GEEARS’ Recommendations for the Georgia Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Child Care

The Georgia Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Child Care has been staffed! The bipartisan septet of legislators chaired by Senator Brian Strickland includes several parents of young children and will spend the rest of 2024 delving into our state’s challenging child care landscape. 

But wait a minute, GEEARS, we can hear you thinking. Haven’t you been telling us about this group for a while? Where’s the new news? 

Actually, the committee all over our recent feed had a similar name—The House Working Group on Early Education—and an aligned but different goal: To issue recommendations aimed at strengthening Georgia’s Lottery-Funded Pre-K. 

And boy, did they. At the end of the 2024 Legislative Session, the Working Group’s recommendations led to almost $100 million to make critical improvements to our state’s Lottery-funded Pre-K program. This figure was almost double what was in the original budget proposal and essentially the entire amount that GEEARS and our partners recommended. 

Now, we’re focusing our attention across the aisle. As with the House Working Group, the 2024 formation of the Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Child Care came after years of advocacy by GEEARS and our partners. We’ve spent a full decade, in fact, building toward this moment by developing strong relationships with the members of the Study Committee, several of whom know first-hand what it’s like to juggle work and the child care needs of their young children. 

This Study Committee’s reach will be more broad than the Working Group’s. According to Senate Resolution 471, “The committee shall undertake a study of the conditions, needs, issues, and problems” stemming from parents’ struggle to find affordable child care options. It cites reasons ranging from pandemic closures of child care programs to the expiration of allocated funds from 2021’s American Rescue Act Plan to our current economic inflation. The resolution also lists the child care crisis’s high stakes: $218 million per year in lost wages and a disproportionate barrier for mothers of young children who are trying to work full-time. 

GEEARS has offered the committee specific avenues of support. In a recent letter, we outlined our recommended topics of focus, including. . . 

The High Cost of Quality 

Quality child care is inherently resource-intensive to support child-staff ratios and environments that both keep children safe and promote optimal development. Yet, early education teachers often receive poverty-level wages and only an estimated 15% of income-eligible working families in Georgia receive child care scholarships through the Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS) Program. GEEARS can inform the committee about mechanisms to estimate the true cost of care, such as cost modeling, as well as other states’ approaches to improving access to affordable care.

The Economic Impact of Child Care Challenges

The state’s economy is inextricably linked to child care. GEEARS and the Metro Atlanta Chamber found that child care challenges lead to at least $1.75 billion in lost economic activity and an additional $105 million in lost tax revenue in Georgia each year. In our most recent commissioned survey of families with young children, 44% reported that child care problems compelled them or their partner to turn down a job opportunity. Thirty-six percent reported that they or their partner had to leave the workforce entirely. GEEARS can dive deeper into this research and more with the committee. 

Recruitment and Retention of the Child Care Workforce

The quality of instruction in early childhood classrooms depends upon committed, well-prepared teachers. Yet early educators make significantly less than their counterparts in similar professions and are among the lowest-paid workers in every state, making an average hourly wage of only $10.72 nationally. Low pay has always been a challenge for the child care industry, leading to high staff turnover and lower program quality. The pandemic has exacerbated this problem. Many programs across Georgia are struggling with staffing. Despite demand in their communities, some have to keep classrooms closed due to workforce shortages.

We look forward to being an active resource for the Committee as they study this far-ranging and complicated issue. We hope you’ll join us in reaching out to them with your own insights and experiences around the high cost of child care. And/or, share your stories with us at GEEARS so we can pass them along. 

Together as experts, advocates, and legislators, we now have the power to make affordable, high-quality child care a reality for more Georgia families. GEEARS and our partners plan to spend the rest of 2024 making the most of this opportunity. 

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