LOVELAND MAGAZINE

News and Events from the Loveland, Ohio Area

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Since 2004

Tag: child well-being

  • Child Care Crisis a Barrier to Economic Mobility for Ohio Families

    Child Care Crisis a Barrier to Economic Mobility for Ohio Families

    From Public News Service

    Ohio ranks 29th among states in overall child well-being, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book.

    Child care continues to pose challenges for working parents, and the new data showed average child care costs for one child in 2021 topped $10,000 per year.

    Kelly Vyzral, senior health policy associate for the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, said women are five to eight times more likely than men to experience negative employment consequences related to caregiving. Lack of affordable child care also disproportionately affects families of color and immigrant families.

    “We can’t expect parents — and many times this is especially relevant for single moms — we can’t expect them to go back to work, if they don’t have a safe place to leave their children,” Vyzral asserted.

    In 2021, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows Ohio hit a twenty-year low in the number of child care workers, with around 12,000 across 88 counties. According to the report, the nation’s already insufficient child care workforce dropped by more than a third in just two months at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since rebounded to 996,000 workers by April 2023, still far below pre-pandemic levels.

    An executive order issued by President Biden this year aims to expand child care access by lowering costs and raising worker wages.

    Vyzral acknowledged it is a start, and pointed out state lawmakers should continue to implement policies aimed at addressing the crisis.

    “There’s money in the budget for those publicly funded child care centers,” Vyzral argued. “And there’s also scholarships for spots within those child care centers for workers. So for the people that are working in these day care centers, to send their children to day care, because they often in order to work, have to have some place to put their children.”

    Nationwide, the average salary for a child care worker was around $29,000 per year or around $14 an hour in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    author Eric Tegethoff, Producer

    Disclosure: The Annie E. Casey Foundation contributes to our fund for reporting on Children’s Issues, Education, Juvenile Justice, and Welfare Reform. If you would like to help support news in the public interest, click here.
  • Awaiting budget proposal, child advocates hope for more

    Awaiting budget proposal, child advocates hope for more

    Getty Images

    BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

    As policymakers await the newest budget priorities to be laid out by Gov. Mike DeWine, advocates for the state’s children are hoping comprehensive child well-being will be at the top of the list.

    The Ohio Children’s Budget Coalition released their policy agenda for the 2024-2025 state budget, which they hope will include whole-child services to address housing, health, child care, economic stability, and adoption of the Fair School Funding Plan, which was only approved for two years of the six-year phase-in so far.

    “Children do not come in pieces, and neither should the policies and investments that crucially provide and pave the way for them to grow and flourish into successful adulthood,” said Katherine Ungar, senior policy associate with the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

    Recommendations by the OCBC also targeted structural racism, the effects of which “negatively impact child outcomes,” according to the announcement of budget priorities.

    “The budget is a moral document that reflects our state’s priorities,” OCBC co-leader and Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio policy associate Matthew Tippit said in a statement.

    The policy report also laid out challenges to combatting the teacher shortage the state has suffered from for several years, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics stating 21,000 fewer teachers were employed in K-12 public school in the state from September 2021 to September 2019.

    The state has faced recruitment and retention issues, which the coalition attributes to “mounting pressures related to the COVID-19 pandemic, under-resourced schools, politicization of education and lack of respect for educators and the education profession.”

    “While a mass exodus of experienced educators from the teaching profession has not yet materialized, it is cause for significant concern when so many are expressing deep frustrations over what they believe is a lack of support and respect for the work they do with students,” the report stated.

     Groundwork Ohio

    The policy recommendations also come on the heels of a recent early childhood dashboard released by the advocacy group Groundwork Ohio. The dashboard has been in the works since 2021 to “help inform policy makers about the realities facing Ohio families with young children.”

    Groundwork Ohio president and CEO Shannon Jones said the dashboard “tells us where to focus on making positive change for infants, toddlers and preschoolers.”

    The report found that one in five Ohio infants don’t have access to child care or early learning and six in 10 children aren’t ready to attend school based on kindergarten readiness, fourth-grade reading proficiency and eighth-grade math proficiency.

    Racial issues appeared as part of Groundwork Ohio’s analysis, with the group finding that infant mortality rates are still above the U.S. average in Ohio “with a large and appalling racial disparity.”

    “While there are many ways we can begin to improve outcomes for young children, focusing state efforts on its very youngest citizens is an urgent moral imperative as well as a wise state investment,” according to the report.

    The organization was encouraged by state performance in areas like eighth grade math proficiency and improved homeless students and housing cost burdens.

    Early investments are needed to benefit Ohio children throughout their lives, the dashboard concluded as state performance compared to the rest of the country was worse in categories such as early intervention service access and young child poverty.

    Large disparities were found particularly in Black, Hispanic and Native American/American Indian children living below the poverty level.

    The state has also worsened in terms of kindergarten literacy, chronic absenteeism and special needs preschools, according to the dashboard.