For many Kentucky families, day care for their kids can rival tuition at a state community college.

The cost of it that is Kentucky's largest advocacy group for business, says the state's economy would get a big boost if child care was much more accessible and affordable.

The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce has produced a report on what a more robust child care alliance would mean for Kentucky, and testified earlier this week to a legislative panel in Frankfort about the hundreds of millions of dollars the state would gain in wages, sales tax and income tax revenues if child care wasn't the barrier it is now for many Kentucky families.

Kate Shanks, senior vice president of public affairs for the Kentucky Chamber, stopped by our studios yesterday to tell us more.

That is tonight's Business Beat segment.

I can tell you a friend of mine pays $400 a week for her infant and child care.

I was talking to someone today who's expecting a child, and it's on a on a list.

And would, well expect to pay $300 a week.

So you're looking at what, 12, $69 a month in some parts of Kentucky might be less, you know, maybe 8 to $10,000 a year.

And it's going to depend on the age of the child.

So infants are, of course, require more care than older kids.

So as a parent, you get to see those child care costs drop a little bit.

But you know, I think our community college is very competitive and there's a lot of great scholarships and grants available.

So I would expect that your parents are paying more in some instances in Kentucky given given the care that they have.

It is significantly more than what I pay.

My children are much older.

When I hear those numbers, I don't know how I would have done it, but we do have some new programs on the books.

We have the employee Child Care Assistance Partnership started a few years ago.

Representative Summer Heaven champion that bill.

An employer can provide a child care benefit in the state will match it up to dollar for dollar.

To help the employee, reduce the cost of child care.

We have the child care assistance program, which is for individuals at certain income levels, and we have extended that program to care workers as a really great benefit to attract people to that profession.

And so what are the reports did that we published last week was to look at what happens if we reduce the costs of child care per month for families.

And we had researchers, we work with the University of Kentucky, Blueprint Kentucky, and we we modeled it.

And so we modeled a handful of different scenarios where we reduce the cost of child care per month.

And what we found is on the high end, we can get around 16,000 to 28,000 Kentuckians back in the workforce.

Well, mostly women.

This is significant amount of women.

Some fathers too.

But you do see that arrangement where you have you have moms rejoining in the model that we did and what we have found, if we can hit 28,000 Kentuckians, we can bring them back into the workforce.

We can bring Kentucky off the bottom ten of states for workforce participation, which was where we've been stuck forever.

It seems, it's a very stubborn problem.

We can also generate about $1.1 billion in economic impact through wages and, you know, taxes generated from wages and spending in the economy.

And what we didn't measure, but we know is there is some of those families may be on public services such as Medicaid and hopefully they're moving to self-sufficiency where they're not on those programs anymore.

So that can have an effect as well.

And so, you know, it's it's a significant, issue for Kentucky.

We have around 320,000 Kentuckians who are prime working age Kentuckians, 25 to 54, who are not in the workforce.

Undoubtedly, some people will choose not to work, but for those that face barriers to work, we want to remove those barriers so that we can get them into the workforce.

And the chamber's childcare report, it was noted that in 37 rural counties, more than half of children potentially needing care lack available slots.

The report also found that families with multiple children and regulated childcare may spend 20 to 40% of their income on that care.

We'll have more about this examination of child care in Kentucky next week on Kentucky edition.