Illinois business leaders: Child care vital to economy

Execs release new report, urge policymakers to bolster child care assistance

Carterville – A strong Illinois child care program is key to the well-being of not only kids and their working parents, but the state’s business productivity and economy – both today, and into the future.

That’s the thrust of a new report from the ReadyNation network of business leaders, released Tuesday in Carterville with the help of several southern Illinois executives.

“Affordable, reliable, high-quality child care helps to keep parents earning, their children learning, and businesses buzzing with productivity,” said Woody Thorne, Vice President of Community Affairs at Carbondale-based Southern Illinois Healthcare. He was one of several business leaders to speak at a news event held at the Child Care Resource & Referral Agency on the campus of John A. Logan College.

Accordingly, business leaders are encouraging policymakers to continue investing wisely in Illinois’ Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) – avoiding proposed cuts while stepping-up outreach efforts to ensure low-income, working parents know about the services for which they are eligible.

The ReadyNation report cites findings from a national survey in which one out of seven respondents noted that – during the previous year –  child care problems prompted someone in their family to either quit a job, forego taking a job, or change a job. Another national study found that parents struggling with child care issues wind-up taking an average of five to nine days off work annually to deal with those challenges.

“The results are not only employee absenteeism, but ‘presentee-ism’ – employees who are on the job, but distracted and not fully engaged in their work,” said Jonathon Hallberg, Executive Director of the Jefferson County Development Corporation in Mt. Vernon. In all, the associated costs of lost productivity, hiring and training new workers come to more than $3 billion for American employers.

Moreover, in addition to their current-day value to working parents and business productivity, high-quality child care represents long-lasting benefits for development of a skilled workforce for the future.

Child care programs form an essential component of Illinois’ early learning system, according to the ReadyNation report. They fit together with preschool and birth-to-3 services to help kids during a crucial stage of their brain growth: the first five years of life, when more than 1 million neural connections are forming every second and foundations are laid for further cognitive, health, and behavioral development.

A recent study of more than 200 youngsters found that high-quality, full-day child care had a positive impact on their language development at age 2. Plus, compared with their non-program peers, the participants enjoyed more positive parent-child relationships – and their parents reported fewer child behavior problems.

It’s important to recognize that parents are children’s first and best caregivers, the business leaders said. But in trying to find and maintain work, struggling mothers and fathers often need and seek the kind of assistance offered by the state’s child care program.

“In Illinois, 70 percent of young children – up to age 5 – live in households where all available parents are participating in the workforce,” said Samantha Loucks, Regional Manager at the Marion office of the HireLevel staffing firm. “That’s true of both single-parent and two-parent families, and it represents about 627,000 young children.”

CCAP currently helps the low-income, working families of about 120,000 children – up to age 13 – cover the costs of care while parents are on the job. For this subsidy help, participating parents are charged only “co-pay” fees, assessed on a sliding scale that reflects family size and income. Families are eligible if they earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of three, such as a single mother raising two kids, that income-eligibility ceiling is about $38,400.

Such assistance is critical to the pocketbooks of low-income households, according to the ReadyNation report: In Illinois, the annual cost of center-based care – for children up to age 4 – can rival the average cost of in-state college tuition, which tops $13,600.
However, the state’s child care program has been navigating significant challenges in recent years. In mid-2015, the Administration sharply reduced income-eligibility levels for assistance and eliminated help for working parents involved in education and job-training efforts. This left thousands of parents scrambling for other options – including decisions about whether to quit their jobs or reduce work hours.

ReadyNation’s business leaders joined the push to restore those eligibility guidelines, a bipartisan effort that succeeded last August. However, today’s child care caseloads still remain about 30,000 children below their previous levels. That’s one reason the Governor has proposed cutting program appropriations by nearly $100 million in the coming year; ReadyNation urges policymakers to avoid such cuts.

“Even after last year’s eligibility restorations, thousands of working families are likely going without the child care services for which they qualify,” said Sean Noble, Illinois State Director for ReadyNation. “The problem is, too many parents don’t know this – or, they know but are understandably wary of turning to a program that had suffered through so much turmoil in recent years.”
Maintaining strong child care funding, and increasing the state’s communications-and-outreach efforts, could help bridge some of those gaps and aid working parents in finding their way to this valuable program, he said. Noble added that ReadyNation will be helping to spread the word of eligibility restoration to working families via outreach to local chambers of commerce and other business executives.

ReadyNation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan network of more than 2,000 business leaders across the country – including 220 in Illinois – who focus on strengthening our workforce and economy through research-proven investments in kids. It is part of the Council for a Strong America, a national, bipartisan nonprofit that unites five organizations (comprising business executives, law-enforcement leaders, retired military leaders, pastors, and prominent coaches and athletes) to promote solutions ensuring the citizen-readiness of children.