SILER CITY, N.C. — This week Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill that provides $67.5 million of emergency funding to child care centers.
They have been using federal COVID-19-era funding for the past four years to help pay staff and keep their businesses up and running, but those funds expired at the end of June.
Tania Taylor loves spending time with the kids at Children First Learning Center. She’s worked here for 14 years, and her favorite part is hanging out with the children. Taylor owns the center now and said the center survived COVID because of federal relief funding. That program ended, and Taylor is worried about the impacts.
“Everything keeps going up,” Taylor said. “All the prices for everything keeps going up.”
North Carolina lawmakers are discussing a new budget for the child care industry. The state house and senate proposed around $135 million, less than half the amount recommended by the North Carolina Early Education Coalition.
“The teachers work really hard to do their job,” Taylor said, “And they deserve anything extra that the state helps, provided by those grants and whatnot.”
Lawmakers adjourned for the summer without passing the final budget. They instead passed $67.5 million of emergency funding. Leaders say they’ll return to Raleigh before this month runs out to continue funding the program. These payments will only be around 75% of what child care centers have been getting over the past few years.
“I guess it's really like an unknown of what they're going to do,” Taylor said. “I can't promise the teachers are going to get any more of, you know, their bonus that they've been getting for these past years.”
Taylor said she doesn’t want to close the center or pay her employees less than they deserve. But if they don’t get the funding they need from the state, she’ll have to close that gap by cutting salaries or increasing tuition.
Without more funding, child care groups are worried that centers all across the state could close. In fact a study by the North Carolina Child Care Resource and Referral Council found that 30% of all child care programs in the state expected to close when those stabilization grants ended.
The North Carolina House and Senate will make decisions on child care funding when they return this fall.
