Sherrill Sounds the Alarm on Upcoming Child Care Cliff 

Star-Ledger Editorial: “Supporting babies, kids and parents should be a bipartisan issue. Parents aren’t going to work if they don’t have a safe place for their kids to be cared for: This is money well spent.”

PARSIPPANY, NJ — In case you missed it, the Star-Ledger this weekend published an editorial on the upcoming child care cliff, when federal funding for the industry will expire — and parents and kids could be left without affordable options for child care.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill has been repeatedly raising awareness around the funding cliff and working to find commonsense solutions to address it. Last week, Sherrill toured the child care center at the Montclair YMCA and hosted a roundtable discussion with families about their challenges with the cost and availability of quality child care options. Earlier this year, Sherrill hosted a discussion in Chatham to share how she was fighting for New Jersey families on the federal level.

To address this issue and bring costs down for families, Sherrill has been advocating for her Child Care for Every Community Act, which would ensure access to high-quality, affordable child care and early learning opportunities by establishing a network of federally-supported, locally-administered child care options. Along with more than 100 Members of Congress, Sherrill also sent a letter to President Biden advocating for the investment of $16 billion into the child care sector to avoid the upcoming cliff.

Key excerpts from the Star-Ledger editorial are included below:

Star-Ledger: We’re about to fall off a childcare cliff | Editorial

• America has a childcare problem, and it’s about to get a lot worse. Federal funding for the industry will fall over the edge of a cliff next month, as pandemic relief expires at the end of September. And while this comes as no surprise, Congress has yet to step in.
• The fallout will be “devastating,” more than 100 members of Congress warned in a recent letter to President Biden. Over three million kids – about a third of those in childcare – are likely to lose their spots, according to an analysis from The Century Foundation. This includes more than 100,000 in New Jersey, where about 1,300 centers are ultimately expected to close.
• So, from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Rep. Mikie Sherrill, advocates are banging alarms[.]
• While the average wealthy nation contributes about $14,000 a year in public funding for each toddler’s care, in America, we spend less than $500 — putting us behind Mexico and Romania. That’s absurd.
• In New Jersey, parents pay an average of $13,000 a year for childcare; it’s like sending your toddler to a four-year state college. And nationally, costs in the childcare industry are rising at nearly twice the overall inflation rate, the Wall Street Journal just reported.
• The CEO of the YMCA in Montclair, Buddy Evans, says the federal funding his centers got over the last two years helped them give out incentives and bonuses and pay for trainings to get workers higher certification. The Y has a waitlist of 162 families; if it closes, he says, the waitlist will just get longer at another provider.
• Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, who visited a childcare center with Evans last week, vowed to fight for funding to ensure the childcare crisis doesn’t worsen because of the cliff.
• Supporting babies, kids and parents should be a bipartisan issue. Parents aren’t going to work if they don’t have a safe place for their kids to be cared for: This is money well spent.

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