2016/04/08 – Carley Dear has a four-year-old son, Tailon, who is lucky enough to attend North Jackson’s Richard Brandon Head Start Center every weekday morning.  Soon after the sun peeps over the horizon, his mom drops him off and at the center Tailon eats a good breakfast, tackles his study skills, and learns to get along with other small humans with equally squeaky voices.

The young mother is still a high school student, however, who is finishing her senior year at Murrah High School.  After graduating she plans to attend USM and pursue a media degree and a career as a reporter.

The Head Start Center in Jackson, like Head Start centers throughout Mississippi, hosts children at a fraction of the cost of traditional day care.  This leaves a monumental impact upon the life of Dear and many young women like her who are trying to struggle over the 20-year speed bump that teen pregnancy often produces.

“Before my son started coming here, I was having to pay $130 every two weeks for daycare,” Dear said.

A $260 monthly childcare bill would decimate most young mothers, especially since many traditional teen jobs pay only about $500 or $600 a month — if the boss even gives them a full 40-hour work week.  Owning a car to get you to work might be out of the question under those circumstances.  Rent, most likely, would also be impossible without a long collection of roommates — and many roommates don’t care for kids.

“With Richard Brandon Head Start, Tailon can go to school in the morning, and I can go to school, too.  It really helps,” Dear said.  “Without affordable daycare I wouldn’t be able to afford … well, I couldn’t afford much, I guess.  I’d have to be home and missing out on school.”

As essential as affordable childcare services are, Dear and her son are actually among the very few eligible Mississippians who manage to receive it.  The vast majority of state residents who qualify for some form of government-subsidized childcare will never get it, thanks to uncommitted legislators and their insensitive policies.

Mississippi is so oblivious to the value of childcare aid that the state earned the notorious “honor” of recently being recognized by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) for its insensitivity.  The organization issued a report earlier this year on the harmful impacts of the state’s apparent indifference to low-income working families of color.

In 2015, USCCR’s Mississippi State Advisory Committee voted to investigate discrimination claims against recipients and providers of childcare services based on race or color by the federal low-income childcare subsidy program in Mississippi.  What they found was surprisingly bad, especially since any poverty-reducing program should be welcomed in Mississippi, which has a childhood poverty rate of 29 percent.  The situation is even worse for African-American children, like Tailon Dear, with almost half of black Mississippi youth (47 percent) living at or below the poverty level in 2014.

“The Mississippi State Advisory Committee Memorandum found that far too many eligible children are not serviced by the subsidy program and that the money that should support this eligible population of children is redirected elsewhere,” the Commission stated.  “… Instead of finding appropriate ways for working families to have full access to this transformative program, it appears that ill-explained barriers prevent childcare providers and parents from access.”

These barriers are terribly effective.  While 124,426 children in Mississippi under the age of six were eligible for Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) funding in 2013, only about 18,300 (14.7 percent) actually received assistance each month.

The problem lies in the state’s management of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grants, which ultimately feed into the CCDF.  In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed a rule to alter a pre-existing national childcare grant program that reduced it from a federally managed disbursement system helping low-income parents pay for childcare to a block grant program managed by individual states.  Almost immediately, some states proved more apathetic to child poverty than others.

The federal government mandates only three stipulations for state officials to meet:  (1) benefi­ciaries must earn no more than 85 percent of the state’s median income of $2,917 per month, (2) parents must be able to choose their childcare providers, and (3) providers must charge beneficiaries the same amount they charge other patrons.  These underdeveloped federal requirements leave plenty of room for states to monkey with the program and erect countless obstructions to its operations.

And monkey, they have.  On top of the list of documents and requirements the state of Mississippi requires to prove eligibility (including a mandatory number of hours of weekly work and a poverty-level income cap), the state also requires single parents to verify either the existence of child support from an absent parent or that the parent is taking advantage of MDHS’ Child Support Services to recoup that child support.

With the help of every barrier the state could legally erect, the number of children receiving child care assistance through Child Care and Development Block Grants between 2006 and 2013 declined by 53 percent — a decline larger than all but four states, the report claims.

“Legislators in this state have never acted as if affordable childcare can make a difference,” said Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative Executive Director Carol Burnett, who advocates heavily for the state to open the doors to more childcare funding.

Burnett explained that affordable childcare for low-income mothers and their children could mean the difference between a productive future and a life of poverty, as mothers like Dear no longer have to weigh the pros and cons of paying for childcare vs. abandoning the prospect of work or education entirely in order to take care of their children.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services operates the program and Gov. Phil Bryant holds sway over MDHS.  Burnett said the governor, therefore, ultimately has the power to bring relief to minority women who are disproportionately affected by poverty in the state.  But so far, Burnett said, Bryant’s voice is silent and cold.

Source: MS NAACP