The childcare “waitlist”

Can Arizona afford to end the childcare crisis? ... Presidential material? ... And where else but Scottsdale?

Bill Berk remembers when Arizona parents started calling the Department of Child Safety on themselves to get childcare.

He’s the CEO of Small Miracles Education, which has 17 childcare centers throughout the state. Many parents who send their kids to his centers rely on state-issued funding to subsidize childcare costs that rival college tuition.

During the onset of the Great Recession, lawmakers slashed the budget for childcare subsidies, and parents were put on a waitlist to access those benefits.

Many parents abandoned their jobs to stay home with their kids. And because children referred to the childcare program by Arizona’s Department of Child Safety don’t have to wait for the subsidy, many parents chose to self-report to DCS.

From the Dec. 3, 2009, print edition of the Republic.

That recession-induced waitlist went back into effect in August last year because the Department of Economic Security’s Child Care Assistance Program is running out of the COVID-era money it has used to pay for subsidies the past few years. Parents with low incomes and the childcare centers that serve them are now paying the price.

And there’s no clear solution in sight.

Now, Berk worries that desperate parents will again resort to desperate measures — like calling the agency that could take their kids away from them — to make sure their children are cared for while they’re at work.

“Imagine being faced with a decision like that, where you're going to call DCS on yourself. We shouldn't be putting children and families in that situation,” he said.

As of last Friday, 2,730 families and 4,507 children are on the waiting list, per DES.

If they aren’t waitlisted, families with children aged 12 or younger who make at or below 165% of the Federal Poverty Level (that’s just $53,000 for a family of four) can receive a portion of childcare costs while guardians work or attend school under the DES program.

DES depends on money from the federal Child Care and Development Fund to administer aid for kids’ care, and that fund saw a $1.3 billion influx during the COVID-19 pandemic. That money ended the childcare waitlist that was in effect from 2009 to 2019.

The COVID-relief funding packages the federal government instead sent to states as a short-term emergency measure showed the importance of funding long-term programs. Money for programs like childcare assistance didn’t just help it survive the pandemic — it raised the standard of care.

But that money ran out. And the waitlist is back.

As a result, Berk said he’s had to close one childcare center already. And he’s again seeing parents leaving work or taking their kids to unlicensed centers because they can’t afford childcare, just as they did during the Great Recession.

“I don't blame the parents for doing any of those things. They're doing the best they can to support their families, and we, as a state, are failing them,” he said.

DES’s fiscal year 2026 budget request (p. 57).

Now, DES and Gov. Katie Hobbs want state lawmakers to approve a budget with about $112 million in state money to cut the waitlist in half.

The department estimates that, without the new funding, it will serve 8,000 fewer children next year.

Even with the $112 million infusion, more than 2,000 kids would remain on the waitlist.

Last year, lawmakers agreed to give the department $12 million in one-time General Fund dollars to stabilize the program. That was the first time in a decade the state had paid anything into the childcare program.

But DES has to implement a waitlist when demand for childcare subsidies exceeds available funding. After receiving the $12 million, the waitlist went back into effect a month later.

The waitlist

Referring to the waitlist as a “waitlist” is misleading, per Barbie Prinster, the executive director at the Arizona Early Childhood Education Association.

“I hate calling it a waitlist, because that sounds like you're gonna get off of it,” she said.

The 4,507 children currently on the waitlist won’t get a spot when someone currently using a subsidy ages out or no longer qualifies for it. Parents only get off the waitlist when there’s enough funding to subsidize their childcare. Right now, there’s not.

Prinster runs a trade association for early childcare in Arizona, and she has spent the year lobbying legislators to allocate $120 million to draw down the waitlist.

Childcare centers in low-income areas have plenty of demand, and plenty of slots to fill, Prinster said. But their potential clientele are stuck on the waitlist, and those centers subsequently have to cut back costs.

“Arizona takes childcare, and they put it on the backs of the people that it affects most, which are children, staff and providers,” Prinster said. “That's how they balance childcare — on the backs of those three people.”

Berk said the pandemic-era money preserved Arizona’s infrastructure of low-income childcare providers. Now, the absence of that money is threatening to ruin it.

Enrollment is dropping, centers are closing and Berk often gets calls from business owners asking if he wants to buy their childcare center.

“Our state made great decisions on how to spend that money to keep the infrastructure around for when we exited COVID … I think that so many centers stayed open through those challenges … and all those benefits of having an infrastructure that was around are now going to disappear because people won't be able to keep their doors open,” he said.

Recently, Hobbs has been making the media rounds promoting her “Bright Futures AZ” program — a sweeping plan to improve childcare in Arizona. It includes a lot of different funding proposals besides shrinking the waitlist. For example, the governor wants to allocate $7 million in General Fund money for things like public-private partnerships, tax credits for businesses that provide childcare and grants for childcare providers.

But the governor’s budget only includes $112.4 million in General Fund money to cut the childcare waitlist in half.

And childcare providers like Prinster think the money for the Bright Futures plan would be better spent on the blooming waitlist.

“While (Hobbs’) proposals look great on paper, the childcare system doesn’t work as a whole if the upstream is clogged with a waitlist,” she said. “We are asking for as much funding as possible from the general fund to go toward at least a partial release of the waitlist.”

Arizona’s poorest families are in dire need of childcare, and using DES subsidies is one of only a few pathways in the state to subsidized childcare.

Berk said, while he “applauds the Governor for thinking creatively,” money for low-income families is more important to him than a public-private partnership.

“My belief is that our priority must be the childcare subsidy system because of the impact it has on the greatest number of families, and the greatest number of businesses,” he said.

Slim chances

Parents and disability advocates successfully lobbied lawmakers this year to fill in a budget hole for the Parents as Paid Caregivers program. The program that helps parents take care of children with disabilities also relied on COVID-era funding that ran out, and it needed state dollars to keep going.

But that took months of public testimony and political infighting to achieve. If the battle to continue the disability program amid a COVID-era funding cliff is any indication, getting funding for childcare subsidies won’t be easy in the annual budgeting fight between Republican lawmakers and the Democratic governor.

Last year, childcare advocates wanted about $100 million for the waitlist, and lawmakers gave them $12 million.

Lawmakers probably won’t allocate the full amount this year, either. Projected revenue growth is down, and the tumult of Trump’s tariffs could lead to another recession.

Republican fiscal hawk Rep. Matt Gress told us he supports putting state dollars toward the childcare waitlist, but that he’s “working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find a path forward that balances immediate need with long-term sustainability.”

When we asked about the $120 million request from childcare center owners, Sen. John Kavanagh was more direct: “That’s not going to happen,” he said.

But now that the pandemic funding is gone, DES needs state dollars to provide childcare subsidies. And advocates like Prinster plan to keep asking for it.

“I’ll come back next year and ask for it again,” Prinster said. “The only thing that would change that is if the Legislature woke up and they all had some sort of epiphany that this is a really good thing for Arizona’s kids and the economy.”

First-term senator syndrome: Speculation of Democratic U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego’s 2028 presidential run continues to swirl after he made a pitstop in Pennsylvania and released a Kyrsten-Sinema-inspired immigration plan in the last week. MSNBC declares him either the future of the party or a “Sinema 2.0, a self-serving climber willing to abandon his party, and his stated principles, for personal gain,” depending on your perspective. Republic columnist Laurie Roberts says while Mark Kelly or Doug Ducey would have been more obvious Arizona presidential material, Gallego is “one of the few Democrats” with an actual plan for winning back moderates. And the New Times’ Morgan Fischer ponders how seriously we should take this whole thing. (Not very — yet.)

Governor for sale: Hobbs has a secret slush fund filled by corporate donors that she uses to pay off her 2022 election lawsuit expenses, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Nobody would even know about the legal slush fund except that APS has to file additional reports of its political spending with the Corporation Commission (because it secretly funneled millions to corporation commissioners’ campaigns back in the day). The slush fund isn’t actually a campaign fund, so it’s not subject to campaign finance reporting requirements, and it’s all perfectly legal, despite the fact that Hobbs signs and vetoes legislation that affects her donors, like APS.

“A spokesman for the Hobbs campaign, Michael Beyer, refused Monday to disclose others who have given to her special fund, nor would he say the total amount the governor has collected for her legal fees,” Fischer writes.

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All cops are border agents: It’s interactions with local cops and state police — not ICE — that are most likely to lead people into ICE custody, the Republic’s Richard Ruelas finds in an analysis of court records. That’s even though both Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Gov. Katie Hobbs have promised to resist Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

“Neither Hobbs nor Gallego responded to requests for comment on the findings. Acting Phoenix Police Chief Dennis Orender was not available for an interview,” Ruelas writes.

Time is a flat circle: The LA Times checks in with former Republican state Sen. Bob Worsley, famed for beating Russell Pearce, founding SkyMall and being a rare Republican who supports immigration reform. He says watching the rise and re-rise of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric was “irritating” and “frustrating.”

DINO stampede: Democrat Amish Shah is officially running for Congress — again — in a crowded Democratic primary to take on Republican David Schweikert — again, per the Republic’s Laura Gersony. And he’s racked up endorsements from former Republican state lawmakers Rusty Bowers, Regina Cobb and Joel John. Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton got put in charge of the campaign wing of the “New Democrat Coalition,” a moderate, pro-business group of Democrats.

The veto queen reigns: Hobbs vetoed another baker’s dozen of bills yesterday, bringing her count for the year to 137. Her single-year record is 143, set back in 2023. The Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small rounds up some of the recent vetoes.

So Scottsdale of them: Scottsdale has been creatively interpreting laws designed to increase the supply of affordable housing by declaring big chunks of the city “in the vicinity of” an airport and therefore exempt, among other shenanigans, the Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon writes. Lawmakers came back this year to strengthen the laws, and now the city is holding an “open house” to hear from voters about what to do.

Seven lives on the sevens: Activists submitted a petition with more than 4,000 signatures to end the confusing and dangerous reversible “suicide lanes” on Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, ABC15’s Adam Klepp reports. Phoenix started them to ease rush hour traffic in the 1970s and ‘80s before we had State Route 51.

Summer is here: The Greer Fire burning in Apache County is destroying buildings and forcing mandatory evacuations in Greer, KTAR reports. It started yesterday and quickly grew to 3,500 acres amid strong winds that grounded fire-suppressing aircraft.

HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” spent a full 30 minutes diving into the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents conservative clients like anti-gay bakers and joins lawsuits like the one that struck down Roe v. Wade.

Probably the best skewer of the night was stuck through ADF founder James Dobson, who “looks less like a real person, and more like AI’s answer to the question ‘What do they look like without their hoods?’”

His fact-checkers also debunked some testimony at the Arizona Capitol about a 2020 law banning trans kids from playing sports.

Turns out it was a mixup — the alleged “boy” on the team just “had short hair and was good.”