The Kentucky House's proposed budget includes a $52 million increase for child care spending.

It comes as the state is on the verge of losing approximately 330 million in federal funding a year That started when the COVID 19 pandemic began four years ago.

Child care advocates, including the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, says that the services play a vital part in the economy.

It's a major issue for the Kentucky Chamber because child care is a significant economic issue.

I think what the House did is is a really great start, and that is a record investment in early childhood from far from state general fund dollars.

And so that's that's a great thing.

I think questions such as is it enough?

Those are ultimately I don't think that's the right question to ask is I think a better question to ask is what do we need to be doing to minimize some of the disruption that will cause from the day will come from the lack or the loss of federal funding?

But at the same time, what can we be doing to increase the supply of child care?

And I think for all intents and purposes, there's a lot more that we need to do to address both of those items to minimize disruption, but then also to increase the supply specific to Kentucky.

Throughout the course of 2022.

On average, any given month, there's about 70,000 or so parents not participating in the workforce, specifically due to issues related to child care.

We have a workforce participation rate of just 57%.

It's one of the bottom ten in the nation.

Our workforce participation rate has been declining since COVID and it's actually been declining for about the past 20 years.

And when we look at that and ask, well, why is that?

It's a whole multitude of reasons.

But we have an abundance of data showing us that childcare is one of those primary reasons.

So if you're an employer right now and you're investing in our state and you are wanting to bring jobs here, or maybe you already have and you already are bringing jobs here, you're going to need people to fill those jobs.

And some of those folks are going to need childcare in order for them to take those jobs.

And so if we want this economy to work the way we want it to work, that's going to require us to invest in early childhood education.

At the chamber, we've been working on a range of different initiatives focused on supporting access to high quality early childhood education.

And this includes things like our support for legislation like House Bill for 99 back in the 2022 legislative session, which created the Employee Childcare Assistance Partnership.

But this session we're particularly focused on doing things to help minimize some of the disruption that's going to come from the loss of federal funding that our child care sector is receiving throughout the course of the pandemic.

We're also very interested in initiatives that can help us increase access to child care.

And so that's going to be include things like, you know, supporting in-home family, childcare centers, supporting more employer based childcare care, but also looking at things like local zoning roles so that we can maybe make some adjustments, you know, when it comes to land use rules to allow for more child care centers.

So we are taking a very multi-pronged approach to dealing with this very important economic issue.

According to the progressive leaning Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, the House budget still falls $200 million short of where we need to be to make up for the gap when the federal funding runs out.