Child care grants rolling out in November

'Child care providers have been a critical link for parents and for employers.'

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As child care providers struggle to balance checkbooks and parents struggle to find affordable, quality care, the state will roll out grants with an aim to stabilize North Carolina’s early care and education infrastructure.

The application for the grants for child care providers opens tomorrow at 9 a.m. on the Division of Child Development and Early Education’s website. The state will start awarding the funds in mid-November through an 18-month period.

The federal government sent the $805 million in grant funding to North Carolina as part of the American Rescue Plan Congress passed in March. The law allocated the state another $503 million in child care funds. The state budget, under negotiations between legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, will determine how those funds are spent.

Cooper announced the start of the grant rollout last week, holding a press conference and touring the Community School for People Under Six in Carrboro. He also said the budget negotiations include more early childhood investments.

“One thing I know is that child care providers have been a critical link for parents and for employers, making sure that our workforce is able to function,” Cooper said.

Anna Mercer-McLean, director of the Carrboro center, lauded the grants, saying she planned to use the funds to increase wages for her staff and provide mental health supports for teachers and children. “We’ve been in survival mode,” Mercer-McLean said.

And like many providers, she is finding it especially difficult to find teachers in recent months. I wrote about research from Louisiana and Virginia on turnover among early childhood teachers. A Virginia study found teachers in child care settings were twice as likely to stay at their centers when receiving $1,500 financial incentives spread over eight months.

There’s a lot going on in early childhood policy at the state and federal level. Stay tuned as I cover what it means for North Carolina’s young children and families. And below, don’t miss Ferrel Guillory’s column on the current early childhood moment in which “both uncertainty and opportunity abound,” a piece on the pandemic experiences of Black families with babies, and information on an early childhood teacher pay scale.