A combination of the COVID-19 pandemic separating employees from their day care outlets and new workers moving in has parents in Arizona facing a shortage of places to keep their young children while they work.Â
Day cares around the country saw their clientele vanish when the pandemic laid off millions of parents who paid handsomely for their children to learn while they worked.
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A former Memphis day care director was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison for submitting false documents to the Tennessee Department of Human Services.
Fifty-five-year-old Ollie Stephenson of Germantown pleaded guilty to a criminal information charge after being accused of submitting a false Regions Bank statement and food invoice to the department in an audit during April and May 2020. Stephenson also was ordered to pay $375,158.80 in restitution.
Stephenson was the director of Louise’s Learning Tree Daycare Center in Memphis. It was part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Child and Adult Care Feeding Program.
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Normally when a business shuts its doors, it doesn’t still get to charge its customers for a product they can no longer access. It certainly doesn’t get to charge its customers twice for the privilege.
Yet, that’s exactly what we’re seeing from some public school districts. They refuse to open their doors for in-person learning—citing safety risks—but they are able to open these same school buildings to charge overworked and tired parents for day care.Â
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by Max Gulker In the discussion of the nation’s problem with child care costs, a crucial factor has gone mostly unmentioned. This is one of the most regulated industries. These regulations are driving up costs. Adding more government control of the industry risks making a bad situation even worse. To be sure, costs vary by state. So too do the relevant regulatory regimes. According to data from Child Care Aware, child care for a toddler in a Massachusetts center costs on average a whopping $18,845, or 65 percent on the average single-parent family’s income in the state. Low-cost Mississippi, on the other hand, is $4,670, less than 25 percent of the average single-parent family’s income. Why does child care in Massachusetts cost four times what it does in Mississippi? Indices estimate that the ratio of overall cost of living between the two states is about 1.5, suggesting factors specific to child care account for part of the wide gap. Massachusetts mandates that child-care centers must have one staff member on hand for every three infants. In Mississippi, that staff member can care for five. Massachusetts requires a staff member for every ten preschool-age children. In Mississippi, that number is fourteen.…
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