Tompkins County, NY
The Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, along with the Day Care and Child Development Council, took the lead in creating the Early Education Partnership. The goal of the partnership is to create a community scholarship fund for child care. The Partnership produced fact sheets rather than a full report.
- Vision and Goals
- Tompkins County Early Education Partnership: a joint effort of the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce and Day Care and Child Development Council
- Challenges: information sheet on the challenges facing the early care and education industry in Tompkins County, NY
- Vision: the vision for building a community subsidy fund for child care in Tompkins County
- Economic Impact
- "How Does Child Care Impact the Tompkins County Economy?" This fact sheet summarizes our findings. Please read this information about a change to the recommended methodology that was made after the original study was completed.
- Estimating total revenue and workers in the sector.
- Structure of the Child Care Sector
- Economic Impact -- labor shortage
- Policy Uses of the Economic Development Frame
- "New Visions for Welfare Policy". We argue here that subsidies are economic development.
- "Fill the Gap." This describes the potential impact on the Tompkins County economy if all children eligible for subsidies were able to receive them.
- Scholarship Fund Design in Tompkins County
- What parents pay: current funding streams for child care
- Estimating demand for child care
- Fund liability cost projections: estimate of the cost of meeting the child care needs of middle income families
- Gap between the supply of child care and potential demand
- Provider budgets and implications for fund design; estimated budgets (Monthly Budget for Group Family Childcare, Charges by Age Group for Childcare Centers in Tompkins County, and Capacity and Revenue for Childcare Providers in Tompkins County) are also available
- Child care provider budget methodology
Outreach Strategies
Parents lack awareness of existing funds for child care. Educating parents is important both for increasing utilization rates of existing programs, and for working toward increased community funding for child care. To build parent awareness, outreach campaign should involve providers, schools, human services organizations, employers, and the media. These two documents describe outreach strategies and provide background on existing child care funding resources.
- Parent Outreach Strategy. Describes research on child care outreach to parents and methods used by other community groups and statewide programs. This document also describes the outreach campaign to be used by the Early Education Partnership in Tompkins County, New York.
- Parent Materials: brochures, fact sheets, posters, and fliers about Dept of Social Services subsidies, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and Flexible Spending Accounts
- The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: Too Little, Too Late. Discusses the history of the most wide-reaching federal child care program, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, as an example of program inadequacy and policy neglect.
- Employer outreach strategy for publicizing subsidies, tax credits, and flexible spending accounts – developed for Tompkins County, NY
- Employer Materials: information on Flexible Spending Accounts and Department of Social Services subsidies
- Read further about outreach campaigns in Tompkins County, New York, and browse our outreach materials.
Fund Design Issues
The Tompkins County Early Education Partnership's community fund will provide a universal point of entry for Tompkins County families of all income levels to access public, private, and charitable funds to support child care. Currently middle-income families pay the highest percentage of their incomes for child care. The materials on this webpage were created to help fund designers in Tompkins County understand the multiple existing funding streams for child care and the fund's potential liability, and think about ways to help providers achieve economies of scale. We hope the materials will be useful to other community groups conducting similar work.
- An assessment of current funding streams for child care: What parents pay.
- Considerations in estimating demand for child care
- Fund liability cost projections. This memo estimates the costs of meeting the needs of middle income parents not served by government subsidies.
- The gap between the supply of regulated care and potential demand
- Child care provider budgets and implications for fund design
- Methodology for child care home provider budget