Speaker 1: Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to our forum on child care stabilization grants. I'm Donna Wade, and I'm the Senior Program Director at the Early Childhood Investment Corporation here in Michigan. We partner with the Michigan Department of Education to provide guidance and resources for child care providers across the state as they embark on using federal dollars to support their child care programs. Today, we are joined by child care experts from three other states, Maryland, Nevada, and Louisiana. And they're here to share their stories and wisdom on how child care providers, in their states, have navigated this process. So welcome, guests. So today we have from Nevada, Marty Elquist. She's the Program Manager at the Children's Cabinet. Welcome, Marty. We also have Margo Chappell from Nevada, and she's the Deputy Administrator, Field Operations Support from the Nevada Department of Health, and Human Services.

Speaker 2: You did a great job pronouncing my name too. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Great, great. And from Maryland, we have Christina, and I'll probably mess up your last name. Pushe? Pushe. Pushe. She's the Executive Director of the Maryland State Child Care Association. And lastly, we have from Louisiana, Ruth Ann Oakley, and Ruth Ann is the Policy Director and General Counsel for Louisiana. Louisiana Policy Institute for Children. Welcome, everyone. So, ladies, recruiting, hiring, and retaining staff is a top challenge for child care providers right now in Michigan, and I'm sure that all of your providers are feeling the same way. Can you give us specific examples of how your providers use the money to support the workforce? I can jump in really quickly, because I had

Speaker 3: Yeah, so our provider survey found that as of January 2021, about 58% of the providers were using their grant money to offer pay incentives, and that number jumped up to 70% in the fall of 2021. So, the big numbers are they're using it on utilities, cleaning supplies, and then the number three was employee salaries and wages. Number four was employee pay incentives and bonuses. So, we think that there's... There's been a big shift over the course of the pandemic to start using these relief grants to

Speaker 4: help retain and recruit a qualified workforce. Yes, similarly here in Nevada, it was a requirement of our application process that they use 20% of the funds to support their workforce, and if they are not, they could request a waiver. We haven't received waiver requests to support the workforce, and we... The three-month report has to clearly indicate how they use that 20% with backup documentation, either through their payroll system or other supports that they have given their staff. But right now, providers are reporting through email communication with our grants team that they're using for recruitment bonuses, longevity bonuses, having kind of a tiered structure for their staff, and then a few are providing temporary wage stipends. We have a provider in Las Vegas who is providing payroll to their staff every week instead of every two weeks, and the off week is the temporary stipend bonus. So, we thought that was a really nice way to support their staff. And I don't know, Margo, if you want... If you want to talk a little bit more about the wage stipend effort through Nevada Association for the Education of Young Children, or if you want me to take that one, that's not a project that we're administering, but the state definitely recognizes the wage issue for our providers and recruiting

Speaker 2: and retaining staff. Margo, you're on mute. We are in the process of distributing 11 million dollars to individual child care providers who we have the Nevada registry, and by regulation, all people who work in child care centers or licensed child care facilities must be on the Nevada registry. So, anybody who's in the Nevada registry will be getting $1,000 stipend, and so the number of providers times that amount came up to $11 million. And so, that's how we're using that funding. And we expect that to hopefully be distributed in February and March, or by the end of this fiscal year for sure. It has not been distributed yet.

Speaker 5: Thank you, Margo and Marty. Christina?

Speaker 6: Yeah, okay. So, just echoing my colleagues on this call, but there's a critical workforce shortage across the country. So, we're all facing that. Our Department of Education, I do have the information and numbers of personnel costs, including increasing personnel and retainment costs, they used 80% of the money was used for those purposes. Rent, mortgages, utilities, depending on if you were family child care or center-based child care, some of them reported up to 92% used it for some of the money for that. We did not earmark that you had to use it. There was a limit. There was a list from the federal government of what's allowable, and that was what was on the application, including to waive family co-pays, to assist families during COVID shutdowns. So, all of these things. So, 85% used it for some additional PPE equipment, goods and services, 73% mental health services, only 22%, and paying for past expenses, 60%. So, in the whole, as many are experiencing the struggle with the closures and shortages, skyrocketing expenses for all businesses, because we have almost over 7% inflation. And then, of course, trying to do our part now as we have this Omicron variant, and it's much more contagious. So, there's more people getting it, whether it's child or staff member, and then having families struggle to be excluded and trying to not have them pay during that time to assist them. So, there's lots of ways that people are using and plan to use. The funding that they've received from the federal dollars, including, so, we're in legislative session now, and I've worked in the off season to have new bills with state money. So, I highly recommend engaging in these types of processes, because these are federal dollars we're talking about. You need your state to step up. You can't do this alone and shouldn't do it alone. Your state needs to pay a portion of this, or come up with something else. Thank you. I appreciate your additional supports, because this is not a, this was a tenuous industry prior to the pandemic, and it certainly has been exacerbated to be very unstable through this pandemic for many reasons. But we have a number of bills, one of those, if we're talking about the workforce, we have a bill with a number of champions based on the state and Senate and House of Delegates side that provides, for example, personnel costs, for example, for fingerprinting. It doesn't have to be passed off to the candidate, and it doesn't have to be incurred necessarily from the business, if they apply for the grant for medicals, fingerprinting. It could be for training that's necessary for pre-service. And then also, we have a recruitment and retainment package part of this bill that would allow for additional bonuses for recruitment and retainment from the state level and the state budget. So, we support the requirement of this bill. It is a staff requirement. It's very important. So we're continuing our work to make sure that this is an ongoing stabilization into recovery and not just a one and done deal, because that is not going to help any of us in the future, nor will it help children and families to build a stronger infrastructure in child care. So also, I think you mentioned something about how they're using it. I do have a quote from one of my members. She said that when she received her grant, she raised her pay scale by 20% to fill 14 staff positions in two center locations. She had to because people would go to Kohl's or McDonald's or Sam's Club, and they can get jobs. We're competing for the few people that are willing and able to work. And I don't know how long she says she'll be able to sustain the salaries. However, ultimately, she wants to be able to pay employees what they deserve. It is critical considering the requirements of the job. This is a highly skilled work. It's highly skilled work. It requires being aware of growth and development. It requires being aware of social and emotional development. Cognitive development and physical development. It requires having a lot of physical energy and stamina. And we need to keep that in mind as we continue to work with our leaders in Congress and at the state and local levels, how essential and important this industry and the work that we do is.

Speaker 5: I completely agree, Christina.