CHILD CARE CENTER NAME: Hoskins Learning Center
OWNER: Lillie Hoskins
ESTABLISHED: 1980
PHYSICAL ADDRESS: 300 Highway 51 S, Batesville, Mississippi
WEBSITE: https://www.facebook.com/hoskinslearningcenter/
When Lillie Hoskins received news that her child care center had won a recent Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative contest for completing a survey, she was elated.
“It was so great,” Hoskins chuckled about the $1,000 prize money awarded to Hoskins Learning Center in Batesville, Mississippi. “It came right on time because it was time for me to pay my payroll taxes and God worked that thing right on out.”
MLICCI had offered child care centers across the state an opportunity to win the funds as part of its efforts to increase interest in a Child Care Center Data Survey. The survey was distributed to assess the impact of ongoing changes within the Mississippi Department of Human Services’ Child Care Payment Program.
MLICCI will use the survey data to improve the CCPP by sharing how some of the changes made it difficult for low-income parents to keep their child care as well as the centers who provide services to them and rely on the state-funded program to operate.
In Mississippi, the cost of child care is a major challenge for working families. With 64 percent of mothers with preschool-aged children in the workforce, child care is not a luxury but rather a critical need for those struggling to take care of their families.
Mississippi’s CCPP only serves about 15% of families eligible to receive child care support. A reported 21,500 children are on the waiting list.
Hoskins said in her 38 years of being in business, the past few have been the most difficult because of the dwindling number of children being supported by the program.
In her rural community, located in Panola County, about one-fourth of the population lives below the poverty line. In addition to producing two former Mississippi governors – Cliff Finch and Ronnie Musgrove – the North Delta area is known for dominance in high school football and as the former hometown to hip-hop artist SouljaBoy.
“I have about 60 children at my center, but I am licensed for 138,” she said. “When they dropped those new redetermination rules, I lost a lot of babies…sometimes three to four from one family with a single mother. And a lot of them are young girls who didn’t know how to go out there and try to get help. Between my secretary, and me we did everything we could to help them. I am not going to just put them out. I’ve got to help them and do what is right.”
Hoskins said she managed to weather the financial crisis due to her faith in God and her love for the children.
“I love my job,” she said. “But when they came through with all this new stuff I was about to go to the house. I told my staff that and I told everyone to pray for my center and for me. I stayed because I know that somebody has got to help these parents. The kids that came through my center years ago now have kids and I have their children and in some cases, grandchildren. It has been a difficult time, but I am hanging on.”
MLICCI is a statewide nonprofit policy and advocacy organization that organizes people within the state of Mississippi across lines of race and class to press for policy changes to improve women’s economic circumstances. Our policy goals include affordable child care, comprehensive and affordable women’s health care, pay equity, paid family leave, gender equity in job training and job referrals in the state’s workforce development system, more women entering nontraditional occupations leading to higher paying jobs, affordable higher education with child care support and protection from domestic violence and sexual assault.