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Advocating for children, families and communities facing barriers to high quality child care. | |
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Advocating for children, families and communities facing barriers to high quality child care. | |
Access to high quality child care is important to every family, and providing child care subsidies for low income families who cannot afford care is an essential part of any sound anti-poverty policy. Child care both supports a family’s ability to work or participate in training or other supportive activities and high quality child care ensures children’s development and well being. Using state and federal funds, every state offers some type of child care subsidy for low income families. Many of these subsidies are available only to families who are receiving welfare (TANF, which in California is called CalWORKs). Different types of subsidies may be available to other low income families. The Child Care Law Center can assist low income parents who are in need of subsidized child to access or maintain any subsidies for which they may be eligible, as well as the providers who care for their children.
In policy discussions on the local, state, and national levels, the Child Care Law Center has emphasized that child care affects healthy child development and the economic stability of low income parents, particularly single parents. CCLC keeps a family’s need for child care in the forefront of debates on welfare and other supports for working families. We provide legal information and technical assistance to legal services programs, welfare advocates and the child care community, and we help advocates address problems and recommend appropriate policy changes.
Congress reauthorized the Temporary Assistance for Need Families (TANF) program in February 2006. Although many elements of the program remain the same, the federal government greatly increased the number of families receiving welfare who must be working or engaged in work activities. Every state will now be required to respond to these federal changes to welfare, and determine how to address the increased need for child care. CCLC is engaged in advocacy with the California state legislature and the Departments of Social Services and Education to improve the delivery of subsidized child care services for welfare and non-welfare families, and to ensure that funding levels are sufficient to meet the needs of all eligible children. CCLC will continue to work with state agencies and advocates to identify key legal issues and problems facing families, and will provide technical assistance to welfare and child care advocates working in other states.
CCLC had already identified various problems with the CalWORKs program. CalWORKs recipients have a right to receive child care but are often unable to navigate the welfare bureaucracy successfully and obtain the child care subsidies for which they are eligible (and that are essential to their ability to move into the labor market). We work with state agencies and with advocates to address these problems, and conduct regular trainings and develop materials on CalWORKs child care issues for parents, child care providers, community agencies, and legal services advocates.
We represented the plaintiffs in Rose v. Eastin, a class action lawsuit challenging the California Department of Education’s use of “underground regulations” in administering CalWORKs child care. CCLC was successful, and the court required the Department to issue properly promulgated regulations. Since that lawsuit, the Department of Education has generally used the regulatory process when making changes to subsidy policies.
In partnership with the Welfare Law Center and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, CCLC led the National TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) Project to monitor the implementation of the 1996 welfare reform law as it affected child care. The work requirements TANF imposes on low-income parents makes access to appropriate, affordable child care essential to families’ survival. The project focused particularly on California, Illinois, New York, and Texas, and developed trainings and materials for legal advocates to use in assisting families to access subsidized child care.