came up for us this weekend. One of our bargaining team Members who is an FFM provider, she was hospitalized this past weekend. She was fortunate enough to catch some pre heart attack symptoms. She spent several days in the hospital.

She has been released which we are all so grateful for.

But FFM providers have no paid time off and so even though she needs to rest to take care of her health, she is faced with an enviable choice of do I rest and take care of myself and don't get paid or do I push myself even though I know I shouldn't because I need this money to help support my family?

Those are not choices that the fourth biggest economy in the world should be forcing women like her. And the story is repeated throughout the State of California. We've got to do better. Fourth, we need improved support for providers who are working in areas facing emergencies or disasters. This is not just a rural area.

This is obviously something that impacts all of us in the state. We need to providers in particular pay a really important role in supporting firefighters and other disaster workers and it's really critical to have the stability that providers need to be able to provide stability to those families who are playing important roles in our disasters in California.

Fifth, we've got to stabilize providers who are facing the loss of 4 year olds to TK as you heard earlier, and find ways to better integrate family childcare into the mixed delivery system here in California.

They play a critical role and it enables true parental choice to allow parents of four year olds and parents throughout the State of California to really choose the providers that they think best meet their family's needs as you heard from Quinn earlier.

Finally, we've got to continue to value care that meets families needs such as incentivizing hard to find care for infants, ensuring care during non traditional hours and adequately paying for transportation including the staff and other things that are needed to provide transportation to schools, to appointments and other things that children need.

This may sound like a long list, but providers work has been undervalued for so long. It is time that we do something about the significant consequences that this brings. Provider low pay creates a revolving door of providers who can't afford to stay open.

Data from the state show that one provider each hour closes which impacts on average four children per hour. It's critical we establish a structure that values the contributions providers made, including all of the unseen work they do. And then the Legislature can begin the important work of determining how to phase this in with existing resources.

I want to briefly touch on some data that recently the state submitted to the Federal Government just to highlight what I think everyone in this room knows that the current system is broken for paying child care providers. Data show that family child care providers suffer the most.

We were glad to see in the state's report to the Federal Government that they acknowledged that, and I quote, the gap between subsidy rates and the full cost of care disproportionately impacts family child care.

So what that means is for a family child care provider caring for an infant in Los Angeles, their rate only covers 30% of the cost of care versus 51% for a center. We must do better for everyone and it's particularly critical to begin investment where the gap is greatest.

Family child care in closing, we believe this Committee has an important role to play to keep the spotlight on how we've got to move to child care. Reimbursement based on the cost of care is part of the solution for families in this state.

Fair pay, which is adequate, timely and reliable, will ensure providers can stay open and also ensure that providers enter the field. As this workforce ages. Providers need to not just continue to tread water as they do now, but they need to thrive which cost of care will enable them to do.

We look forward to updating the Committee and the Legislature more broadly on the progress and our soon to form joint Labor Management Committee with the state to recommend a rate structure and amounts for based and enhanced rates, including final recommendations by November 30th. This will equip you all in your 2026 budgeting and investments.

We are clear eyed about the economic challenges facing the state. Indeed, providers existence, as you heard from Anita, has been stretching too few dollars as far as possible to meet the needs of families they serve and their own families. Yet this work is too important to delay any longer. California must do better. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for all your testimony. Before I go any further, I have Assemblymember Lashay Sharp Collins here and Jose Silache here. So I want to thank you both for attending today. I'm going to open it up to questions. Do you have any questions that we can bring? Go ahead. Assembly Member Nguyen.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. The former two that spoke as well as you three up here.

Many moons ago before I had kids and was married I did the foster DOP program and I took in a couple babies and at the time I was a single income person and took in the babies but I was working at the same time and so I was able to enroll in Beanstalk or Child Action and was able to have the child be dropped off at a home based childcare and she was absolutely wonderful.

The child learned Spanish. She was great. And it was then, this is probably over 20 years ago, that she educated me on what she was paid and how it wasn't enough for her to be able to make ends meet.

As a matter of fact, there was some time where I was able to take the child and go on vacation.

And she shared with me that during that time she would not be paid at all and that she would not have enough money to be able to make the mortgage pay for all of the things that she has to continue to keep her home based childcare center going. And so I paid out of cash.

She nearly cried because she thought that's never happened before. But this was 20 years ago and over 20 years ago actually. And so I'm seeing now because I've had many home based childcare providers reach out to me and says, you need to come and hear what we have to go through and see what we do.

And I've probably visited eight now home based in my district and they've all said the exact same thing. As a matter of fact, one provider told me that similar to what Anita had said, I mean it sounds like her staff makes more than she does, that they make so little that they're on Government assistance program.

And I'm thinking, wow, you run the business and you don't get any time off. And very similar, she talked about how her husband was sick and you know, they're on medi-Cal and her kids get free base, you know, lunch. This is before it was off, you know, everything was free.

But she loves to work and she knows that if she doesn't do this, all of the other families that rely on her to be able to provide the childcare so that they can go to work would also suffer because they can't find childcare that is affordable for them.

But this is on the cost of her, of them, of the home based child care providers. And so I'm wondering if this was an issue 20 plus years ago, why is it still an issue now?

And I will note this, I serve on six other Select Committees and this by far outnumbers the amount of people that attend the Select Committees of all the Select Committees I sit on. So this, this yes, is an important topic for us to continue to have and to continue to discuss.

But the question is, you know, if this was over 20 years ago and this was an issue, why is it still an issue now and how come we haven't been able to figure this out? And it sounds like it's actually gotten worse.

Anybody want to take a stab at that one? I'll speak to what I A few remarks that I made about the Great Recession. So 20 years ago, 2005, Great Recession 2012 was when funding for childcare dipped at its lowest. Things got worse before the funding actually increased.

And as mentioned, that dramatic decrease in funding for spaces and wages had long lasting impacts that only exacerbated the existing issues. That's definitely one piece of the puzzle.

I mean there hasn't been a lack of attention to it. And agree this is an amazing crowd and we have been in Sacramento with CCPU so many times I'm going to have to start paying taxes here, as are many of our Members.

But you know, this takes real money to fix and I wanted to be clear about that. And we are very proud of the investments that we have been able to negotiate that the Legislature has been forthcoming through the leadership of the Women's Caucus and others. But this is not just something that got created overnight.

And so we are going to continue to need bold leadership to invest even when times are bad if we are going to really break this trend that you are raising that has I have been in this work for 20 years, which I don't always love to admit, but it has been the same story.

And while there has been great progress under this Administration with this legislative leadership, there's been a lot of years that we're digging out from and decades before that. And so we've got to continue to invest no matter what the headwinds that are against us right now.

I'm going to plus one to all of those remarks and I guess the things that I would add. First of all, I want to just acknowledge that I think it is a economists often refer to this as a broken market more broadly.

So I don't think that the problems are unique to the subsidy system, but are rather larger problems in the overall economy and for the entirety of the child care field. I think that's worth acknowledging.

Then I also want to acknowledge the milestone of having achieved the alternative methodologies for for those who haven't been following in detail, I'll just say in simple terms that the way that we set rates for childcare within the subsidy system for family child care providers in particular has historically been based on paying a portion of what the market will bear.

We survey providers, what do you charge and then we pay a portion of the market rate.

This is the first time that we have had a study and taken the opportunity to utilize what's called an alternative methodology which is actually trying to address what is the cost of the care that's being provided, not what is what does the market bear, but what is the actual cost.

And when we now set rates and tell the Federal Government what proportion of the costs we are covering with our subsidy rates. It is benchmarked against that alternative methodology, cost of care. So while that doesn't in and of itself solve anything about the gap, we have made investments that are working on that gap.

It does at least provide us visibility to have a more meaningful conversation than we've really ever been able to have before about how to answer that question.

Can I also ask follow up question. The cost of care, is it, it varies, I'm assuming, depending whether you're in Sacramento or LA or whatnot. And then does that cost of care also take a look at the curriculum or each center? Like how do you, is it just a, is it just equal all across the board?

Because every center is different, right? Every home based center offers different things or does different things or. And then if you are providing care to a child who is gluten free, who's allergic to peanut, I mean you're talking, you're going to have to buy certain specific things for this child which can cost more money.

So do we take into consideration that as well too?

I don't know that we take into consideration every factor you just described, but I will say there are a lot of factors.

So what we have are actual factors and then selection points within them, which is like the salary and then a selection point to identify what constitutes a living wage that is broken down regionally and it's broken down on a per child basis and does take into account a number of the factors that you're describing.

So it is, there is great variation that is accounted for. What ultimately will happen is that we will use that cost of care to then set rates. And those rates may be different than what is described in the cost of care.

So it's one method of measuring, taking into account a number of those factors, what is the cost of providing care. And then separately we will have a conversation saying in light of that, how do we want to pay rates?

But I do think one of the things that the Director lifted up is those variables, right? And so for example, what is the food variable? I'm not sure there's a food variable, but if there is, there's a lot of surveying that's done. But then there are also choices to make, right?

Like are we going to choose a variable that accounts for some of those complexities that the children have?

Same thing when it comes to salary, for example, are we going to choose a variable that is reflects the current market, about $20 an hour, $22 an hour, or are we going to look at a living wage salary that will allow a provider to support her and her family? Or are we going to look somewhere in between?

And so there are choices that need to be made that reflect not just all the data that's been collected through what Jen is describing, but also reflect what people's lived experiences and what they need to be able to thrive.

Assembly Member, Sharp Collins.

Thank you. I just wanted to still piggyback off from what my colleague is talking about. So you're talking about the variations, what you were just saying, and how that's dealing with the actual cost of care and then rates are set. So how are we utilizing the sliding skill? I mean, are we, are we doing that?

Because I'm asking this question because if I go back some years ago, this is when our Secretary of State, Shirley Werb was in office and we were having a conversation about the childcare, military family, all of that stuff.

And I remember working with educational enrichment systems and working on a sliding scale that was, that was going to be utilized. So have anyone talked about the sliding scale to assist families with, with them being eligible? That's just part one. I have another part.

So I'm not exactly sure by sliding scale if you're referring to the family fees that families pay or if you're. Yeah. Okay. So in 2324, the Governor and the Legislature invested a little over $50 million to address family fees and make some really significant reforms.

So as it is now, under the family fee schedule, the fees are limited to 1% of families monthly income, and there's no fee assessment for families whose incomes are below 75% of the state median income. So we have made huge strides in that conversation in the last couple of years.

So even though we've made some strides, there are a lot of families who still, they don't qualify, qualify for subsidized care, but also because they make too much, but then some of them, they make too little to afford the unsubsidized care.

There is definitely an issue with the families who are still struggling to afford child care but don't qualify for the subsidized because childcare is so expensive and living in California is so expensive. So definitely acknowledge that. There is also an issue that even among those who qualify, we don't have sufficient slots. It's a capped program.

The subsidy programs are capped, and so we are able to serve those we have funding for. We have massively expanded the number of subsidies in recent years, but that does not meet the full need. So I acknowledge what you are saying is an issue.

So then what help, if any is available to these middle income families? I'm asking that because I fell in that category. I mean luckily he's 15 now but at that time and this is where.

And then part of the reason why we ended up doing the legislation work that we did then is because I was in the middle. So whether it was $50 over, it was $100 over, I just, I didn't qualify. Luckily I did find something.

But I would have like to have some other options, you know, made available to me because I was a part of that middle income family. So if there's any help, any suggestions.

Yeah, it's a very real issue and one that I think we should continue to all talk about and work to address. There are some resources in terms of just navigation and resources for identifying like resource and referral to figuring out who serves and where there's spaces that are available.

We have a website that also offers opportunities families to locate childcare and be able to sort of search through and figure out what is the child care that might be available that could match their needs. But again those affordability issues are real and will still be there even once you find a provider who may accept that child.

And if I could just add, if a provider does accept that child but the parent isn't able to pay as much as a subsidy would, then that's one of the additional things that further erodes the provider's ability to care for everyone. Right. So this isn't just, you know, middle income problems also then impacts subsidy children and families.

So it's the whole system needs investment. But I just want to say that, you know, these things aren't happening in isolation and particularly when there are limited subsidy dollars also it doesn't give folks a lot of room to be able to support those families as they might want to that can't pay the full price.

I think my, one of my last points for right now is when we're talking about increasing the affordable child care slots.

And I know that we have done that over the years and so I still find that there is an actual disconnect in a sense of how people are being informed of their eligibility to even get into those slots because there are so many times where folks have come to me or even when I was working in other departments and so forth of them saying zero, I didn't even know or do I have to apply?

Do I have to qualify? Do I this, do I that?

So I'm trying to understand can you help me understand my colleagues even further on why this is occurring, that families that are in need can't find it, or they're not well aware of the opportunity to even come into these, these child care slides, but also, just why is there such a disconnect in this part of it of addressing it?

I guess what I would say is there's a couple of different tracks here. So within the child care system that is--falls under the CalWORKs program, so the Welfare-to-Work program, child care is an entitlement, and so the, the goal there is that the child--that the worker who is actually working with that family on their case plan and on their Welfare-to-Work plan is, is having those conversations and make sure that they are aware of that entitlement.

We do hear from many families that same concern, but they are inundated with a lot of information as they come in the door, and the program is complex, and so I think we have often found that it takes multiple times and multiple ways of explaining and multiple messengers to make sure that it is clear and that that information is highlighted within the mix of all the things that are coming at a family, and so those are some of the best practices that we work on with the counties.

On the community-based side for the subsidy slots for those who are not enrolled in CalWORKs, again, it's not an entitlement, but there are the slots and waiting lists for those who may not currently have a slot but do qualify.

And I think in a very similar vein, we have contractors at the resource and referral agencies who are working to provide that information and we try to provide it publicly on our website, but we are always open to the conversations about how we improve the flow of that information and make it more accessible for families. It is a hard thing to navigate and we know that and are totally open to the conversations about how to continue improving.

I don't want to speak for Parent Voices, but I would just say one of the things they've lifted up many times is the system wasn't necessarily designed with parents and providers at the table and so that has led to a system that doesn't always reflect, you know, some of the most streamlined ways to get access to information and resources that they could need.

Thank you, Assembly Member. Assembly Member Hadwick.

Thank you guys for being here and all of your information. I had a couple questions and I guess a comment. I was also in that middle section and was blessed to be able to stay home for ten years, and I wanted to make a comment on Aisha.

We didn't talk after, but you will completely get hired anywhere you go because stay-at-home moms are the ultimate multitaskers and some of the best employees and co-workers I've ever worked with, so you'll just be a little bit behind and a little bit older than the rest of them.

I'm still playing catch up, but it's working. But that middle-income is where I think a lot of my constituents are struggling and we have just a not enough slots, so my question is mostly about the slots that were promised to happen in the state and why that's not happening and kind of where we're at there and when we will be opening those slots up.

Thank you so much. So we have dramatically increased the number of children served through the subsidy system. So it was 294,000 in 2019, as I mentioned, and is now 378,000 in 2024. So we've made enormous progress.

What I will also say though is that it has been faster to bring those additional slots online to being filled on the voucher side than it has been on the center-based side, and that is in part what it takes for the infrastructure, the things that it takes to open a classroom that take additional time, and so that has been a process.

We've also made some process improvements along the way. This all happened at the same time that we were transferring programs from CDE to CDSS. We had all the money coming in related to the pandemic. There was a lot going on, and the pandemic itself.

And so admittedly, there were some processes that we needed to streamline about how we put out the RFPs, how we worked with our contractors to make that more efficient in terms of doing the expansion, and we have made a number of improvements in that regard.

So for example, those who have already been contractors can go through a more streamlined process than those who are newly coming in. So those improvements have been helpful. There is a continued commitment to the rest of the slots.

We had paused them due to the state's fiscal situation and the time that it's taking those center-based contractors to come online for a year or two, but the agreement was that they would continue in the out-year. So the timeframe got elongated but the total number of slot commitments didn't change.

So we've had a lot of population growth or need because just the economy as well, like one-income households are hard to come by now, so I think the need has grown but our number of slots has not caught up with that. So that really concerns me. What, as a legislative body, can we do to help make that happen faster? I mean, yeah, besides money. It's always money, right? Is there anything other than money? Like since we're, you know, also broke.

I think, I mean from what the director is lifting up, it seems like money on the voucher side would be the most expedient.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

I want to thank you all for being here today. I have two comments I just want to make is that you talked briefly about the alternative payment methodology. Do we have a timeline for that process and can we make sure that we have providers, childhood providers, and advocates to be included in this process?

I don't want them left behind, so, I know you talked about it a little briefly, and I want to make sure that the legislature has a role in setting new rates. So we could talk about this offline, but these are really important that I think the alternative method, we got to nail that thing down.

I'm committed to work with it as well as my, my group that is here, other legislators as well, so without further ado, I just want to thank you very, very much for being here today. We have a lot more questions, but we'd like to kind of make sure that other voices are heard today. So, again, thank you very much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, I have Panel Two. Okay. I'd like to welcome--we are now going to have on our Panel Two, economic perspectives and labor force participation, Ashley Hoffman, Senior Policy Advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce--welcome--as well as Sarah Bohn from Vice President Director of the Public Policy Institute of California Economic Policy Center. Thank you for being here today, and this is really good information. I hope you're feeling the same way we are. Okay, go ahead and start.

Yeah, and I did have some slides just because I did do a member survey, so just to help broadcast some of those members.

You guys, there's some slides behind us. You can just pull it out.

I know, I know, I know. It's very triggering, isn't it?

That's good, that's good, that's good. We can, we can see pretty well, can't we? Mr. Solache, can you see? Okay.

Yeah, I'll do--yeah, absolutely.

Yes. Good afternoon. Ashley Hoffman, on behalf of the California Chamber of Commerce today, really honored--oh, they're just moving--really honored to be here today to talk with you about this important issue, and I'm really here to talk about how can employers be part of the solution to improving access to child care?

Thank you.

We know that access to child care benefits both employees and employers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a foundation that has actually done quite a bit of work and ongoing work about this issue because of the gravity of the issue nationwide, not only in California.

According to reports by the U.S. Chamber, up to 40% of parents have reported that they or someone else in their household has either left a job, declined a job, or changed jobs because of problems with child care in the last 12 months.

Of those who have left their job, up to 76% say that they've done so when their child was two or younger, and the Chamber is actually in the process of doing a series of reports focusing on different states, and all of those reports are showing that states actually use hundreds and--lose hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars due to workforce issues resulting from a lack of child care.

And that chart over there really shows just the gravity of the absentee issue that happens when parents must unfortunately be absent from work due to child care issues. So what I really want to talk about today is what kind of benefits are employers offering right now, what are some of the challenges that they face in potentially offering more benefits, and then what are some models of potential public-private partnerships that we've seen in other states, but then also locally that the legislature can consider?

So I was very interested just to know, you know, what kind of benefits do our members offer? So I sent a survey out to our members. We had about 225 who did respond. I was happy to see that actually about half of those respondents were small businesses, so small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and some of the respondents themselves were actually child care providers who are our members.

So about 30% of the respondents do offer some benefit related to child care, and examples of that can include things like PTO or leave specific to child care, a flexible spending account for dependent care, some do offer on-site or near-site care, some employers responded that they actually allow employees to bring children into the office, some do only up to a certain age, and then others allowed for all children to be able to be brought into the office.

Some that were child care providers say that they offer discounts, of course, to their own employees for using their services, and then a lot of people responded that they also offer flexibility, you know, to work at home if necessary, which can help alleviate.

But I think one of the really big takeaways that I had from the survey, which I intentionally left open just for people to write in comments because I was very curious for just anecdotal responses from our members was that there's really no one-size-fits-all kind of benefit.

You know, every workplace and every, really, set of employees have very different needs. You know, some of the responses I got were, you know, that they do offer benefits and their employees love it. Others were that, you know, instead our employees have said that they would prefer, you know, better healthcare benefits or other kinds of benefits, so really showing that it really is kind of a workplace-by-workplace situation.

Of those that do offer benefit, about 60% said that they do believe that improves employee retention. I did include a few quotes that we got directly, which was that, you know, they've had really direct feedback from employees that show that their child care subsidy helps so they can work full-time and absolutely helps with retention and employee loyalty over time. It is a frequent topic of discussion among employees and satisfaction surveys.

And some folks said that, you know, we started offering this during the pandemic, of course, because of the impact that that had on the labor force and on child care providers and that we've actually continued those benefits just because it's been such a success.

And then of course there's, you know, I asked about challenges to providing benefits, and of course cost comes up, right, especially for some small businesses. It's very difficult for them, right, to kind of afford above and beyond to provide some of these, but cost, you know, also came up in a couple different considerations.

Some of it, yes, is business size, but then other things were, you know, for those who were considering things like on-site or near-site care, you know, it's important to note that the cost of a new child care facility, according to a report from HHS, has actually tripled from what it was just a couple years ago.

And so for those looking at some of these bigger solutions, maybe it's partnering with other employers to offer near-site care or something of that nature that just the cost and the regulation and the permitting to build these kinds of facilities is very difficult.

Again, you know, requiring consistent use and enrollment was another theme that we really saw from our members that we were talking to. Again, some that used to offer those kind of benefits, once employees who had utilized those benefits--maybe their children grew or those employees no longer worked there--there was a lot of ebb and flow in the use, especially when we were talking about offering maybe subsidies or contracts or considerations for off-site care.

And then working remotely, right? Of course that's something that people like to offer, especially to help with child care, but that's not necessarily doable, right, for every single employer. For an employer like Agar Construction, you're not going to be able to offer maybe remote work the same that you could for someone who's more in an office job. So these were just a couple of the challenges I wanted to raise just to kind of show what employers were thinking through.

I also had a lot of respondents that said, 'I really wish I could offer this,' or they said that they had started to offer it because someone in their organization, whether it be the HR representative or maybe the leader of the company, you know, they were a working parent themselves and this has all of a sudden kind of come to the forefront. So one of the kind of things for the legislature, I think, to consider would be, you know, looking at the idea of a public-private partnership.

California Health and Human Services Master Plan for Early Learning and Care did include in their knowledge brief, you know, that one of the recommendations was to help expand access is to encourage partnerships among large and small employers, government, educational institutions, and organizations such as chambers of commerce to help bring parties together about how can we help address this issue.

So actually earlier this year had been looking into this issue just separately about, you know, what do other states do to help try and bring employers into some of the conversation around the accessibility of child care? So, for example, Michigan started a number of years ago a pilot program that has turned into a broader program called Tri-Share.

So the theory here is that the employer, the employee, and the state share the cost of child care. What they do is they contract with nonprofits that serve as regional hubs that help connect employees with providers.

So effectively, the employer will put in, you know, a certain amount of money, the state will put in a certain amount of money, and then that nonprofit will work directly with the employees to help them choose the provider that they wish and help connect them and provide the payment then to that provider.

I think something that's really great about this program is it really emphasizes parent choice, right? It's not up to the employer who the provider is. It's up to the employee themselves. And they do also curb eligibility based on income, of course.

I think one of the common themes that we were talking about earlier this year when we were talking about these models is exactly what's been brought up, which is, how do you reach that middle group?

You know, how do you reach that group that may not qualify for certain assistance now, but also doesn't have the means to maybe afford child care, given how expensive it is? Another is actually Kentucky. So the Kentucky--really was interested in this because they actually had the lowest workforce participation rate in the entire country and they found that a lot of that was due to child care issues.

So they do something similar where an employer who decides to they want to contribute a certain amount to child care basically applies for some sort of match from the state, and the state will then grant applications. A preference is given to smaller businesses but then also areas that are child care deserts, and they match between 50 and 100%, and to be able, and then to be able to help those employees, you know, and help increase their workforce participation rate.

And then finally, you know, a lot of states really are putting together kind of working groups and roundtables, including the business community. I did really want to highlight one of my member chambers, which is the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber. They are doing a lot of work in this space, especially pre-pandemic.

They were actually responsible for getting some changes done to some local regulations about how, what the cost of these facilities would be and the requirements. They also were able to help pool together some employers to basically go in together on a facility.

I know they've experienced delays due to Covid because of that--or sorry, because of Covid--but you know, just really showing like the instrumentality of what a local chamber can do, especially on the local level. I'm happy, very happy to connect you with them if interested.

They asked me to say that they'd be very happy to chat with anyone interested in the work they've been doing. And then finally, really want to also highlight the San Diego YMCA. They are a group that we've had some conversations with. They are the child care resource and referral agency for San Diego County.

And then purely using federal and some state funding, they work with employers at no cost to the employer to do two things: one, assess employees' child care needs, which can be done through things like surveying and direct conversations with employees, and then they also help employers explore and implement employer-funded child care benefit programs.

So for example, if employers are interested in contributing to the cost of child care, the employer would provide a lump sum to the YMCA, and the YMCA then works with the employee and the provider directly to pay for that cost. The YMCA also helps providers who are small businesses themselves of course, to start or expand their businesses.

And so I think I just really want to end by saying I absolutely think that there is a role for employers in this conversation and that I hope you continue to consider us as a partner going forward as we address this important issue. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and will we be able to get a copy of your slides?

Yes. Absolutely.

Thank you very much. We appreciate that because our handwriting is not that good. No kidding. So welcome. Thank you for being here, and just real quick, I just want to acknowledge that we have Assembly Member Stefani here as well as the Assembly Member Ward, and I've already introduced Solache twice because I like him two times more than the rest of them.

I'm used to that.

Welcome.

Good afternoon. My name is Sarah Bohn. I'm a Vice President at PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California where I direct our Economic Policy Center. Thank you so much for inviting my testimony today.

I'd like to share some findings from PPIC research, specifically pertaining to the economic implications of child care costs for families and what that means for our workforce overall in the state. The average California household spends 73% of their income on just four major categories: food, housing, transportation, and healthcare.

So as you know, that leaves very little left over for care responsibilities and we've heard throughout this hearing a lot of examples and statistics on how costly that is. Our statewide survey, the PPIC survey, found that those expenses, the child care expenses, weigh very heavily on the minds of parents.

So 13% of parents in our survey responded that they worry about the cost of child care every day or nearly every day, and that's parents with school-age children. I suspect it would be higher if you just--if we were able to narrow in on parents of young children.

Nonetheless, you know, eligible families, as we've been discussing, can defray some of the cost of care by accessing subsidies, but parents who cannot are paying out of pocket for a lot of their care needs, and for some families in California, that actually puts them into poverty status.

Our research suggests that poverty among families with preschoolers in particular would be 24% lower if they had access to subsidized care. And to me, that statistic demonstrates just how care costs meaningfully impact the economic status for families, constraining their day-to-day needs as well as handling emergency expenses, investing in education, investing in starting a business, all of the things that help families build their financial resilience and mobility over time and contribute to the dynamism of our communities.

So that's really the first economic cost that I wanted to highlight, which is really the opportunity cost of unaffordable care and how that impacts families and communities. The second economic implication that I'd like to highlight is around how access to care affects parents' choices on whether to work or not and how much.

Of course, those are complex personal decisions but the statistics in our view demonstrate broader patterns that suggest systemic barriers that parents face in both the job market and the child care market. So our research in California finds that mothers of young children are much less likely to work than fathers. That is no surprise, but the gap is huge. It's 29 points.

Fathers of young children, 95% of them are working. About 67% of mothers of young children are working. That gap is a little bit smaller when both parents are college-educated and probably earning more of the resources to afford care, but there's still a gap there, which I think is also related to the facts about time spent on care that falls just disproportionately on women, regardless of their education, regardless of whether they're working or not.

So we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using data on the circumstances, the current circumstances of California's women with children just to get a benchmark of how how work and child care decisions could be different or how different decisions on work and child care among women would affect our workforce overall.

So the thought experiment that we did in the data is to ask if mothers of young children were as likely to work as mothers of older children, those who are using school in a sense that has care for their children. How many additional mothers could be working?

And this is not to say that all mothers of young children would be working in that case because most mothers actually--a lot of mothers don't work regardless of the age of their children. Our calculation showed that over 80,000 more women would be in the workforce every year just running that thought experiment around, kind of, access to care for mothers of the youngest children in California.

And those results are consistent with national research that showed in a causal sense that increases in Child Care and Development Fund expenditures related to increased employment among low-income mothers. So in addition, increasing access to affordable care could affect the number of hours that California mothers choose to work.

We've been holding focus groups across the state on a number of topics this year, and a mother in one of our groups around the issue of economic security in the Bay Area shared that: 'my issue is'--and this is quoting her--'I need to work full-time but I can't because I don't have child care.'

'I've done the numbers. If I go full-time, I'm just paying someone with that extra income and it's not worth it.' I think a very common sentiment that we've already heard from others in this hearing, but this is an example of a mother who would like to work full-time to advance economically but doesn't have a route to do that because of her options in the care space and in the job space.

So while it's a completely rational and probably loving decision for her family, the reality is in our labor market, those choices will have long-term impacts on her ability to earn, and that's because when mothers leave the workforce, either by working part-time or not working full-time, their earnings suffer in both the near-term and the long-term.

The gender wage gap, which I know we're all fully aware of and is well documented, to some extent rises because of the women take more time out of the workforce, and the penalty to doing so statistically is larger for mothers than it is for fathers, even fathers who also take time out of the workforce.

Some of that is because of what's just embedded in our labor market over decades, right, the inflexibility of jobs around kind of them needing to be linear, continuous, needing to work long hours in order to accrue kind of the gains to your work.

So I would say, just as a kind of somewhat painful example is during the pandemic, we saw how job flexibility mattered for women in particular. Women's unemployment rates spiked the worst, worse than men in the first few years of the pandemic, but by the end of 2022, women's employment had recovered more quickly than it did for men and to better rates than it was before the pandemic even started.

So the evidence on kind of the causes of that are somewhat anecdotal, but the patterns are consistent with the stories that we heard about increasing flexibility of remote work, allowing particularly mothers to balance care responsibilities, and the ability to work.

So I would just submit to you that in addition to considering the costs of care, subsidies and expansions in that realm, working with employers to grow jobs with kinds of aspects of flexibility that help mothers choose the work that they would like is to the benefit of those families as well as our workforce overall.

And to me, this is a very strong imperative to address some of these barriers, because--not just to individuals and families, which is quite clear--but so that the state can meet its workforce and economic needs, and that's because our workforce is shrinking relative to the population because the Baby Boom generation is reaching retirement age.

By 2050, we will have the highest ratio of working age adults to dependent individuals, both young and old, than we have ever seen since we have tracked this data back to 1860. So to ensure we have the workforce that we need to grow our economy, to grow opportunity, to meet the needs of all of us as residents and the aging residents, we need to maximize the ability to work among those Californians who want to.

So the extent to which we can kind of open up parents' choices is the way that I would state it, by addressing barriers in the child care market, in the job market, is to the good, to their good of having choices that can maximize their opportunity but also for the strength of California's workforce and overall our economy. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you both for your testimony. Is there any questions from any of you? I'll start with one that just came. I was looking at your slide regarding Michigan and Iowa that have piloted public-private partnerships. Do you have any data or how long have they been doing that and what are the outcomes that they might have gotten so far?

Yeah. So I know Michigan has been doing it for a handful of years and their pilot program was so successful that they've actually started to expand it statewide, so very happy to get more kind of hard data. These are of part pretty relatively new programs, so some of that data is still coming in.

That's good to know. Yeah. You know, we have to think outside the box here periodically. I know we do a lot of good, but you know...anybody else have any questions?

And just a shout out to the YMCA in San Diego. That sounds like a really great program, very creative, and I'll be sharing that with my YMCAs as well, so, thanks.

Yeah, happy to connect you with them as well.

And then Santa Rosa, that was another one?

The Metro Chamber.

The Metro Chamber? Oh, okay. Those were two ones I want to follow up on. Thanks.

Yes.

Can you walk me through the return on investment that child care brings to our local and state-level economies?

Yeah. I mean, I know, you know, I know there's been a lot of research done on, you know, what is the return on investment. You know, I focus a little bit on the employer side which there's plenty of research that shows that if you offer benefits, it's over 100%, right, return on investment.

And I think, you know, some of my slides were talking about some of the work the U.S. Chamber has done is they're going state by state, and they're analyzing what is basically what they're calling the untapped potential, which I think my colleague referenced is how many more people would be in the workforce, right, if they had access to stable child care.

And in some of these states--and I would venture to guess California would be in this group because how large we are--we are losing over about $1 billion, right, of economic potential in dollars to the state.

And so I think the return on investment of if we are investing in ensuring, you know, stable childcare, we would see that just grow so, you know, grow our economic benefit to the state so much that I feel like it feels like a no-brainer, of course, to invest in child care to ensure that our workforce is, you know, tapping its potential. I don't know if you have anything to add, but--

Yeah. One thing, as many know, Heather and I--oh, excuse me--Assembly Member Hadwick and myself--are from rural communities, so I get frustrated--and I've said this before--is that I don't think we gather the data from our rural communities as much as we should. You know, people say, well, where are you from?

I go, 'well, I can tell you where I'm not from: Hollywood, LA, San Diego, and San Francisco.' The rest of the state is as open, you know, so I just want to just encourage, as you continue to collect data, is to find out what's happening in rural America.

You know, when I look at the Central Valley right now, they're struggling, so many families struggling, and it would be really helpful if we had more data from the Central Valley as well. I think that they've really been taking it hard. I know, I would assume--and you can speak for yourself--but up in Siskiyou and Butte and Modoc, all 11 counties that she has--

She's got the biggest district.

And we know access--it doesn't matter. In rural communities, the word access is our number one word. I mean, lack of access for healthcare, lack of child care, transportation, so service areas.

So if you could, as you collect data, both of you, is if you could supply us with some more information because we have to sell this, these ideas and the funding and what it's costing our constituents, so I'd appreciate that. Anybody have any other questions? If not, we can move on to the next panel.

Thank you very much for coming today. Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's scary stuff. Okay. All right. We are going to now have Panel Three. This is our final panel where we'll hear directly from early childhood educators, families, and providers, and with us today, we have Jennifer Greppi, Director of Parent Policy, Parent Voices California, Lakeisha Doyle, CalWORKs participant. We'll have Keisha--

No, Keisha. You had it.

Keisha? If I got it right, God, you know--Co-Founder and Woman in Charge, Black Californians United for Early Child--Early Care and Education, Fresha Moore, Program Director at Moore Learning Preschool, and Marian Algori, Program Director, Little Blossoms Childcare, but I'm missing a couple of people, so whoever wants to speak? Sure, go ahead. Thank you.

Hi, there. I can start.

Yeah, please do.

Hi, chair and members. I am Jennifer Greppi. I'm the Director of Parent Policy with Parent Voices California, and for more than 20 years, I've worked tirelessly to address the systems of oppression that have created obstacles and roadblocks for families to access the quality early learning that they need for their kids.

Twenty-two years ago, when my husband passed away suddenly, I found myself in need of child care services for my two little ones. I entered the CalWORKs program and started both my kids in child care while I went to school to become a preschool teacher.

After graduating, I had my very first job in a child care center when I received a letter that said, 'your childcare is in danger of getting cut off, get on the bus,' and that was my very first trip to Sacramento. I got on the bus and I met Parent Voices that day and I went into the Capitol and I told my very personal story about why child care was so important to my family.

I knew without child care, I would not be able to continue to work, and all of the efforts that I had made to stand on my own would have been taken from me. That was the first time I went to Sacramento and to the Capitol. I've made hundreds of trips in the two decades that followed, and while we've been able to make some really significant wins in that time, let's review where we are today. There are still nearly two million families in California eligible for child care but not receiving it.

The majority of these families are Black and Brown. Child care providers are still among the lowest paid workers in our state. 98% of child care workers are women, and over two-thirds are women of color. FFN providers only receive 70% of the family child care rate, and in the new rate structure, they'll make even less.

If it's okay for wealthy families to pay a nanny or family member, why are we denying that same right to families like Quinn? And we have billions of dollars that private equity firms are using right now to buy up more and more of the child care supply, placing profits over providers and children. Do we notice a pattern?

Our child care system in California, which is the fourth largest economy in the world, is built on the backs of women, primarily women of color. Racism and sexism are features of our child care system, not just bugs.

The racist roots of child care runs deep in the U.S. Our nation's first child care providers were enslaved Black women forced to care for children of their enslavers. Domestic workers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and the myth of a Welfare queen, popularized by our very own Ronald Reagan, criminalized poor Black women for seeking benefits, a stereotype that we still fight to this day.

Those of us in this room might not be responsible for the racism and sexism in our child care system, but every single day, every month, every year that we don't do something about it, we are complicit in continuing it. As I mentioned, California is the fourth largest economy in the world.

It sure sounds impressive on paper, but I talk to families every single day that are struggling to get by, struggling to pay rent, bills, child care, healthcare, and I want you to ask them how it feels to live in the fourth largest economy in the world. Ask them if they're sharing in the wealth.

It begs the question, who benefits? One place to start might be looking at the ultra wealthy and multinational corporations. It's funny. In all my years and all my years coming to the Capitol, not once, not a single time have I ever seen or heard a corporate executive come in front of the committee and give public comment pleading to maintain their tax benefits.

The Water's Edge election and research and development tax credits cost the State of California $6 billion every year. That's nearly as much as we spend on child care in the state as a whole. Not once has a corporation had to justify those expenditures.

I ask you, can you explain how everyday Californians benefit from these tax breaks that we rubber stamp every year? According to the Budget and Policy Center, since 2002, corporate profits have risen 133%. That's after adjusting for inflation. Workers wages: 8%. Yep, 8%. When our community was dying during Covid, the Covid Pandemic, these corporations were banking massive profits.

Does this sound like the benefits that are trickling down to our community? I certainly don't feel them. Meanwhile, Parent Voices has had to literally sue the State of California to keep our government from cutting child care funding.

We have spent countless hours, thousands of families have traveled from all over our state to come here to speak to you, to demand justice for our families, and to be honest, I don't see an end in sight. At the rate we're going, my granddaughters, Melanie and Alani, might be sitting here in front of you as the next generation asking our legislatures one day, will you make a change for us?

Enough is enough. It's time for our leaders who cannot tolerate another second of this to take bold action. I know you're all right here. I see you. I see you. And that's what we expect from you in this committee.

Leadership to us means that we stop pretending like corporate tax breaks and funding the availability of child care are not connected. Leadership means implementing a true cost of care so that providers earn thriving wages and parents don't have to make co-payments.

Leadership means fully funding our system to put an end to the waiting list. Leadership means confronting the rise of private equity in the child care space. This is a major commitment, I know, but if we are not committed to that vision, then what are we doing here?

I know we've been working with all of you over many years for some really meaningful and deep and progressive, you know, policies that have made some real good changes for families, family fees being one of them, stage one from day one and many others. I know you care deeply about this issue and we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

We have to believe it's possible to pay child care providers what they deserve and ensure that every single family has access to the care that they deserve. Together--like together, everybody in this room, everybody here--we can make this happen, and the answers are with the parents and providers, like, we are the ones who are living this every day and we can help share the solutions to make this system better. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and it's always a delight to see you here in this building--

Thank you.

Advocating for our children, so thank you.

Yes. Thank you.

Okay, who wants to be next? We'll just go down the table. Welcome.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Keisha Nzewi, Co-Founder and Woman in Charge of Black Californians United for Early Care and Education. I'm extremely proud to be here with my friends and all of our friends behind us and honored to be invited by you.

Founded in 2022, Black Californians United for Early Care and Education is the only organization in California dedicated to advocating for safe, nurturing, and loving early care and education for Black children, families, and early educators. Black ECE is a leading voice for the needs and experiences of California's nearly 500,000 Black children, their families, and our community.

We are building a strong, proud coalition of Black advocates to shape California's policy--policies, systems, and services to care for Black children and affirm Black culture, and because my texts are are coming in on my tablet, I can see that a lot of our advocates are watching.

Yes. Black ECE is grounded in Black culture, Black joy, Black history, Black legacy, and Black empowerment. We're proud to be Black. Our commitment, passion, and fire is anchored in Black love and Black pride.

Black children have a right to learn in safe, nurturing, loving environments and opportunities for social connection and growth. For generations, as Jennifer mentioned, Black caregivers have been the backbone of our society, providing nurturing and engaging care to a large population of our nation's children.

We value the wisdom and expertise of Black early care and education providers who are continuing legacies of nurturing and raising and educating all children in environments that reflect their background. We are the descendants of our ancestors who made a way out of no way while exuding strength, love, joy, and pride.

We reflect the richness and diversity of our experiences as Black early educators, caregivers, parents, children, and community members, but our early care and education system, from policies and practices to how money is distributed, was founded on a legacy of racism towards Black children and families.

As we focus today on child care costs, I want to bring attention to a different kind of cost--the cost of Black children not being able to receive culturally-affirming care and education. Last week, Black ECE hosted our second ever symposium which was focused on dismantling linguistic oppression for Black children in early care and education.

And there were so many aha moments, but one that really stands out is when two different presenters talked about how their Black English was corrected when they were in school starting in early care and education, and how that correction tells young children that the way their mother talks, their father, their grandmother, their aunties, their uncles, is wrong, and by taking those kind of steps, we're on a path towards eliminating and disappearing such an important part of Black culture.

Another co-founder and I share memories of--a co-founder of Black ECE--share memories of dropping off our daughters in the morning to their child care providers, maybe with two afro puffs, maybe with a little afro, but then picking them up in the afternoon with their hair beautifully cornrowed in braids, which then leads to at least two weeks of not having to get up early to do their hair.

This is just another example of the cultural capital that Black early care and education providers bring to this--to our system, but we have a racial wage injustice problem and this problem limits the opportunity for Black children to receive culturally-affirming care.

This costs families the ability to shore up their children's racial pride before they enter the TK-12 system, where we know that pride is challenged every day. According to the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Black lead teachers compared to all other lead teachers are paid $2,288 less per year, Black lead teachers compared to White teachers are paid $3,120 less per year, and Black lead teachers compared to Asian lead teachers are paid $6,032 less per year.

It is literally illogical for a Black person to enter this profession. That is a cost that our children can't afford, but rate reform, there's elements of rate reform that could address this. We could provide program funding that reflects the true cost of care, obviously, with thriving wages, though, for Black women and their peers, salary scales can be funded and driven by a combination of years of experience and education, and data and analysis to pinpoint disparities and course-correct.

I mostly mentioned in this data around center-based educators, but the majority also of Black early educators have family child care homes, and like many of the challenges mentioned earlier with having to pay a staff member, having to pay rent, having to pay for food, they too suffer from the racial wage justice. So I would just like to remind you that Black Californians are indeed a blessing to our state and we would do really well to remember that.

Yes. Thank you very much for your comments. I think next we have up, Lakeisha? Welcome.

Thank you. Lakeisha Doyle.

Before I just make a short statement because I promised to give you all time back on today. I just like to welcome you al l in to my point of view, my mind, when considering child care. I am a 35 year old mother of three.

I waited a little bit longer than some of my peers to have a child, mostly because I saw the hardship that happens if you are not prepared to have children. I was very young when I said I will never be a single mother.

And the way that my life panned out, I was definitely a single mother for the first seven years of my daughter's life. Not, not by choice, of course, but for the first four years of my daughter's life, her father was incarcerated.

He was unable to physically be there to provide for his child, but he did in every other way that he could. When she was six years old, he passed away, he died and I became a very single mother. And navigating that type of lifestyle, you know, you have to make sure that you can provide for your child.

And that definitely encompasses child care, right? I have the firm belief that if you have children, you should take care of them. That is just my personal conviction. If you have children, you are solely responsible for taking care of those children.

The world that we live in today, taking care of and providing for your child means quality child care. Because nine times out of 10, you cannot make a living that is decent without physically going to work, which children are not allowed in most workspaces.

And so in order to provide that care for your children, you need to physically leave them. And so I do understand that. And I would just like to say that in having to make choices regarding childcare, most of my considerations and things that I have had to think about is the climate.

I grew up in a time where kidnapping, that became very prominent. Those are things that you had to watch out for, child neglect and mistreatment, what else? A plethora of other things that came to light that were already happening. But I grew up in a time where those things came to light, right?

And so we kind of grew up with that fear of someone might take my child or abuse my child in some way, shape or form. Media became very popular, recordings of daycare centers and children being abused for no reason, you know, and there's never a reason to abuse a child.

And so, you know, you would see those things on the news and things like that. And so when considering child care, not only do you have to consider, do I feel comfortable, do I feel safe leaving my child in this space?

Whether the place is professional or not, because I've seen case after case of certified child care centers being one of those places that are portrayed on the news in a public way of abuse happening in some way, shape or form to a child. And so, you know, you consider. The. You know, are you safe?

Are you, you know, is my child safe? And do you have a peace of mind regarding that? But you also consider the cost, right? And so as the care, the quality of care increases, the cost increases.

I remember a time where I had to pay out of pocket as a single mother, you know, my childcare provider, I had to pay them for months back pay because for whatever the reason, they were not signed up in time for the resources, the child action, the stage one child care, things like that, those resources that are designed to help People utilizing CalWORKS or public assistance in some way, shape or form.

There's a time, there's a timeframe that goes along with that, you know, and I remember that the childcare provider that I had chose for my children, she was not signed up in time or in that timeframe. And so I ended up having to come out of pocket.

But you're coming out of pocket and you're paying for not only the childcare, but you're also paying rent at the time and you're paying for your vehicle and you're paying for other expenses that you know, of course we all have. And so it does cause child quality childcare does cost.

And so I said that to say that in considering child care for my own children, I have the background of experience, right, Growing up in the culture, but then I also have the education where I've been educated as an early child care educator. And I have seen the need for quality childcare, but I've also experienced it.

I'm no longer a single mother. I'm married to a very caring and devoted spouse. And he does his part and I do my part. And then you still see the need, right? You have two parents that are working and, or going to school and then you have children who still yet need childcare, right?

So I've also seen that part because one would think that, well, that solves everything, but it doesn't. It kind of puts a little bit more of a strain because then you don't qualify for certain services or things like that because you're a two parent household, right? But then the cost of childcare is still there.

I remember working and at 1.0 the childcare was almost one of our salaries. And so it was like, well, do we just stay home with our children and educate them that way. Choices had to be made.

But all in all, I just want to say that while I understand the importance of quality child care, I also understand the cost of it. And I hope you all do, too.

Thank you.

We do. Thank you very much. Okay, I believe we have with us now. Let me see.

Yes. Hi.

Good afternoon. I'm Frisha Moore. Good afternoon. Chair Members and fellow panelists. My name is Frisha Moore, and I'm the owner of Moore Learning Preschool in Elk Grove. I also represent hundreds of child care centers and owners and directors across California through the California Child Care Center Alliance.

Good afternoon.

I'm licensed for over 200 children, and in early 2019, I had 25 staff and over 90 students at a single location. Today, I employ 11 and serve just 87 across two sites. And about a third of my students are on subsidy.

I've worked in early childhood education for over 20 years, and I know the joy of children thriving in high quality care and the heartbreak when families lose it. And here is my reality as a center owner.

This summer, I lost 30 children to free TK families love our school, but if you can save $1400 a month, you do. Others cut hours and days not because it's what's best for their child, but because they can't afford it. When preschoolers leave, it destabilized the entire center budget.

Preschool tuition normally helps offset the much higher cost of infant care. So what's the true cost of running an infant program? My current infant tuition is $1,900 a month. That's already a huge amount for families to pay. The subsidy rate from child action is 1572.

That's nearly a $400 copay that families have to pay to me to meet my current tuition. The true cost would be $2,700 a month or more. So what would that look like for families? For a private pay family, that would be an $800 increase a month.

And for subsidy families, it means they'd need to pay a copay of $1,100. Families already cannot afford child care in General, and many of my subsidy families struggle just to cover their portion as it is to keep them from leaving, I often offer a scholarship to cover their co pays.

Even though it cuts into my already negative bottom line, the financial pressure is overwhelming. I'm personally liable for $36,000 a month in rent and my Covid emergency disaster loans. This is something that I am personally liable for and puts my personal property on the line. That's before payroll, food, insurance or supplies.

I took on debt during COVID to keep teachers employed and now every month we operate in the negative. We've already cut food budgets, eliminated admin tools, laid off support staff. There's nothing left to cut. As the owner and Director, I know where every hat licensing, payroll, enrollment, parent meetings, covering breaks and even cooking meals.

This leads me to staff and retention. Staffing is our biggest challenge. Teachers can now turn down $24 an hour compared to the $18 an hour we paid for the same qualified teacher a few years ago. We want to pay more, but the money isn't there. Turnover is constant.

It takes months to train a teacher, but by the time they're confident and leaving for they leave for higher pay at fast food or public schools. Administrators like me are back in classrooms daily. I personally cover hours of breaks and lunches each day just to stay compliant. The Bigger Picture this isn't just about my centers.

Across California, families are traveling further, piecing together care, relying on unlicensed options because infant care is vanishing. Teachers pour their hearts into this work, but they still can't afford to live. Parents are cutting hours or leaving jobs where care falls through. And I'm not alone. Hundreds of other child care center owners are battling the same issues.

For example, just blocks from here, Amy Walker. She asked me to share this had to close one of her centers. 43 spots and 12 jobs lost. Amy, like myself, hasn't taken a paycheck and is looking for work just to be able to keep her remaining staff paid.

You can read her full story and many others in the packet that I provided. So how can we restore the balance? I propose that we do the following to keep costs down for childcare centers like mine, Rate reform tied to the true cost of care. Reimbursement must reflect the actual cost to run programs.

Centers cannot keep covering the gap and survive a mixed delivery alignment. Protect community based providers alongside TK if Prop 98 funds can't include us create parallel funding streams to keep the system balanced. Workforce supports invest in wages, benefits and retention strategies reignite passion for early educators to rebuild the pipeline similar to the Pivot Sacramento ECE apprenticeship program.

In closing, childcare is a workforce behind the workforce and when it breaks down, families face job loss, housing insecurity and mental health struggles. We were hailed the heroes during the pandemic keeping children safe, parents working and the economy moving. Today, we're buried in debt, left out of fair funding and competing with free programs that we can't access.

I stay in this work because I believe deeply in what happens during these early years. Every day I see the joy of a child writing their name, making a friend, or discovering something new. But passion doesn't pay the bills.

Without change, more centers will close, families will be left scrambling, and our youngest children will lose the care that they deserve. Thank you for listening and considering what it truly takes to sustain child care in California. And I'm available for questions.

Thank you very much. Really appreciate that. Mirin Al welcome. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair, co chair and Members of the Committee. My name is Miren Algorri and I'm a family child care provider from San Diego County and a proud member of UGW CCPU and also a member of its bargaining team.

And I stand before you not just as an individual family childcare provider, but but as a part of a movement that has spanned generations. My story as a provider did not begin the day I opened my own program 20 years ago.

Started as a teenager as I sat at the table while my mother and her fellow providers were having these conversations about organizing, dreaming and fighting for a voice. I grew up hearing my mom talking to her fellow providers about joining the cause because she believed that our work deserved dignity and respect.

And it took nearly two decades, yes, 20 years of meetings, rallies, petitions and perseverance before family child care providers finally won the right to form a union and collected bargaining rights. Those victories weren't handed to us. It was built on the sweat, tears and sacrifice of thousands of women, especially women of color, who carried this movement forward.

And since then, we've made history time and time and again. Together, we've increased rates for subsidized care. We have secured health care and a training Fund and the first of its kind, retirement Fund for family child care providers in the nation. But none of these victories came easy.

Each victory required thousands of hours of unpaid time in bargaining sessions, joint labor management committees, organizing drives, phone calls, letters, emails, rallies, and meeting with elected officials so they could understand the work we do and its importance.

All the while, we've continued our daily work of educating and nurturing the next generations of Californians, the children of grocery workers, delivery drivers, healthcare workers, and so many other essential workers. We educate, we nourish, we comfort, and we guide them, often working from before dawn until late at night.

But even with all of our gains, we still absorb the rising cost of food, utilities and supplies while subsidizing the subsidy program meant to support families who need it most.

We are a movement that's been generations in the making and we will keep moving Forward, we will keep fighting for wages that reflect the true cost of care, for the benefits that honor our humanity, and for a future where family child care is recognized as the respected profession that it is.

We're grateful for the support of some of our state leaders that have shown for child care providers. And we hope to continue working with you all and with the state as we move forward, finally establishing true cost of care rates, because that is what will allow our programs, families and communities to truly thrive.

That is the future my mother dreamed. Of. And it is the future I will keep fighting for until it's real for all of us. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And thank you for all the testimony. I didn't start with this, but one of the things when we've been talking about childcare for eight years at least I've been here eight years and always put it to the forefront with the Women's Caucus.

One of the things I just wanted to acknowledge is that Speaker Revis made this his number one affordability conversation. So that's why you're seeing us here, that we want to be united in having this tough discussion. And it shouldn't be a tough discussion. Right.

I mean, you know, when you think about things, what's the most rewarding thing is bringing a child up, making sure they have a roof over their head, they have health care, and the providers are taken care of, the workers are taken care of. So there's no doubt about it. Do we have a lot more work to do?

Absolutely. Are we committed to it? Absolutely. And you're gonna see these same faces and a lot more trying to get this passed and move this along. So I just wanted to start with that right now. Do any of you have any questions you'd like to.

I have one right behind you by this nice young man right behind me.

Thank you. Madam Chair, I wanna echo your comments about the priority from our leadership. I actually chair Economic Development, House Impact Committee and Growth. And with that, obviously this is a priority for that Committee, too, to ensure that the affordability aspect, how we're tackling this at the state level, is a priority.

So I want to just echo those words and of course, your leadership on the Women's Caucus. And so I'm excited to be here. I wanted to say respectfully to all the other panels, this is a great panel today. I love the energy, I love the passion, and I think we all have those shared experiences.

One of the things that I always share with people is that we bring our lived experiences to the Capitol. Right. And our backgrounds and what we do. And as much I don't have children, I have four godchildren and trust me, they keep us busy.

We have the youngest, a four year old right now and she's in that preschool pre tk but those lesson learned that you guys shared and those experiences are amazing. But there's a loved one, there's compassion, there's a lot of things that are provided to her.

And it takes a team effort, not only the providers, but the family Members. And truly to your point, you know that conviction of taking care of that child. So thank you for your experiences. Thank you for lived experiences. And the last comment was about our mothers. Right. My mother was my world.

So I know that if she could keep me in a little cage and protect me her whole life, she would have done that. But like she said, this little bird here flew away and lived the world and experienced experience the world.

So that being said, I know that to our moms specifically, of course our fathers too, but our moms were something that we were their treasure.

So I know, I want to commend all amazing women out there that take care of the children because I was one of those child that I was already protected by, you know, by my mom and just want to uplift those voices are strong women out there. So thank you, Madam Chair.

And I look forward to continuing these discussions and again, love the panel of the compassion and the love that you all have for. For others. Gracias.

Yes. Who else?

Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story and all of you actually for speaking. I had a chance to actually tour more learning preschool and learn something.

I think one of the things that you had mentioned is that when we put one of the areas and it was before me here is that we put forth TK Right. Universal TK and while it was a great thing and we wanted children to be able to experience that, it actually harmed centers like yours.

And I don't know if that was discussed here, that when we made this something for the community, what it actually did was it negatively impacts many of these centers. Where they got it was basically money taken away. And then hearing now that there's conversations about even infant care as well too. Right. Is what you shared with me.

And I hadn't had a chance to hear anything about that. But if that comes into place, it would indefinitely shut down all centers. And so I'm not sure, Madam Chair, if you heard that at all, if that's something that was talked about years ago when this came into the conversation. But also it was News to me.

And I appreciate that tour completely because I learned so much from you. And just seeing that center, I'd always tour the home base childcare centers and knew that they were struggling. And then I always thought these center based ones were doing really, really well.

But then when you actually explained to me the difference and then told me about that, then it was one of those areas where we talked about we have to do a roundtable to bring you all together to talk about how do we make it whole again.

Because if we took something away from you, we have to be able to come back and replace that with something else and not just keep taking more and more away.

And so I don't know if we can chat about that, if you know more about that or if anybody here on the panel can also weigh in on that as well too because that wasn't discussed how that really impacted many of your centers.

And I think it's not just your centers, but also any of the home based centers as well too. It took away, I want to say, half of their income more than anything.

And I think that this is where I can add this on to another one of our workshop meetings. And we should talk about infant care and how that affects, you know, we do policy right. And we think that we're doing the right thing and sometimes we make a mistake, unintended consequences.

So we going to have to reevaluate some of this stuff. We're just going to have to. So Assembly Member Sharp-Collins.

Okay, I was trying to get back to here, y'all, but I'm here and I will go back to replay to watch and make sure that I document everything else and what you guys were saying.

I do want to thank everyone for being here today and shedding light on this really important topic and thank my majority leader and for, for all of your work, not only as our majority leader, but Women's caucus and everything else.

And keeping this topic of conversation at the forefront at all times, as your assistant majority leader over policy and the research division, we've issued out a affordability report that is highlighting child care. And in that re. In that report we did highlight four different key areas for us to actually consider.

So and this report has been shared out with, with our chair and our colleagues. And it talked about of course, the key issues of high cost, but also the, the lack of access. But even diving deeper now going further into the quality of pay, the state, the state efforts, and then the CalWORKS program.

So know that even though we are, we're having you know, hearing here and there that the conversation is ongoing conversation with deep in depth breadth of research that is also following that. And you guys are adding to that particular research to ensure that we get the things that we need to.

As I mentioned from the last panel, too, I'm one of those people that fell into that category of the middle and not being able to find childcare for my son, Lucky. I mean, I found something, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. But, hey, he's here. He's good, right?

But that actually pushed me to want to serve on early education boards. And so I did serve on an early ed board for about six years. And on that board, I truly understand the importance of how much you guys give. Of.

Give of yourselves, you know, meaning you carry so much, you take on so much, you have your own personal challenges, you know, your own kids, your families, but then you're carrying the weight of others, same thing for what we do. So. And then from there, you have to regroup and come back and still provide a service.

People have to remember that, that when it comes down to this work, it's not just your family. You're caring for the whole child. You're caring for the entire family. And that is a lot that comes with this work. I wouldn't be here, honestly, if it wasn't for you all, for the work, for what you guys have done.

I did have early childhood care, but I know a lot of people who cannot afford it. And I remember some people who were formerly incarcerated who said that the one thing that I wish I had to ensure that I would have been on track was early childhood care.

You guys play a pivotal role in people's lives and quality of lives. And I want to thank you for that. And just the last point from me, serving on that board, we talked about wage increases before others was talking about trying to increase the wages. We talked about family fees and slots being reimbursement.

But one thing that has proven to be even more of importance right now is therefore natural disasters and supports on what's happening, wildfires, floods or whichever, and then insurance support. So for you guys to be able to be able to now come back in and get the funding that you need to rebuild.

And that's also been an actual huge concern. So I'm saying all this to say, I hear you, I get it. And you have a champion here. You have champions here with all of us that are here. And thank you guys for sharing your stories. Your stories, once again, helps to speak truth to power.

And it's an honor to be here to serve the state and to hear from you all. So thank you and thank you for allowing me to participate. Thank you very much. Assemblymember Stefani.

Thank you. Madam Chair, thank you to both of you for convening this FLET Committee. I'm very proud and privileged to be on it. And I'm just so moved by all of the testimony today about making sure we have culturally competent care.

And one thing that stuck out in terms of how, you know, billionaires don't have to stand in line here and beg for tax breaks and you know, we see lines of women wrapping around buildings.

You know, I've been in government for a long time in San Francisco and here and just how many, not just the lines, but the years of having to advocate for something that seems so basic. I'm a mom. I have a 20 year old son and a 16 year old daughter.

And I remember the struggles of childcare and getting back into my career and how I was going to balance all that.

I'm also the oldest of six and I'm just realizing that I was my mom's built in childcare during summer break and, and you know, it's just, I can't believe we're still arguing about this or we're still having to fight so hard. And the TK example in terms of the unintended consequences of trying to do something good.

But we need to really unravel those unintended consequences quicker than, I mean like yesterday. And I'm just so happy to be here with all of the women now that are here. There's how many over 4,000 people have served the California State Legislature since the inception of our state and we've only had 206 women. I'm number 206. Yes.

And we're not going anywhere and we have more women getting elected. And I think that, you know, it's important because we, these issues, everything you just said resonates and we know that we want to make a difference.

And I feel so lucky to be serving with these incredible women and of course, who was obviously raised by an incredible mother because he's so wonderful that I really feel with the emphasis on this, that we will make a difference because we're not going to give up.

And I thank you all again for sharing your experience with us today and for your continued fight in this matter. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, I think, you know, when we're talking about TK especially, I think, you know, there were many of us that stood in those long lines to talk about what we knew would happen if we didn't really look at a true mixed delivery system for TK and, you know, making sure that we included all types of providers.

You know, in California, we say that we have a value, that we want parents to be able to choose the type of care that works best for their family, which means at all ages. Right. But the reality, you said it in your testimony, right. Where the. The parents have no choice. They have to use TK because that's.

That's free. Right. And so if that's your only choice, that's what you're going to do. Right. It's not. Because what if that's what maybe they think or want or know is best for their family, but it's what they. Have have to do. Right.

So I just want to. I mean, firstly, I have to close out. I have to go see the speaker, but that's not the point. Ms. Assembly Member Nguyen is willing to take public comment.

I understand there's a young lady, a child that still might be here, I don't know if she's still here, that wants to make a comment. Did she leave?

Yeah, I think so.

Okay. Well, I'm sure those words are precious, but before I leave, I just want to thank you all for being here. You know, the fight's not over. We're going to be here. We'll continue. Continue our having these conversations. And thank you all for being here. It's meant a lot. It opens a lot of our eyes.

You go, you know, I forgot about some of this. Right? Yeah, you just. So anyway, I want to thank you all for being here. And if you want to do any public comment and end it for me. Yeah, I think Assemblymember Salache wanted to make some comments.

Yeah.

Yeah, actually perfect. As you're. As you're walking away, mature leader, you have been a champion in the space. And again, we can't thank you enough. And with.

That's a reflection of also all the providers in the audience because you have been the voices amplified because it takes leadership like our leader here and our providers here, but it takes all those voices in the background to really amplify the voices. So I want to thank you all.

I think of Tanya Mcmillan, I think of Ophelia in the background in my district and the audience. So all of your voices are strong, too. So we want to just amplify all of us here and allies like myself in this space as well, that we need to continue being those voices and to uplift these important conversations.

So thank you thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Assembly Member Slaughter. One of the things that the majority leader did say as you were talking is that the conversation around Universal tk, that we would convene again and have another one of these session, we'll probably do it in Central California somewhere so that we have others able to join us and speak as well.

But it would be specifically around that. And knowing what we did and the unintended consequences, I don't think we're looking at moving infants out, knowing that that's. That's what happened already. Right. Learning from the past.

But I do want to bring that back up again and maybe fix some of those areas that we thought were a good thing. And to your point about, you know, families are going to have to choose, it's free or they have to pay. And of course, I would take something free, too.

I'll take it 10 times free if I could. Right. And so I think bringing that back again and having that conversation and seeing how we can fix it or other areas in which, in which we can do.

If there are no other comments from the panel, I will go ahead and open up for the public to be able to come up and speak. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Sara Bachez with Children Now. One thing I wanted to acknowledge before I begin is that what we're seeing is families deferring their family wishes to build their family. And that includes me and their financial stability as well as the financial stability of all of our amazing educators and providers.

Thank you very much of the sacrifices that they made. And I'm tearing up because I used to be the budget consultant sitting here during the Great Recession when we made these reductions. So I really truly appreciate your leadership and this forum.

I believe that the state can ensure that our families and our children have access to a variety of child care issues and options because stability, affordability and the promotion of child healthy development is so critical to our economic need. And California can do it. We have the tools, we have the expertise, we have amazing resources.

It's just how we lift it up and launch it. So I do urge you as a state to continue to stabilize our child care field through multi year investments towards equitable wages and benefits for our providers.

And please set aspirational targets that creates incentives using public private partnerships, using all of us as resources to grow the services that are needed as well as our workforce. While expanding care, our families and children have continued to carry the burden and we are responsible for meeting their needs. Thank you.

Thank you.

Madeline Foreman, Every Child California, speaking on behalf of early childhood educators through our grassroots advocacy arm, Every Child California's ECE Voices. We bring on, we bring on the ground early childhood educators together.

Participation is open regardless of Association membership because our leadership wanted to ensure all educators, especially those who may not have the resources to afford formal representation, still have a seat at the table. Recently our team interviewed one such educator and asked what message she wanted most conveyed to legislators. Her reply? Why they don't care about us.

We know that most people serve in the Legislature because they care deeply. But her words reflected a systemic gap. Historically, there hasn't been a designated space for the realities of early childhood education and the cost pressures within to be centered in policy conversations. Thank you, co chairs, for stepping up and changing the system and creating that space.

It not only conveys that policymakers care, it demonstrates it. Thank you so much. We look forward to working with the Members and staff on this Select Committee.

Thank you. Good afternoon, co Chair and Members of the Committee. I'm Barbara Schmitz. I'm here on behalf of First Five California. I want to thank you first of all for the opportunity to have this deep conversation, something that's very focused, obviously, you know, given the testimony and then I presume some things that will be said after me.

You understand the need and the desperate hope that we've all had that this conversation would occur. So thank you. I just want to mention, you know, our organization is focused on making sure that children 0 to 5 have all those essential services so that they can thrive in a safe, stable, and nurturing environment.

And in sort of coalescing some of the conversations and the data that came forward today. One of the things that I wanted to uplift is equity. And so I think we have focused and need to continue to focus on equity on the provider side, on the parent side, but also on the child side.

And so I just wanted to uplift a couple of areas that could potentially be overlooked, and those are children who need care, for example, in migrant families, children who need care in non traditional hour settings, children who have special needs.

Just wanted to uplift and make sure that we shine a little bit of a light on them as we're having this conversation so that they don't get overlooked and their needs continue to be unmet. Thank you.

Good afternoon. It's just such a pleasure to be here with all of you who have such a commitment to the early care and education field. I've been doing this for a very, very long time.

Thank you.

And I'm a product of a high school ROP program where I had the opportunity of working in a teen parenting program where I got my first opportunity to understand the magic of early care and education and what the influence of an early educator has on a child's life. It is where I had my commitment to the field.

That was in the time when we actually had regional occupational programs and career and tech and education programs that focused on career readiness, where high schoolers could leave high school and be a job ready. In addition to needing a true cost of care in a reimbursement system that actualizes the true cost of child care.

All of those issues are also hurting our workforce. They're bleeding at the seams. We've been bleeding at the seams for quite some time. The lack of investment in our workforce continues to be a barrier to this holistic system.

I think as a state, we need to think about early care and education as part of the overall education system. And we need to quit segregating ECE from the entire education platform that we rethink that our teacher pathways, our teacher recruitment, we make it part of the K12 recruitment system.

I'm very worried about not just the issues that we're having in California with all the lack of costs and not having reimbursement that's paying our programs what they actually need to operate high quality programs. But I'm also worried about the longevity of our field in our workforce and the educational community as a whole.

I do think that there's opportunities for us to rethink these things if we want to talk about making it more affordable for all. There's a lot of administrative burdens that come along with state subsidized care, the administrative costs that come in to even getting a parent through the door. Right.

So I think that if we work as a partner and collectively, we can be creative of reimagining what California's education system can truly look like, that we can be mindful of some additional fears that we have coming down. Not only are our early educators do they qualify for the state subsidy for the programs that they serve.

When I was in Direct Service, I had 28 programs and over 300 staff and over 80% of them qualified for the subsidy in which they were working for. That is an issue. Right.

So if we want to address these issues, we need to create more pathways and we look at the Trump's big beautiful Bill that just released new requirements or recommendations for student loans and early care and education would not qualify to take out a student loan because ECE does not equal a living wage.

So as we think about all of these issues, our workforce is bleeding at the seams and we look forward to working in partnership with you to address these in a creative manner. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon Co chair Members. My name is Mariam Suaduno and I'm a Staff Attorney at the Child Care Law Center. We must support both providers and families to create an equitable society where all children receive enriching, culturally affirming child care.

The state must make good on its promise to pay child care providers fairly for the true cost of care and increase the number of affordable child care spaces as soon as possible. All of our communities will suffer if the status quo is allowed to continue.

You must also ensure that affordable child care is not tied to a single employer or a person's ability to work as this can have detrimental effects on families, including keeping people in low wages, low wage jobs and potentially toxic job situations.

Concerning fair pay, California's cost model and the alternative methodology structure must reflect the child care providers lived reality and put an end to the discriminatory policies and regulations that have exploited providers for decades. Currently, that is not the case. We thank the Legislative Women's Caucus for their leadership on this issue.

We encourage the Legislature and the Legislative Women's Caucus to continue to leaders for positive transformation, transformation of transformative change in this process and hold the governor's Administration accountable for being the same. California can strengthen affordable child care options for all families by ending the exploitation of child care providers and paying them fairly. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, good afternoon. Carol Gonzalez. On behalf of Hope Latinas, we are grateful for your leadership and elevating the critical issue which disproportionately impacts the community we represent. Latinas make up the largest share of California's women and our mothers to over half the children in our state. So our economic security and caregiving conditions shape the future of California.

According to the National Women's Law Center, 23% of center based child care workers and 16% of home based child care providers are Latina. Because Latinas are overrepresented both as providers and users of child care, inadequate compensation has a double impact on our community.

Proper compensation for child care workers, many of whom are Latinas, means stability for our families, continuity of care for children and economic mobility for women. Low pay for child care professionals devalues the essential labor that allows a broader economy to function. Fair pay would recognize child care as the critical infrastructure that it is.

Strengthening child care compensation builds a sustainable system that reflects California's demographics and prepares our children for the future. Again, thank you so much for your leadership and thank you all Committee Members for your commitment to our state. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Sylvia Hernandez. Thank you for allowing us to be here. I am a child care provider, early age, early childhood educator as well, and I'm part of CCPU. The urgency that we have for the rate reformation is because as it is, we need our help with our assistance.

We have 65% of our wages go to our employees and it's hurting because a lot of them are professionals, they have their degrees and there's no way that we're going to pay them below minimum wage. This is an urgency that we do have for our childcare providers.

I am at 24 hours, so I do need the staff and I know the to give high quality care. And this is not just taking care of the children, but educating the children as well.

So this is an urgency that we do have and we do plead for, you know, over 62,000 providers that we do represent that we need this reformation of rates because it's really hurting us and I really do not would like to close my doors to parents who are having to go to school to do a better career, have a better Job.

Some of them are working two to three jobs just to make ends meet. So this is a really urgency and I. I'm a big believer that, you know, things have to change for the positive. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello everyone. My name is Saul Urtada. I'm a child care provider and educator for more than 21 years in county as well as a Member of CCPU. I would like to thank you co chairs and Members of the Committee for the Strong support for our CCPU contract.

I come here today to talk about why we need an implemented alternative methodology based on the true cost of care. By having this method, we will save child care providers who are educators as well from closing our doors to working families.

True cost of care rates would help providers like me to be able to stop using our savings. Like myself, I have to borrow more than 18 to $20,000 to operate and provide high quality care that includes school transportation, home cooked meals and educational activities.

As someone who works 247 we can continue to operate under outdated market rates. Parents are struggling to get by working multiple jobs and try my best to help provide a safe and stable environment for their children's healthy development. But I find it very difficult with inflation.

I just lost a family of four who moved to a more affordable community. With this situation, I have to scale back hours and expenses to keep my assistants from leaving. I don't know if I can continue to afford pay my assistance. We need stability for providers in our families that we work with.

I would like to end by this question. If we are the fourth largest economic state in the world, why can we pass an alternative methodology to stop the closures of child care providers? Thank you.

Thank you. And before the next speaker speaks, I want to acknowledge that Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens has joined us.

Buenas tardes. Mi number and cinque dado mucha.

No, thank you. I have a staff that speaks Spanish, so I'll make sure they interpret it for me. Thank you very much.

Good evening. Thank you very much for letting us be here. Thank you so much for helping us to get our tentative contract. Please help us follow through and ratify that because it's so important. I want to come and share a couple of stories. My name is Blanca Sanchez.

I am from down in California and I am a home child care provider and educator. Two of my most beautiful stories are that there was a father who lost his job and he was able to use the services and his child didn't speak well. Unfortunately, the child they left for free.

TK this year they Told me last week. But the child is speaking. The child is just evolved like a butterfly, right? You see the caterpillar and you see the butterfly evolve. That child just blossom and bloom. I had another child who's on the spectrum that they had their IEP and they just needed like right everywhere, right?

Bouncing off the walls. That child also gave me this sudden notice. The parents said, zero, they're going into free tk the child was taking. But the child's totally different from day one to now when the parent took the child. And I asked both parents, you know, why are you taking them?

The single mother had told me, you know what? This program allows me to support my child all on my own. I don't have to get extra support. She has her own apartment because of this program. And the father had just lost his job, so his family were in dire straits.

So the program helped, but I absorbed the cost. And I love this job. I mean, my mother in law helps here. And so we serve them like these nutritious veggie filled foods. And the parents even brag about, zero, my kids eat all these vegetables and the cousins have to eat all this processed food.

But you guys do the home cooked meals so they can brag about it. But those vegetables cost money. So I have depleted my savings. I use my credit cards to pay for the expenses.

I, I had to let go of one of my teachers and she actually got a better paying job because she's a great teacher because she had all this experience. And so that's why I'm asking you guys to continue to stand with us. Thank you for this panel. Thank you so much for listening. Please continue. Don't stop.

I love that you said we need dates. We need to see them like completed. So we're not like, like what happened with our contract that all of a sudden, wait, we're here at the end of it and you guys aren't ready.

I trust that you guys are going to do a great job the way that you just did today. And if we keep this up, then we can change this because this is America. We can change things here. So thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members. Thank you so much for having this panel today. My name is Jeanette Carpenter and I'm here on behalf of Child Action. I just wanted to uplift a. It's in your packet anyway. But it's a parent from who has a child at Moore Learning Center.

She's a public servant and she has one at Moore Learning center and another child at Elk Grove Unified School District program.

She said that if costs weren't a barrier, she would have both of her children at more learning and she hopes that in some way more learning can be supported either through increased Child Action reimbursement rates or funding parity with a TK program. So just wanted to highlight that. Thank you again for your time today. Appreciate it.