An empty classroom at Quality Interactive Montessori in Anthem, Arizona is shown on June 24, 2024. Photo by Izabella Mullady for AZCIR

More than 2,000 Arizona children have been waitlisted for state child care assistance, according to the Department of Economic Security, and that number is likely to climb as the agency reviews pending applications.

The waitlist counts, quietly added to the DES website after weeks of inquiries from AZCIR, publicly quantify for the first time the impact of state lawmakers’ failure to fill a gaping budget hole left by expiring federal pandemic funds last year. DES had warned state leaders that declining to address the shortfall would likely force the agency to reinstate its waitlist, which had taken a decade to eliminate.

The current waitlist for subsidies—designed to help families in need pay for child care while guardians work, job-hunt or go to school or training—took effect Aug. 1. It applies to new applicants, minus those the state cannot legally turn away.

“The reality is that the funding we get from the federal government for the CCDBG (Child Care and Development Block Grant) is not enough to support the whole system,” said Barbie Prinster, director of the Arizona Early Childhood Education Association. “This is why we have a waitlist, because we don’t have enough state funding to (make up the difference).”

That has been the case since at least the Great Recession, when lawmakers slashed and ultimately eliminated state child care funding to balance the budget. The $12 million in state dollars approved in 2024 marked the first time a Republican-led Legislature had agreed to spend General Fund money on child care in almost 15 years.

Still, the amount fell far short of the $100 million Gov. Katie Hobbs had requested to temporarily stabilize the state’s child care system and avoid reinstatement of a waitlist.

Republican lawmakers don’t seem particularly receptive to the even more ambitious child care plan the Democrat released in January, either. It proposes a public-private partnership that would allow the state, businesses and families to share the cost of care, among several other initiatives.

Despite some bipartisan support for increased child care funding at the federal level, the future of those dollars is also uncertain amid the ongoing blitz of spending freezes and budget cuts under the Trump administration.

Chances that Arizona’s waitlist will be swiftly eliminated through falling caseloads or increased funding, the two possibilities offered by DES, seem slim. And the agency has yet to publicly address the scope of the problem, failing to acknowledge repeated requests by AZCIR to provide the number of cases still awaiting review. In the second week of February alone, DES added more than 300 children to the waitlist.

Being waitlisted indefinitely can spur parents who would otherwise be working or in school to turn down promotions, cut back their hours or quit. Those decisions, in turn, can have a sweeping impact on Arizona’s economy overall. In 2023, a ReadyNation analysis largely funded by the Helios Education Foundation estimated that insufficient child care led to a $4.7 billion loss in earnings, productivity and revenue for the state.

“The child care waitlist is just more proof of what we’ve been saying: Arizona families and businesses are struggling with a system that isn’t working,” Danny Seiden, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told AZCIR via email. “Employers across the state tell us all the time that the lack of affordable child care is keeping people out of the workforce and making it harder to hire.”

Seiden has pointed out that it costs the state far more to financially support a family with no income at all than to help a working parent with child care costs. He said the state “needs to look at real, bipartisan solutions that not only increase funding where it’s needed but also incentivize businesses to offer benefits that support working parents without imposing new burdens on employers.”

Prinster, the longtime advocate for child care reform, similarly said that “when not everyone has access to child care, especially low-income families, the economy and employers suffer.”

“Child care needs to be affordable and accessible for everyone that needs it,” she said.

This article first appeared on Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This post was originally authored and published by Maria Polletta/AZCIR from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.