Case Study: Care in Georgia

Monyatta Carter’s struggles with early care and learning are hardly unique. In interviews with dozens of families across Georgia, parents shared stories of how they are forced to make choices between cost, quality, and availability every day when it comes to finding care for their children. Moreover, those difficult trade-offs often shape their lives and can determine the course of their children’s futures.

The inability to find or afford quality early care is the reason why some families, like Jaime White’s, decided not to have more children, even though they’d hoped to. Already, the Whites pay $44,000 a year, more than their mortgage, to ensure their children have high quality care. The lack of early care is why parents in some families, like Ashley Henderson’s, work split shifts and rarely see each other. The lack of early care is why some parents, typically mothers, dropped out of the workforce, even though they didn’t want to. “Child care can affect the direction of your whole life, the unattainability of it. It certainly has for me,” said Michelle Cawley Burg of Lilburn, who reluctantly quit her job when she had no paid family leave and couldn’t afford child care. Ten years out of the workforce and five children later, she’s starting all over again.

For many struggling families, like single mother Raysean Hawkins, a patient care tech who lost her child care subsidy after picking up an extra 12-hour shift to better provide for her two children, the lack of affordable, high-quality early care can keep parents stuck and unable to climb the economic ladder. Hawkins dreams of going to college to get ahead in life. But Georgia is one of eight states that do not help low-income parents offset the cost of early care if they’re enrolled in a four-year college program or two-year associate degree program. For children, research has found that a majority of the achievement gap at age 14 was already present on the first day of kindergarten, and that the disparity in cognitive skills at age four between low- and high-income children in the United States is already among the largest in all of the advanced economies. “How can you get up the financial ladder when you’re constantly being pulled down?” Hawkins says. “Child care is crazy.”

“How can you get up the financial ladder when you’re constantly being pulled down?” Hawkins says. “Child care is crazy.”

In the Care Index, a data and methodology collaboration between New America and Care.com, Georgia ranked in the second quartile, 18th out of the 50 states, scoring in the top 15 on quality and availability, but falling to 31st in terms of affordability. Though quality is difficult to measure, 11 percent of centers and family homes in the state are nationally accredited for quality. The Care Index found that the average cost of full-time infant care in a child care center or family home center outstrips the average cost of in-state college tuition and fees in the state. For a family earning minimum wage, the average cost of child care in a center for all children under five eats up more than half their income. Nanny care, the Index found, runs $27,729 a year, more than two and a half times the average rent in the state.

What Georgia does well, however, is its early and pioneering embrace of early childhood education. Georgia was among the first states, along with Massachusetts and Washington, to create a stand-alone Department of Early Care and Learning.  “We don’t talk about daycare here,” one state official said. “We talk about early learning.”

Both Democratic and Republican governors have campaigned on and later supported the expansion of one of the first universal pre-kindergarten programs in the country. The state has invested more than $6 billion in state lottery funds over 25 years to make high quality pre-K available to 1.4 million children. Though demand still outstrips a supply—between 5,000 and 8,000 children sit on the waiting list every year—the system currently serves more than 80,000 children annually, or nearly 60 percent of the state’s four year olds. That falls just short of the universal pre-K programs in the District of Columbia, Vermont, Oklahoma, and Florida that reach more than 70 percent of their four-year populations. But it far outstrips others: 12 states serve less than 10 percent of their four-year-olds, and seven states have no pre-K program at all.

That investment in pre-K in Georgia is paying off. Researchers contracted by the state have found that children from all backgrounds are benefitting from the program, making gains across all domains. And that those who don’t speak English at home, a fast-growing population, begin the year with lower skills than their English-speaking peers, but learn at a faster rate and make large gains throughout the year.  “And those gains tend to continue beyond the pre-K program,” said University of North Carolina research scientist Ellen Peisner-Feinberg, who is studying a representative sample of Georgia children from pre-K through third grade.

“I don’t think that early learning is a partisan issue. It’s a bipartisan issue. I think how you pay for it is a partisan issue. And we’re working on that here in Georgia.”

Further, a 2015 study of the economic impact of child care in Georgia found that it is a $4.7 billion a year industry, on par with the pharmaceutical and the hotel/motel sectors, creating nearly 85,000 direct and indirect jobs, serving 337,000 children and enabling more than a half million parents to work each year and pay taxes on $24 billion in income. “Legislators and business leaders now see that the child care industry is an important economic driver in the state,” said Amy Jacobs, commissioner of the Department of Early Care and Learning for Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. The economic impact data got both Republican and Democratic lawmakers’ attention, she said. Now, the brain research showing that in the first few years of life, a child’s brain is making 700 to 1,000 critical new neural connections every second, forming the foundation upon which all later learning will be built, is pushing lawmakers to take action. “You can’t dispute that research. And I think Republicans and Democrats are starting to listen,” Jacobs added. “I don’t think that early learning is a partisan issue. It’s a bipartisan issue. I think how you pay for it is a partisan issue. And we’re working on that here in Georgia.”

But that also gets at the heart of the current struggle in Georgia: what to do about the babies.

The cities of Atlanta and Marietta, along with major employers headquartered in the state, like Home Depot and Coca Cola, offer paid family leave to new parents. But most workers in the state, as in the rest of the country, get little or no paid family leave and new, adoptive, and foster parents must either use their own vacation or sick time, take unpaid leave, or seek child care and return to work within weeks of the baby’s arrival. Nearly one in four mothers, one investigation of a Department of Labor survey found, return to work within two weeks.

In Georgia, as in the rest of the country, infant care is hard to find, often wildly expensive and, a 2009 state study found, pretty bad. Nearly 70 percent of all licensed infant and toddler classrooms in Georgia were rated as low quality, with children in environments “inadequate for their health and safety” that “do not promote their cognitive and social-emotional development.” And though the care was that bad among licensed providers, the state has no idea about the experience of children in small, unregulated settings—people may care for up to two children unrelated to them for pay without needing to obtain training or a license—or on the cheaper “gray market” of informal care provided by family, friends, and neighbors.

“That was a real clarion call for us,” Jacobs said.

With a $51 million federal Race to the Top grant through the end of 2017 and an additional $14 million raised from the private sector, the state has a new plan to boost the quality of infant and toddler programs through efforts like creating the Quality-Rated Improvement System, giving more generous subsidies to low-income families who choose higher-rated child care establishments, and offering scholarships to teachers to seek more training—the key to quality care. In addition, the governor added $25 million from state lottery funds in May 2016 to raise pre-K teacher salaries and bring them more in line with K-12 teachers.

Georgia is also using the federal funds to increase the availability of quality infant and toddler care in rural counties, called Early Education Empowerment Zones, where the need for licensed, quality infant and toddler care far outstrips what’s currently available. In Clark County, home of the University of Georgia, the current system can only serve 27 percent of the children ages 0-4 who may need care. In Brooks County, it’s less than 5 percent.

In addition, the state is also revamping its child care subsidy program with an eye to increasing quality for disadvantaged children in an effort to boost school readiness, close the achievement gap, and reduce inequality. In a plan approved in May 2016, the state is lowering the amount low-income working families have to pay out of pocket, a move that will mean strapped Georgia families will no longer pay among the most for care in the nation. Georgia is also raising the rate it reimburses high quality centers for accepting children who qualify for subsidies—up to the 75th percentile of the 2013 market rate for care. (Although the cost of early care and learning nationally has risen every year—at nearly twice the rate of the price for all other consumer goods—the state had been setting reimbursement rates based on a fraction of what early care and learning cost in 2007.) Advocates say that will mean high quality centers will be more likely to accept more children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. And that’s a good thing.

But the bad thing is that the increased spending on quality and affordability means, without additional substantial investment, the state will be cutting availability to as many as 17,000 children a year. “It’s like, in a flu epidemic when you have limited vaccines. Do you give watered-down flu vaccines to the whole population, where it may not do the trick, or do you give the recommended dosage to a smaller number of people?” said Mindy Binderman, an advocate with Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. “It’s a really hard trade-off.”

At the end of a long day of work at a small sports marketing firm, a very pregnant Micki Velmer is driving to pick up her three-year-old son, Burke, from the Frazer Center, a child development center, when her car overheats and breaks down. Although Velmer’s husband, Jason, who works in digital marketing, soon swings by to get her and then get both of them to the Frazer Center before it closes, Velmer is uneasy.

Because infant slots are so hard to find—in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the United States—the Velmers’ baby will be enrolled and they will actually start paying tuition a few days before the baby is even born. And they’ll continue to pay throughout Velmer’s 12-week parental leave. This time, working for a new company, she gets two weeks of paid parental leave, which she’ll extend with other paid and unpaid time off, and short term disability. Jason, who works for a French company, will have four weeks paid parental leave. All the while, they’ll be paying $4,350, plus deposit, just to reserve their baby’s spot.

Velmer has her concerns about the Frazer Center. She loves the diverse and inclusive special needs community; how the center is tucked into the woods with walking paths and gardens; and that it’s only one mile from their house. But, every year, the teacher turnover has been high. Not one of Burke’s teachers has made it through an entire school year, which she worries has disrupted the continuity of care, so critical for a child’s healthy development, despite the high price tag. But, just like Monyatta Carter waiting for her daughter to turn four and the financial relief of Georgia’s universal pre-K program, Velmer hangs on at the Frazer Center because, if Burke stays, he’ll be guaranteed a free pre-K spot. Then she’ll only need to pay about $75 a week for after school care. If they remove him, they can enter the lottery and take a chance that he’ll get one of the universal pre-K slots at a nearby public school or another private or nonprofit center. But that’s no guarantee. The competition in Druid Hills for the limited pre-K slots is fierce. “It just seems like a big gamble,” she says.

“Child care is tough,” Velmer said. Even for those, like she and Jason, with good jobs and savings. “I honestly don’t know how some people do it.” She does know that costs like early care and learning  are a big reason that, after their second child is born, she and Jason will never likely have more. “We’d always said we’d have two or three, but the financial piece is so scary.”

Velmer slowly walks into Burke’s classroom at the Frazer Center, where the children sit in a circle on a colorful carpet listening to one of the new teachers read a story, while Jason stays in the car and calls a mechanic and tow truck. The little boy’s eyes light up when he sees his mother, and he rushes to crush himself against her huge belly.

“Hey Bud,” she says softly, brushing the soft blonde hair from his forehead. “Have a good day?”

“Yeah,” Burke says, not letting go.

“You ready to go home?”

The boy nods. They walk toward the car, hand in hand.