This holiday season, while some Americans are enjoying a cornucopia of abundance, 44% of child care providers are struggling to afford at least one basic need like food, housing or utilities, and one in three is going hungry. Many providers, like Tammie Hazlet, who cares for six children in her Vermont home, feed the children in their care two, or even three, meals a day, plus snacks. Hazlet participates in the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), but says “I shop every Sunday and buy fresh, healthy ingredients based upon my expectations of who will attend that week, but when kids are out sick or parents keep them home, that’s food wasted and I can’t request a reimbursement.”
For some providers, the inflated cost of food over the last two years (an 11 percent increase in 2022 and additional 6 percent increase in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture) and low rates of reimbursement lead to food insecurity for their own families. Brianne Moline, a home-based child care provider in Montana says her program is caught in a double bind. “Before the pandemic,” she says, “I qualified for food stamps, and I used stamps to buy food for my program. Then in 2021, I got funding from the American Rescue Plan, which meant that I no longer qualified for food stamps. That was great, but now I’m terrified because the ARPA funding is over, and I won’t qualify for food stamps because my income for 2023 will look higher than it is now. I’ve had to go to local food banks to acquire food, not just for my family but for the child care program. I envision that might be something I have to do again in the coming months.”
Legislation introduced this fall offer significant improvements to the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) formulas by which child care providers like Hazlet and Moline are reimbursed for food they purchase for the children in their care. Passage of these bills, endorsed by dozens of national organizations, would provide real sustenance to millions of children in child care, including those in home-based child care settings.
The Child Care Nutrition Enhancement Act, sponsored by Reps. Bonamici (D-Ore) and Landsman (D-Ohio) adds 10 cents to the calculation of reimbursement for eligible meals and snacks in child care, Head Start, at-risk after-school programs and adult care. It eliminates the two-tier system currently in place for family child care, which requires providers to document the household income of families they serve and reimburses those who serve middle-class and high-income families at a “second tier” rate that many say is not worth the paperwork and monitoring they must do every day to comply with the program after an already busy day taking care of children.
Sheryl Hutzenbiler, a home-based provider in Billings, Mont., is just one of thousands of providers who would benefit from eliminating the unfair tiering system. “Because of the household earnings of my area according to the census, I have always been a tier one provider which means I get a higher reimbursement rate for the money I spend on food for the children,” she says. “But my neighborhood is developing into a new demographic and that may bump me to tier two in the CACFP program. If that happens, I would probably lose about $1,000 a month in food reimbursements. That makes for a lot of impossible choices. Do I replace the toy truck that got broken or upgrade the playground equipment, or just let things go? I can’t lower my staff’s wages. Instead, my own take-home pay will decrease so that I can maintain hers and keep a good employee. I’ve let my families know I will have to raise tuition, and now some are asking for part-time spots so that they can cut back on their own employment or work from home and take care of their kids at the same time.”
Eliminating the tiering system so that all providers receive the same rate of reimbursement would help Sheryl avoid those impossible choices and sustain her program. Eliminating tiering and increasing the rate of reimbursement and the number of meals reimbursed would also provide incentives for more caregivers to participate in a program that researchers point out is “underused and unevenly accessed.”
Although research shows that CACFP improves child nutrition, supports families and boosts the net income of child care providers, as many as 85 percent of eligible providers in some states don’t apply for the funds. The primary barriers to participation, according to economist Tatiana Andreyeva, who conducted the research, are simply not knowing that the program exists and the mountain of paperwork required to apply for and maintain participation in the program.
The Child Care Nutrition Enhancement Act would ensure that a family child care provider could be reimbursed for their own child’s meals and snacks if the child is in their child care program. Shalicia Jackson, a five-star licensed provider in North Carolina with a master’s degree in social work, makes about $14 an hour in a typical 10-hour day caring for children. Jackson also participates in CACFP but says, “It doesn’t seem fair that I can’t claim reimbursements for my own son’s meal, because, of course, you still feed your own child when he’s part of your program!”
Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has also introduced the Child Care Nutrition Enhancement Act in the Senate. It is the same as the House bill, with one additional provision: It makes the CACFP payment rate-setting more equitable by calculating family child care payments the same as child care center payments, as “food away from home.”
The bipartisan Early Childhood Nutrition Improvement Act, sponsored by Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore) and Marc Molinaro (R-NY), fortifies the Child Care Nutrition Enhancement Act by including the equitable rate-setting provision and also adding an additional meal or snack for reimbursement by the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), when this meal takes place eight hours after the first meal service of the program day. It makes CACFP accessible to more child care providers by simplifying the reporting processes for the eligibility of for-profit child care center participation in CACFP. And finally, it calls on the Secretary of Agriculture to review the CACFP serious deficiency process and establishes an advisory committee on CACFP paperwork.
“Passage of these bills would improve upon the CACFP program, a critical revenue source for home-based child care providers.” says Mary Beth Salomone Testa, a policy consultant working with Home Grown. “As federal stabilization funds have ended, the need for more nutrition in child care funding is clear. The legislation outlined here and championed by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers can make a difference.”
Child care advocates are asking members of Congress to cosponsor the Child Care Nutrition Enhancement Act and the Early Childhood Nutrition Improvement Act and to prioritize child care in emergency funding and annual spending bills. Together these measures will help to stabilize the household budgets of caregivers who might otherwise be food insecure and address critical flaws in the federal food program.
Anne Vilen writes about child care, education and mental health from her home in Asheville, North Carolina. Find her on X: @Anne_Vilen
