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Vermont had a problem. Child care was too expensive. \u201cWe would be paying $3,500 a month, more than twice our mortgage.\u201d Some parents were giving up their careers to stay home \u2014 \u201cAfter daycare, you come home with maybe $60 extra a week. It\u2019s just not even worth it at that point.\u201d making it harder for local businesses to hire workers. Some businesses wanted the state to pay for childcare, but they faced a big obstacle. \u201cThe word tax. It\u2019s a very volatile word.\u201d Ultimately, Vermont did manage to make child care more affordable. So we\u2019re here to find out how they\u2019re doing it. This year\u2019s midterm elections could turn on the issue of affordability. \u201cAffordability.\u201d \u201cAffordability.\u201d \u201cAffordability.\u201d \u201cThe affordability crisis.\u201d Forty-four percent of voters said having a family was unaffordable in a recent Times-Siena poll. Alison Byrnes and her husband, for example, wanted a third kid. \u201cIt felt just like our family wasn\u2019t complete.\u201d But daycare for two kids here costs $3,500 a month, and Alison\u2019s mom was already dipping into her retirement fund to help pay for that. \u201cThere\u2019s no way we could make that work.\u201d For years, Vermont\u2019s working-age population has been shrinking, making businesses like Smugglers\u2019 Notch Resort compete to find the workers they need. In 2022, the resort was short more than a dozen housekeepers. The managing director was fed up with the staffing shortage and decided to try something new. He offered free child care for employees. \u201cWe announced the new program on a Friday and by Tuesday, we were full. All the jobs had been taken, so we knew we were really on to something.\u201d The child care benefit attracted employees like Becca Bishop, who wanted to rejoin the workforce after a few years as a stay-at-home mom. \u201cI chose to start working here purely because of the child care that we have.\u201d Now before work, she drops off her 3-year-old, Archer, at the on-site daycare and her 5-year-old son, Hunter, at ski camp, which is also free. Then she works full time managing the resort\u2019s arcade. Once Bill solved his staffing problem, he started talking to other Vermont C.E.O.s about the benefits of child care and lobbying for a new tax that would fund it statewide. \u201cWhen I was first back in Vermont working for the governor, I was talking to all kinds of Vermonters, and what I found was everything that they cared about actually linked back to child care. Aly Richards spent a decade expanding child care in Vermont. She said business leaders like Bill were a crucial part of the push. \u201cOnce we had them in here saying, \u2018Look, if I paid in to fix child care in a systemic, sustainable way through, let\u2019s say, a payroll tax,\u2019 what happened was it gave permission to lawmakers to move forward on this issue. Often, businesses come into this building and say, \u2018Please, do not raise taxes.\u2019 In this case, it really was flipped on its head. They became the most powerful voices in advocating for public investment.\u201d \u201cWhat we should really do is try it and find out what happens.\u201d The child care bill, Act 76, passed in 2023. It established a new 0.44 percent payroll tax on employers and generates about $125 million a year to fund child care subsidies. Families pay on a sliding scale. So a family of four with a modest income pays no tuition for child care. Higher-income families pay a co-pay that\u2019s supposed to stay below roughly 10 percent of their income. The law has only fully been in place for a year, but already the new funding has led to more than 1,200 new child care slots for kids across Vermont. For years, child care centers were closing because they couldn\u2019t cover their bills. Now, new ones are opening, like this one in the farming town of Addison. Michelle Bishop had dreamed of starting a place like this, but couldn\u2019t afford to open until she could count on the state to pay more than $400 per child each week. \u201cWe have 16 children enrolled \u2014 80 percent of them are receiving subsidy.\u201d The additional funding also meant she could actually afford to pay her workers a livable wage. Statewide, Vermont still needs many more child care centers before it can fully meet demand. For now, though, the difference the new law has made for these Vermont residents is clear. Alison and her husband were finally able to have the third child they wanted because they knew their childcare costs would be about $30,000 a year less than it would have been without the new law. \u201cWe can\u2019t imagine our family without that third kiddo. It\u2019s literally life-changing. Like \u2014 she would not be here.\u201d For Rebecca, free child care means she can afford to save for a new house that fits her family better. \u201cWe do plan on staying in Vermont, yes.\u201d Michelle plans to expand into another room for toddlers this spring. \u201cWe hope to open in March or April. We\u2019re almost finished.\u201d And as for Bill, he says the New tax is nothing compared to what Vermont gets for it. \u201cWe didn\u2019t put in a new tax and find that we couldn\u2019t pay our bills. We\u2019re still here.\u201d \u201cIn Vermont, we really came together and it\u2019s working.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vermont had a problem. Child care was too expensive. \u201cWe would be paying $3,500 a month, more than twice our mortgage.\u201d Some parents were giving up their careers to stay home \u2014 \u201cAfter daycare, you come home with maybe $60 extra a week. It\u2019s just not even worth it at that point.\u201d making it harder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[14196,165,681,1660,23082],"class_list":{"0":"post-44463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-affordable","9":"tag-care","10":"tag-child","11":"tag-lead","12":"tag-vermont"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}