In addition to a teacher shortage, Kentucky faces continuing childcare challenges and daycare on Kentucky denied.

Last Monday, our panel of state lawmakers talked about daycare shortages in Kentucky and the costs.

We need to get people back into the workforce.

And I'm a proponent of looking at the daycare situation.

We're coming out of COVID still, and I remember and it's been a long time, but my kids were in daycare and the daycare just their rules right now, when a kid has to miss daycare, if they're running, if they have sniffles, they're not allowed to come to daycare.

When my kids were little, it was a temperature or vomiting and now they're shut down if they have a cough.

I don't know too many babies that don't have a cough, but we need reliable childcare so people can go to their jobs and show up at their jobs.

And I think so it's all a workforce issue and we have to include the daycare as part of that.

Well, the General Assembly did pass the I'm not going to remember all of this, The child Care Assistance program.

Right.

That was $50 million that was appropriated to businesses and it helped subsidize their employees.

So it was something like is there an expansion of that that you think is in order or is it still.

Well, let's wait to see how it's working, because it's taken a long time for this to kind of ramp up.

It has.

And people haven't applied for it quite the way we thought they would.

And I think both both my colleagues bring up good points.

You can't talk about universal pre-K without talking about childcare.

They go together.

The systems are intertwined.

And I think that's the challenge with one time money on a systems problem.

You know, we supplemented with a lot of this ARPA money.

The child care effort came and it was wonderful.

It helped stabilize really the entire ability for people to come back to work.

But now we have the same problem.

It's not really fixed.

And coming back with more money isn't is maybe the best solution.

Those payments from the federal government have run out.

They've run out.

So now we're all sitting here knowing exactly what was going to happen when we took the federal money, which it was finite.

What do you say to this, Senator?

Yeah, I'm looking at our child care sector and the fact that the federal money is set to run out at the end of this year.

We've been sort of cobbling together extra money to make sure we make it until the General Assembly gavels back in.

And you look at the statistics of what we're staring at in that sector.

And it is scary when you ask providers what happens if you don't get support, What happens if you don't get payments to be able to continue operating?

20% of them say that they'll have to close.

70% of them say that they'll have to raise tuition for families.

I'm not that far removed from daycare.

I have a three and I have a four year old.

And I remember what it was like during COVID when 20% of our child care centers closed.

And I was calling I was nine months pregnant on this ship, and I called and said, I'd like to get a space for my child.

And they said, our waiting list is two years.

We'll add you to that list.

We had 100,000 women in Kentucky.

That is enough to fill cardinals Stadium two times over.

They had to leave the workforce during COVID because they couldn't find childcare.

When we had 20% of our centers closed.

And our centers are telling us right now that if we don't invest in them, the exact same thing is going to happen.

And all of those gains, small gains, but gains that we've made over the past couple of years are going to be erased.

And I think about what that means for women.

I think about what that means for working parents and I think about what it means for kids, because we know that daycare, it's not just a place you go to leave your child.

It's a place your child can learn and be enriched and learn how to socialize and where you can build your village.

In our world, we're the village is harder to find sometimes.

And so I think we're facing a really scary moment for the childcare sector.

And I worry what it means for an entire economy.

Quite frankly, if we don't act boldly.

Childcare access and affordability were just one of the many topics we discussed as part of our preview of the 2024 General Assembly.

You can see the full program online on demand at Katie Dawgs Logic.

Why tonight's.