PublicSource: Child care funding boost won’t solve problem long-term in Allegheny County

Photo of students playing with blocks at Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North by Anastasia Busby/PublicSource.

After its bruising budget fight last fall, Allegheny County began 2025 with a $2.5 million boost for the department charged with making child care affordable for more families, including those who earn slightly more than the state aid threshold.

But whether the Department of Children Initiatives (DCI) can maintain its spending is daunting officials amid county budgetary pressures. This year’s budget buys time for policymakers to investigate longer-term avenues for funding child care, County Executive Sara Innamorato said.

“We’re not there. We do not have a solution for sustainable funding at this time,” Innamorato told PublicSource in a recent interview. She called the county’s $1.17 billion operating budget “everything we need but not everything we wanted.”

The emphasis on child care echoes her campaign in 2023, when the Democrat pledged more money for children’s programs as shortfalls in staffing and access persist. Across the county, about 8,800 youngsters under age 5 aren’t enrolled in a state child care program despite qualifying for the assistance, according to the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children. The nonprofit cites a countywide net loss of 22 child care providers since 2019.

To strengthen support mechanisms, DCI is marshaling its roughly threefold increase in local tax dollars — about $3.7 million overall for 2025 — and nearly $7 million in remaining federal pandemic funds tagged for services and programs backed by the department. It employs subsidies and other tools to help families pursue early childhood education, after-school care and more services outside the traditional school day.

Uncertainties confronting the work stretch from Washington, D.C., to Grant Street. Under President Donald Trump, the county’s overall federal support appears in question. The pandemic dollars must be spent by 2026. And higher taxes could be a tough sell in future years after Innamorato and County Council raised property taxes by 36% for 2025 — the county’s first such increase in more than a decade.

Against that backdrop, Innamorato said securing resources for DCI means “everything has to be on the table.” Partnerships with large employers, labor unions and grant funders along with state and federal advocacy can contribute to care access, she said.

“We can’t relegate [child care] to the sidelines any longer as a women’s issue or a family issue,” Innamorato said. “It is about our regional competitiveness. We want to integrate the subject more into our economic development conversations.”

Child care shortages inhibiting economy

To advocates, child care is key for families’ financial health, overall economic growth and children’s intellectual development. Innamorato has cast a shortage of care as an “urgent crisis” that keeps parents from going to work, employers from staffing up and the region from fulfilling economic potential.

“To have stable work, you need to have stable child care,” said Becky Czekaj-Dengler, director for the regional Early Learning Resource Center in Downtown. The resource center administers state- and county-supported child care subsidies for just more than 10,000 Allegheny County children under age 13 in families with low income. Federal funding covers much of the state subsidies.

The care is especially vital for households with more than one person working, said Katherine Mirt, the youth and families coordinator at the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh.

“Face it: Not many households can get by with only one person working,” Mirt said.

A recent study of Pennsylvania working mothers found inadequate child care depressed their earnings by about 12%, according to the nonprofit Council for a Strong America. Findings put the statewide cost of inadequate child care at more than $2 billion a year — and that counted only working mothers with children younger than 5 years old.

An earlier study found child care deficiencies in the Commonwealth led to more than $6 billion a year in total lost earnings, productivity and revenue, the council reported.

At the same time, children get much more than babysitting when they enroll in high-quality care programs, educators said. Research ties early education and care programs to better cognitive development.

“When we think about the work that early-childhood educators do, it’s simply brain science,” said Lindsey Ramsey, executive director at Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North. “They are developing a child’s brain and providing them with high-quality interactions and experiences from early, early on.”

Local government takes up cause

Economic and developmental arguments have gained attention in recent years, supporters said, as policymakers angle to promote children’s programs.

In 2018, Allegheny County voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have put $18 million a year into a new children’s fund. But the vote was close.

Three years later, then-County Executive Rich Fitzgerald created DCI to strengthen the child care sector. Care shortages at that point were worsening a workforce shortfall as the COVID-19 pandemic persisted.

Since then, DCI has spent down about $12 million from the county’s allocation under the federal American Rescue Plan Act, or pandemic relief money. The department funneled much of that into the Allegheny County Child Care Matters [ACCM], a 3-year-old pilot program that grants child care subsidies to qualifying families whose earnings fall roughly between 200% and 300% of the federal poverty rate.

Many of those families make just enough to disqualify them from the lower-income state subsidy program known as Child Care Works, county officials said.

Eight days into her administration, Innamorato announced an extra $500,000 for Child Care Matters in January 2024. The move wiped out a waitlist of more than two dozen kids and opened slots for others — an opening salvo after she campaigned to prioritize child care.

Child Care Matters “has been a big stress relief,” said Aneia Dutrieuille, 28, who enrolled her daughter, now 3, about 18 months ago. Full-time child care was then running about $350 a week, she said.

But she made too much money to qualify for state aid.

“I thought I was going to have to go down to part-time work because I couldn’t afford to send her full-time to the program,” said Dutrieuille, of Monroeville, a director in a child care facility.

Rising costs, low pay

Advocacy groups describe a two-pronged problem. Rising tuition prices often put child care out of reach for low- to middle-income families. And low pay amid the escalating cost of living drives away child care professionals, leaving providers without enough hands.

“Your heart might be in it, but your pocketbook is not,” said Diane Barber, executive director of the nonprofit Pennsylvania Child Care Association near Harrisburg.

Staffing shortfalls are so severe that there’s too much slack for program directors and administrative workers to pick up, Barber said.

“This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It’s about who’s in charge — who has the public platform, who has the ability to move this” issue, she said. She cheered Innamorato’s advocacy as “a real step forward.”

Staffing shortfalls likely pushed care waitlists in Allegheny County above 5,000 children last year, said Cara Ciminillo, executive director at Trying Together, a nonprofit that promotes early-childhood education and care.

Waitlists have shrunk somewhat since the height of provider closures and worker departures during the pandemic, partly because the state strengthened reimbursements for providers that accept children on state subsidies, Ciminillo said. That has helped alleviate the inflation-related pressures on providers’ budgets, including as federal relief money wanes, she added.

“The child care industry will tell you they don’t want to push those costs to families,” Ciminillo said. “We know families are already squeezed. So the question is, where do those dollars come from?”

Bridging the gap

Local programs like Allegheny Child Care Matters can contribute by equipping families with subsidies that reinforce providers’ revenue. More than 450 children have participated in ACCM, including the 264 who were actively enrolled as of late January.

Early last year, the county estimated up to 15,000 children could qualify for the offering.

“There is no safety net for those families” who aren’t eligible for state aid, said Rebecca Mercatoris, director of the 11-person Department of Children Initiatives. ACCM “has ended up providing a bridge” while eligibility criteria for the state Child Care Works subsidy shift.

It’s difficult to estimate how much DCI’s budget increase could affect enrollment in the county program, largely because individual subsidies vary based on children’s ages, according to organizers. The Early Learning Resource Center flags families for ACCM when they apply but don’t meet income guidelines for the state program.

A website supported by Trying Together — www.alleghenychildcare.org — helps families locate providers. One of those providers, the Bhutanese Community Association, didn’t publicize its after-school program for the 2024-25 year because it already had strong demand, Mirt said.

She credited county grants for helping expand the program, which enrolls 86 kids across four locations from Carrick to the Jefferson Hills area. Launched in 2022 for refugee and immigrant families struggling to help their kids with homework, it also helps mothers enter the workforce outside the home, Mirt said. One location has a waitlist because of a space limit, while each of the others has a few open spots.

At Shady Lane School, a waitlist in February numbered 193 youngsters, 55 of them infants. Total enrollment was around 140, with monthly tuition for this school year ranging from around $1,400 for pre-schoolers to around $1,750 for infants and 6.5% increases slated for next year. Ramsey, the executive director, said she sees more families pursuing subsidies.

Well more than half of Shady Lane enrollees benefit from public or private aid, including scholarships bankrolled by the language education company Duolingo, Ramsey said.

The firm has provided $2 million to support East End care providers for two years, said DaVonna Shannon, director of research and impact at the Early Excellence Project advocacy group for Black and brown care providers. The money is easing waitlists in part by improving employee wages and, in Shady Lane’s case, supporting medical benefits, Shannon said.

Historically, “early-childhood educators have been paid wages that put them in the straight firing lane of being in poverty,” said Ramsey, who started in the field as a minimum-wage worker.

While wages are climbing, “it will constantly be a losing battle if we don’t get investments to help with that curve,” Ramsey said. Child care needs buy-in from business leaders, lawmakers and the broader community “to support the workforce that supports our workforce.”

Child care ‘undergirds entire economy’

Backers see hope in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2025-26 state budget proposal, which includes $55 million for child care workforce recruitment and retention. The money would provide at least $1,000 in bonuses for workers at licensed providers in the Child Care Works program.

A petition campaign had sought some $284 million for recruitment and retention. Still, Ciminillo said the Shapiro proposal marks “a significant achievement” by encouraging a new line item in the budget.

“Now we have a number on the table to negotiate with,” she said. State and federal leaders should understand “that child care is the infrastructure that undergirds our entire economy.”

Without an overhaul in funding models, subsidies will remain essential to child care access, advocates said. Innamorato described the setup as a precarious structure weighed by federal limitations.

She continues to talk up child care with the Shapiro administration, business leaders and regional organizations, she said, noting she has heard expressions of interest from the private sector.

“If I could snap my fingers and create the world I wanted, I would create universal child care,” Innamorato said.

This article written by Adam Smeltz and fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.