This session saw legislative wins for child care providers and working parents

Each new Texas legislative session may introduce a new set of battles, but there are always some wins that keep us showing up to fight at the capitol every three years. This year, employers and working families alike saw the legislature make child care access easier in a state where around 95,000 people are on a waitlist to access state financial aid and the cost of child care in Travis County is more than in-state tuition at UT. 

In 2023, the Texas Restaurant Association, Early Matters Texas, the Texas Association of Business and Texas 2036 announced a coalition of businesses to develop strategies for expanding access to childcare for working families. They brought those strategies to the legislature this session, which passed most of their major priorities. Coupled with Travis County’s successful child care ballot measure from last year, it looks like the child care deserts left in the wake of pandemic funding drying out are set to become a thing of the past. 

At a virtual press conference last week by the Employers for Childcare Task Force (E4C), Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer of the Texas Restaurant Association, noted that “less than 15 percent of the bills that were filed made it to Governor Abbott’s desk. So to have this kind of accomplishment in our first session is something that we’re really excited about, and frankly, we think it really shows that we’ve struck a nerve. We’ve identified an issue that really resonates with people, regardless of their politics, because of how it’s impacting families and our economy.”

Janie Burkett, who owns the Dallas/Ft.Worth-based Biscuit Bar, spoke to the importance of reliable childcare for hourly workers: If employees’ child care plans fall through, she noted… “we have shifts that are unfulfilled – sometimes that’s caused us to close our doors. As hourly employees, it’s kind of this big cycle that really negatively impacts everyone and, of course, it negatively impacts the child as well. So it’s really encouraging to see so many bipartisan groups with so many differences rallying behind our kids, rallying behind families, rallying behind businesses.”

Before addressing the general dearth of child care options, E4C sought to address how difficult it often is to access the options that are there. The childcare industry’s regulatory bodies are fractured and redundant, Charles Miller with Texas 2036 explained with an anecdote: “We were talking to a provider out in West Texas who operated a pre-K facility in the morning and a child care facility in the afternoon. The same children were involved, but (each facility was) covered under a different regulatory structure, which meant that there were different agencies creating the health, safety, wellness and quality standards. The children had to be physically moved from one room for the pre-K facility to a different room for the child care portion of it, because those standards were in active conflict.” 

HB 4903 will attempt to rectify this by creating an umbrella agency that meets three times a year that will ensure these agencies all talk to each other. It will include a public input mechanism where employers can request redundant policies not be enforced until they are redone to no longer conflict.

“We’re really excited about the immediate opportunity to get rid of those immediate conflicts that are putting our providers in a bind, where they really don’t know which one they should ignore, which one they should abide by, and which one they do not have to do. These multiple agencies can be working towards the same objective instead of working against each other,” said Miller.

Another bill meant to streamline siloed agencies, HB 3963, will create an integrated data system which would connect and streamline the existing ones, enhancing collaboration among agencies and making it easier to identify which early childhood services are leading to good outcomes and which ones need improvement.

Child care workers make an average of $11 an hour in Texas, so around half of them are eligible for state financial aid but unable to access it because of the wait. Wendy Uptain, the executive director for Early Matters Texas, highlighted SB 462, which prioritizes childcare workers for Texas Workforce Commission scholarships, bumping them to the top of that 95,000 waitlist. The idea is that this “helps them stay in the classroom and provide even more childcare for other families,” explained Uptain. 

One major focus of Travis County’s child care ballot initiative was supporting nontraditional hours of child care, for parents who work outside the normal 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pre-Covid to now, Texas lost 20 percent, or 1000 of these home-based providers, Uptain explained, largely due to prohibitive local zoning.

“One example comes to mind where some local fire marshals were requiring a child care worker to install commercial grade sprinkler systems into her home,” she said. “Those sorts of barriers prevent people from even wanting to start up this sort of childcare center in their home. This bill basically says that state regulation is rigorous and sufficient, and it prevents local ordinances and zoning from placing additional regulations on those home based providers.”

 SB 599 bars municipalities from placing additional regulations beyond the Health and Human Services Commission’s, which will make it easier for anyone to open a home-based child care providers, which rural communities and businesses with nontraditional hours rely on. SB 1265 will further democratize the child care landscape by establishing an online resource hub for business owners and employees alike, including policies employers can adopt to help their employees access childcare.

“As a new small business owner in 2018, I wasn’t even aware of all of the things that were available to me and my employees,” said Burkett. “So I’m really excited about this resource hub so that we can make sure they know what they qualify for and what resources are already available to them.” Going forward, the E4C Task Force is looking at creating a kind of funding mechanism to support employers that want to invest in child care, an initiative that was voted out of committee but ran out of time by sine die.

On top of this successful session, HHS and the Texas Workforce Commission will soon come up for sunset review, a performance review process that each state agency goes through every decade or so. HHSC and TWC both oversee key parts of the child care system, so to have them go through sunset at the same time will be a chance to take a comprehensive look at that system.

“The last and perhaps biggest win is $100 million in the budget for child care scholarships,” said Streufert. “This is historic, because until today, the state has almost solely relied on federal dollars to fund child care programs. Today we are putting that flag in the sand and saying, this is not only a federal priority, but this is a priority that’s worthy of state investment as well.”

Photo by Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This story has been changed to correct the spelling, pronouns and location of Janie Burkett.

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