Help could be on the way for parents struggling with childcare costs or even accessing quality daycare where they live.

Republican State Senator Danny Carroll unveiled the what's called Horizon Act this morning.

The $300 million plan comes at a time when Kentucky is set to lose COVID era federal child care funding.

This transformational piece of legislation and the accompanying $150 million per year operation request will go a long way towards averting the impending crisis we are about to face if we don't act with purpose and certainty.

This is to put in motion a process that will lead our Commonwealth to look beyond the horizon to a time when the terms, daycare and child care are no longer the common terms used to describe what happens in centers, homes and schools.

Providing early childhood education to our youngest students.

We are established seeing the vision of early childhood education that it will no longer be called vision child care.

We are also establishing the division of regulated early childhood Education.

Chairman Carroll also outlined a new Innovations grant program.

It is also critically important because that will allow for more employers to offer things like onsite child care, allow more schools to offer early childhood education services for school staff.

It also allows for all sorts of other innovative ways to deliver early childhood services.

And the nice advantage to that is that when we create these new services, that frees up our capacity within existing services.

As we heard today, often have very long wait lists.

Adding additional skilled early childhood workers to our ecosystem cannot be the only solution to solving this crisis.

We simply do not have enough quality centers accessible to our neighbors.

To address this challenge, we will equip individuals with the necessary skills not only to work within high quality facilities, but also to own and operate these facilities.

The Interdisciplinary Early Childhood Entrepreneurship Program will do just that.

One of the things that this bill does is that it creates a new start up program to help those types of entrepreneurs get their startup costs covered.

So thinking about things like purchasing supplies, maybe making certain modifications to their home that are necessary to provide early childhood education services.

Things like this could be the difference between someone deciding to start the service and someone deciding not to do it.

This legislature has a decision to make a session.

We can either fall into the path that other states are falling in right now because they have ignored the impending crisis.

Or we can step up and we can take a lead in this nation, in this area.

We can tell business and industry within the Commonwealth those that are looking to come to the Commonwealth, the providers in our Commonwealth, our families, our kids, you mean something to us and we're going to invest in you.

If we're going to ensure that our economy moves forward, that we have workforce and we have quality education for our kids.