The Achieve Center, a treatment clinic in Wausau centered care around children with developmental disorders, chronic health problems, and physical challenges since 2007 has suddenly closed its doors.
In the overnight hours, the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee voted not to include funding for child care providers; it is funding those early childhood educators say is crucial to keeping the doors of the centers and in-home providers open.
Child care professionals and advocates say maintaining the Child Care Counts program is the most urgent of the priorities under the child care requests, even if it is just for a little while.
Nine months after community groups around Wisconsin received grant funds to come up with unique solutions to address child care challenges, the Marathon County group is giving the state an update on progress.
From a nightmare situation came a dream that has since become reality. The Antigo Child Care Center opened in July and is changing the way communities support their child care infrastructure.
Federal and state pandemic relief funding for child care is set to end in 2023. The state and communities search for long-term solutions before a downward trend in a loss of affordable, accessible, quality child care continues.
Most child care providers become early childhood educators for the love of kids, not to run a business that operates on slim margins and minimal compensation. While some have the business brain, others need more support from the administration side of child care.
As people experience the challenges with child care and all the various elements that drive those challenges, communities and Wisconsin as a whole are grappling with how to solve this web of problems without creating unintended consequences.
The pandemic has exacerbated the lack of affordable, accessible, quality child care, but the issues have been going on for decades. As federal pandemic relief dollars flow in, Wisconsin is allocating more than $824 million to stabilizing the industry already on shaky ground and hoping to begin solving some of those issues too.
”I’ve had employers over the years tell me... ‘Our business isn’t child care.’ And I want to say ‘you’re wrong.’ Your business has to be child care or your business is going to fail,” Gordon Crow said to a crowd of business leaders at a central Wisconsin chamber summit.
There is a lot of research and evidence supporting the comparison that children's brains are like sponges soaking up almost everything around them, and the crucial role the quality of care a child receives during that time has on their future.
The secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, Emilie Amundson, said child care needs to be seen as a community issue, and Thursday, it committed funding toward that in several communities around the state, with several in the north central region.
Finding quality, affordable, accessible child care around the north central Wisconsin region and beyond is tough for a lot of families. It can be even tougher for families who have children with special needs.
Early childhood educators are, generally, very passionate and committed to their work. According to recent research from UW-Madison, more than 80% of child care providers in Wisconsin say that is their chosen field or in other words, the work they want to do.
When a child enters the world, someone -- or several people -- has to provide care for them. For most families today, to say it is a challenge to navigate a lack of accessible, affordable, quality child care options is an understatement.
For many families in Wisconsin, it is a struggle to find affordable, accessible, quality child care and an underappreciated workforce that continues to see declines is placing the state of child care in what some industry experts call a crisis.
Those working in the child care field can often feel underappreciated for a variety of reasons, including what providers say is a lack of understanding from some parents and society at large about the work they do.
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