Further from school

Following up on my follow-up post. Ha! My teacher and I were discussing the concept of a community-funded scholarship program. She mentioned that she liked the idea. My response follows:

I love the community scholarship idea. I have seen it work on a smaller scale, and I've seen the HUGE donation drives done by most of the major medical charities (Susan G. Komen, American Heart Association, etc). If they can get substantial funding by having "donate a dollar" drives in grocery stores, I think it could work for childcare. It's been argued that the cancer research groups and children's charities do so well on those particular drives because they are so sensational, but I believe that, particularly with the in-store drives, they get so much "donate a dollar" participation at the point-of-sale because people are prone to impulse-spending at the registers. When the cashier says "would you like to donate a dollar to [charity]?" people seem to think "it's only a dollar" more than they think "I can save the world."

If the average cost of child care is $6,000 a year, a scholarship fund covered 50% of the cost, and a donation drive made, say, $3M, we could provide childcare to a thousand children. Another idea is that we could cut the amount of the federal subsidy. The vouchers on the MS Gulf Coast cut our child care expense down to about $30 a week, on average, meaning that, on average, it covers 2/3 of the cost of child care for qualifying families, but currently has a six-month waiting list. If it covered 1/3 of the cost for families using the scholarship, and a community scholarship covered 1/3 for the families using the CCDF program (childcare vouchers), and if we earmarked half of our donated funding for families on the CCDF program, we could assist with 750 CCDF families.

The other $1.5M could be used, then, to cover part of the childcare expense for families who are actively looking for work. At 50% of the cost, we could still fund many families, and then transition them to a combined CCDF/Community Scholarship program once they have an income. The federally funded vouchers would stretch MUCH further, and I believe the employment rates of low-income parents would increase significantly as a result.


Next post: Government Regulations and Standards: How the impact the state of childcare among single mothers on the Gulf Coast.