We've heard a lot in recent years about the lack of affordable and accessible child care for Kentucky families.

A new report says that shortage of quality care also extends to families of school age children, particularly those living in low income or rural areas.

According to the Kentucky Out of School Alliance, the way the state regulates afterschool programs, it's playing a big part in that shortage.

The Kentucky High School Alliance is a nonprofit organization.

That basically how I sum it up is we are the biggest cheerleaders for afterschool and summer learning programs here in the Commonwealth.

We've seen lots of research done on kind of child care deserts and what the child care industry looks like for families across Kentucky.

The need for child care doesn't end when a student enters kindergarten.

The benefits of afterschool programs for students are well documented.

We now have decades of research showing that they have positive effects on what we call the ABCs.

So school attendance, school behavior and coursework are for every one student enrolled in a program here in Kentucky.

Four more are waiting.

Again, that's above the national average.

And so it's something that we have to confront.

The chaos today to explore is it is a first of its kind kind of research and data tool that exclusively looks at afterschool and summer learning programs here in the Commonwealth.

When we look at the top barriers for accessing high quality afterschool learning experiences for families, the number one barrier is just program availability.

There's not a program available.

And so what we've seen is and not all that surprising is we've seen a lot of afterschool programs clustered around Louisville, Lexington and northern Kentucky, and so are rural counties, and rural communities are really being left behind.

I think the impact of underserved students who live in rural communities is just not having the same opportunities as their peers.

Right?

So when we talk about the benefits of afterschool programs being, you know, improve school attendance, improve school behavior, improve coursework, we are leaving out a huge swath of students who just do not have those opportunities.

Increasingly, we also see the correlation between low workforce participation and a lot of our rural communities.

Well, if there's not a safe place for your kid to go after school, how are you going to fully participate in the workforce?

And so we're seeing that's not only impacting kids impacting families, but impacting our economy overall.

If we had more safe, engaging, high quality places for kids to go after school on school breaks throughout the summer months, especially because summer is it's a huge thing that we haven't really addressed here in Kentucky.

We could see higher workforce participation in all communities, but especially in rural communities.

We've identified about 1200, almost 1300 childcare centers throughout the state of Kentucky that are licensed to serve school age, the school age population.

But the way our licensing kind of regulatory structure in Kentucky works, we don't actually know if they are they are licensed to do that, but we don't know if they actually have slots available for school age families.

And of that, 12 or 1300, 1200 or 1300 programs, we know that only about 200 of them are school age only programs.

And Kentucky's one of the now certain to be very few states that doesn't have any state funding directed to supporting afterschool and summer learning programs.

So we're just relying on federal funding.

And then the Child Care Assistance program, which kind of has a whole nother few hurdles of participation from the regulatory end.

We know that policymakers are interested right now going into the General Assembly session to talk about child care.

And again, I think the biggest thing that we want to bring up in this conversation is we have to include school age programs and school age youth in this conversation because the needs of students who are in second and third grade are not the same as child care needs for toddlers and infants.

Both incredibly important.

Just the needs are different, and sometimes we have to differentiate those things so that we're providing high quality environments for everybody.

Community learning centers and youth camps also make up Kentucky's regulated afterschool programs.

According to the report, there are 177 federally funded learning centers and 151 youth camps in the state.