Ohio Chamber hosts child care leaders to press for state budget changes to help workers and families
The Ohio Chamber of Commerce building in downtown Columbus. (Photo by David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal.)
As Ohio legislators were working to finish the House's draft of the state operating budget for the next two years, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce held its Childcare Policy Summit across the street with advocates and business leaders stressing the importance of child care to workers and business.
'We can't just warehouse kids, we can't just provide custodial child care to kids,' said David Smith, executive director of Horizon Education Centers.
The chamber held the summit for the second time in two years as it leans in to the issue. Its senior vice president of government affairs, Rick Carfagna, said it is 'the largest workforce throttle that we have at the moment.'
'We have an entire demographic of Ohioans that are skilled, they are college educated, they are creative, they are hard-working people, men and women alike, and they are simply not looking for work at all,' Carfagna told the Capital Journal.
Before the summit even began, he spoke to lawmakers in the House Children and Human Services Committee, supporting bills to address the cost of child care and the building up of the child care workforce.
Language from the bills the committee was considering when Carfagna met with them now appear in the House's version of the state budget. House Bill 2 aimed to establish the 'Child Care Cred Program,' to split the cost of child care three ways: funding from the state, a share from employers, and the rest from employees who are eligible for the child care.
Another part of the new draft budget is a Child Care Recruitment and Mentorship Grant Program to help 'increase the number of licensed child care providers in Ohio and assist recruited entities and individuals,' according to the budget language released this week. It contains a $3.2 million appropriation in fiscal year 2026 for 'child care provider recruitment.'
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Smith was part of a panel discussion about the 'workforce behind the workforce,' child care workers who take care of children so their parents can go to school or maintain their place in the workforce.
Meanwhile, Ohioans have been having trouble staying in the workforce because of the lack of affordable child care and lack of access to any child care at all in some regions of the state.
Advocates in and out of Tuesday's summit have said raising the eligibility level for Publicly Funded Child Care and reimbursement rates for child care workers should be top of mind for lawmakers if they want to help the situation.
In the Ohio House's version of the budget, the Publicly Funded Child Care eligibility remained at the current level of 145% of the federal poverty line, rather than the governor's proposal — and the one child care advocates hoped for — of 200%. In Ohio, the federal poverty level for a family of four is $32,150 a year.
Carfagna said the chamber hoped the federal poverty level would be increased, but 'that alone isn't good enough.'
As a former a lawmaker who's gone through the budget process, Carfagna said he understands there are numerous priorities being dealt with in the budget, and that legislators have to weigh them.
'There are a lot of big price-tag issues that all just kind of hit you from different corners, so legislators, probably rightfully so, need to be careful to not overpromise,' he said.
One big item that has been widely supported by child advocates all over the state was a proposal by Gov. Mike DeWine in his executive budget to create a refundable income tax credit of up to $1,000 for Ohio children up to age 6. That provision did not make it to the House draft.
The Child Care Voucher Program, a previously existing program that subsidizes some children's admission into qualified child care centers, did have its eligibility brought to 200% of the federal poverty line in the House budget draft.
According to the budget document, however, the voucher program would have a budget of $50 million for each year of the biennium, rather than the previous proposal of $75 million in fiscal year 2026, and $150 million in 2027.
In addition to a lack of affordability and access is a problem in which the staffing needed to take care of young children is just not there, advocates said.
Tami Lunan, organizing director for the Ohio-based CEO Project who was not part of the summit but has been testifying in favor of child care measures at the Statehouse as part of the the budget process. She said new money for the child care sector should go directly to providers.
'We want to see something transformational, and I think looking to our workforce is a big part of that,' Lunan said.
Lunan said the industry already has low wages and high turnover, and continuing to underfund the staff maintains the narrative that the workforce is not as important as in other professions.
'I think that's by design that we're not investing in it,' Lunan said. 'Because we don't see those businesses as viable, we don't see those workers as professionals. They look to them more as babysitters.'
According to a 2024 analysis by Policy Matters Ohio, Black Ohioans are more likely to be child care workers, making up 18.8% of the industry's workforce, despite only making up 12.5% of the state population that year.
The Ohio legislature has heard testimony from several child care workers, advocates, and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce about the need to incentivize work in the child care sector, and improve pay and benefits for those workers.
Traditional business solutions won't work for child care providers, said Chris Angellatta, CEO of the Ohio Child Care Resource & Referral Association.
'We have challenges that are very different,' Angellatta said. 'We can't just compete in the labor market and continue to pay people more and just expect families to continue to pay more. It's already expensive.'
To help care providers, the House budget draft has a provision to calculate Publicly Funded Child Care based on a child's enrollment with a provider, rather than basing it on the child's attendance. That's something Angellatta said would be 'critical' for both families and providers.
'We all know that just because someone is not in attendance doesn't mean that spot isn't saved for them,' he said.
An Early Childhood Education Grant Program to 'invest in Ohio's early learning and development programs' including licensed child care centers, licensed family child care homes, and licensed preschools is included in the House budget draft as well. Eligibility goes up to 200% of the federal poverty line.
Discussions about child care in Ohio come down to one primary theme: It can't be fixed by one bill or one source of funding. Instead, the state and everyone involved in decision making have to implement multi-step strategies to improve the start of children's education and the building of a new workforce.
'If you really want to do this, you have to do it in a three-dimensional manner,' Carfagna said. 'You have to attack it from the eligibility standpoint, the capacity side of it, and we need people to staff our child care centers.'
For Lunan, the problem can be looked at very simply by those who hold the state's funding decisions in their hands.
'We literally can not have a thriving economy without child care,' she said.
The House budget will now move to the Ohio Senate, which will draft its own budget. The two drafts will need to be reconciled before the end of June, when a budget must be sent to DeWine for his signature.
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