Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Summit
Consensus Agenda

In January 2008, MLICCI convened 70 strategic partners—advocates, practitioners, policymakers, and parents—for a Mississippi Child Care Summit. We met to discuss important new developments in our state and nationally, and to set an agenda on how to move forward to secure quality early childhood services for our state’s poor children. The following consensus agenda emerged, working in MLICCI’s three core program areas: financing, policy reform, and quality enhancement.

1. Child Care Financing

MLICCI will continue to identify ways to expand the supply of child care subsidies so that more low-income children can receive the early childhood services they need, and to support low-income child care centers as they strive for financial viability.

MLICCI has identified the TANF program as the best fit and largest source of funds for expanding the supply of child care subsidies. (view oped in Clarion Ledger). The Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) has refused to use these TANF funds for child care, claiming last year that there was no unmet need for child care among Mississippi’s low-income families. MLICCI gathered data to contest DHS’ claim through a survey (summer 2007) of more than 500 child care centers that clearly documents unmet need. (View Power Point presentation of survey) MLICCI is using this data as a basis for continuing to press for these funds to be used for child care. In addition, MLICCI has expanded our efforts beyond DHS to the Governor’s office and key state policy makers.   TOP  »

MLICCI is continuing to focus on subsidized child care as an important work support for low-income working parents. In February 2008, MLICCI held press conference to release “Broadening the Base: Strengthening Mississippi's Working Families, Businesses and Economy Through a System of Strong Child Care,” (view report and press release) which provides a blueprint for Mississippi to build a strong child care system that supports family efforts to go to work and helps businesses retain their key employees. MLICCI is working with the MS Economic Policy Center to implement the report’s recommendations.

MLICCI is (with the Gulf Coast Child Care Resource and Referral Agency) launching a two-fold pilot program to 1) train low-income child care providers on techniques for attaining financial viability; and 2) investigate the feasibility of establishing cooperative management functions to achieve the benefits of expertise and economies of scale. To further assist child care providers, MLICCI is working with Professional Associates to demonstrate the need among low-income child care centers for additional financial resources in order to participate in Mssissippi’s new Quality Rating System (QRS). (View the report)

2. Policy and Subsidy Reform

MLICCI will continue to press for operational reforms in the child care subsidy program to minimize interruptions and make services more responsive to the needs of parents and children.   TOP  »

MLICCI recently commissioned a report from the Urban Institute entitled, “Designing Subsidy Systems to Meet the Needs of Families: An Overview of Policy Research Findings.” (view Urban Institute report) The report provides recommendations on best practices gleaned from states across the country in designing child care subsidy systems that meet the need of low-income families and their young children. In addition, MLICCI has compiled a listing of key reforms (view listing)identified by our constituency. (link to key reforms) MLICCI is using these documents as the basis for continued reform efforts directed, again, beyond DHS to the Governor’s office and key state policy makers.

MLICCI has taken on the challenge of educating policymakers and the public about the importance of affordable, quality child care for all children, while building a grassroots coalition to support positive reforms and providing direct technical assistance and training to constituent low-income child care centers. Looking ahead, we plan to focus on the governor’s office as a route to promoting further reforms in the DHS low-income child care programs. We had a representative from the governor’s office in attendance at the Child Care Summit and have since held productive metings sharing information from our surveys and reports.

Quality Enhancement

We will push for funds to help low-income centers make the improvements necessary to participate in the state's quality rating system (QRS) and MLICCI will continue to provide direct curriculum training and techncial assitance to improve the quality of child care for low-income children, who benefit most from quality early education>   TOP  »

MLICCI conducted an evaluation of the first year of the quality rating system and learned that the primary reason centers chose not to participate was the lack of funds to support the requirements. Through SPARK, MLICCI provided support to child care centers to develop and implement strategic plans to improve their ECERS scores—one of the requirements in the quality rating system. The price tag for implementing these strategic plans called for $2,000 to over $10,000 per center. And these costs did not include the requirement for increased education levels among staff. MLICCI is pushing for a grant program to help centers cover these costs so they can participate.

In addition, MLICCI is following up regional training events in June 2007 that provided training and curriculum enhancement kits to 100 low-income child care centers. Since then we have offered 27 additional days of on-site training and technical assistance in the following areas: parent engagement, setting up effective learning environments, promoting developmentally appropriate practice, positive interactions, utilizing child observations, cultural diversity, gender equity, anti-bias values formation in young children, and preparing for ECERS. Many more days of on-site technical assistance are on the calendar for the next several months.

To bolster these initiatives, we plan to build a stronger communications effort. Toward this end, we are creating an overrarching strategy that promotes a positive message around quality child care to build broad-based support for public investments in these services for all children regardless of their parents’ ability to pay.