Day cares facing drop in state subsidies

MARION, Ill. — Some 40,000 child-care providers across Illinois soon may have to weather a financial letdown now that the status of state subsidies for such services is in question, affecting more than 85,000 low-income parents who get state-underwritten day care help.

The Illinois Department of Human Services sent out letters to child-care providers this week, apprising them that the agency has run out of funding for $896 million-a-year program. And the agency says it may not change until July, even though it has asked the state Legislature for more money.

Januari Smith, a spokeswoman for the department, said the cash crunch has been building, largely because of recession-related growth in the welfare rolls.

“We don’t have the money,” she said. “We’re very well aware of the burden this will put on working families.”

Child-care providers and parents are publicly making that known.

In the southern Illinois city of Marion, Bonnie Bracket of Heartland Kids Early Learning Center told WSIU Radio said the state’s subsidy covers 40 percent of her revenues. Not getting that funding could force her to borrow money or lay off some workers.

In Springfield, Ashley Franklin — a single mother of two children — told the State Journal-Register she might have to quit her job as a personal-care assistant if the payment delays force the woman who cares for Franklin’s 3-year-old daughter to close her at-home day care business.

“I have no idea what I’ll do,” Franklin said. “A lot of people are going to have to quit their jobs, especially single parents. If I didn’t get help with it from the state, my whole paycheck would go to day care.”

The woman who runs that day care, Debbie Squires, gets $2,300 a month from the state to help pay for the care of Franklin’s daughter and four other children. A suspension of those payments for three months could be devastating, she said.

“I don’t know how we’re going to pay all our bills,” said Squires, whose family includes a husband who runs a small auto-body repair shop, two children in college, and an at-home teenager.

Keith Kelleher, who heads the SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana union representing 35,000 home-based child-care providers in Illinois, called the problem affecting low- and moderate-income people “disgraceful.”

Home-based providers “are not corporations that can take a hit like this,” he said, noting the child-care shortfall is “just the tip of the iceberg” because Quinn has proposed an $85 million cut for the program in fiscal 2013.