As States Cut Children’s Services, Questions Loom

The vast majority of states cut funding last year for programs that serve children, according to a report published Friday by the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies.* The report, State Budget Cuts: America’s Kids Pay the Price, provides information on 43 states and the District of Columbia that made cuts in 2009 as determined by news accounts and the recent budget update from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The cuts are resulting in distress of many kinds, according to the report and a log of recent news reports on NACCRRA’s site.  Problems include waiting lists and reduced staff at child care centers and preschools; parents unable to pursue new jobs because they have no one to care for their children (since their current state of unemployment disqualifies them from receiving childcare subsidies); furloughs and increasing class sizes in public schools; and children whose families are not able to provide them with enough to eat. (A similar survey that focused on childcare, conducted by the National Women’s Law Center in 2009, also showed an uptick in waiting lists, along with reductions in government reimbursements to childcare centers.)

These cuts are likely to reverberate into the educational system for years to come: Research continues to show that the fewer children who attend high-quality childcare and preschool programs, the fewer will be socially and cognitively prepared to succeed in school. Cuts to high-quality, evidence-based programs, which cost-benefit analyses show to be money well spent, are a real mistake.

What the report doesn’t tells us is whether some cuts were, dare we say, less painful or more prudent than others given states’ dire financial situations. The report is intended to be a timely, broad-brush examination of what states have eliminated or trimmed.  It was not designed to provide a detailed review of exactly what debates preceded the reductions or what research was behind them. But it’s worth noting that reports like this treat all spending on children as the same, despite the real possibility that some programs are likely to be more effective than others or have a more significant impact on families than others. And so it begs questions: Did some state legislatures have the presence of mind to give a boost to, or at least spare programs of cuts, because they showed evidence of being better for children’s wellbeing, health or education? Have some children’s programs become more vulnerable to cuts because they aren’t accompanied by any scientific data on the significance of their impact?

And what about the six states that didn’t make the report –Florida, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and Vermont? The report does not provide details on these states. As Early Ed Watch learned after talking to NACCRRA officials, those states are not included in the report because they did not cut any programs for children and families in 2009 or because reduction reports from the field could not be confirmed. Going forward, it would be helpful to know more about the states that staved off cuts (North Dakota is one) and how they did it.

One final, and chilling, note about this report: These reductions occurred even with the federal stimulus money that was approved last year. (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $2 billion in one-time funding, for example, for the Child Care Development Fund.)  Exactly how states are spending their stimulus money is another question that deserves thorough investigation over the coming year — are funds actually getting to those who need them most? And what factors will be at play next year, when stimulus funds dry up?

Some answers may come at an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday — Budgeting, The Next Generation: Federal and State Investments in Children after ARRA — that will showcase some new research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. We’ll keep you posted. 

* Two other groups were also involved in the publication of this report: Every Child Matters Education Fund and Voices for America’s Children.