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Thousands of Arizona families have been stuck waiting for child care help. This week, some finally got a letter saying relief is on the way.

The Arizona Department of Economic Security sent out notices on July 11 letting families know they’re eligible for child care help after the state Legislature allocated funding to draw down the waitlist of thousands of families on hold for child care assistance.

Although lawmakers nearly shut down the state government during this year’s budget process, the final product included nearly $126 million for child care, and DES will start drawing down the growing waitlist for its child care subsidies on Aug. 1.

Families with children aged 12 or younger who make at or below 165% of the Federal Poverty Level (that’s about $52,000 for a family of four) can receive a portion of child care costs while guardians work or attend school under the DES program.

It’s a lifeline for a lot of families. Child care can cost as much as college tuition — the Economic Policy Institute puts the annual cost for Arizonans at more than $15,000 for infants and more than $12,000 for four-year-olds.

Even if you don’t have young kids or work in child care, the state of Arizona’s early childhood system still affects you. When families can’t find affordable care, parents drop out of the workforce, employers struggle to fill jobs and the economy takes a hit. Plus, ample studies show how a lack of early learning options leaves kids behind.

But DES’s waitlist is crowded.

From The Children’s Equity Project’s November 2023 report.

When we wrote about the child care waitlist in May, there were 2,730 families and 4,507 children on it. As of last Friday, there were 3,674 families and 6,118 children.

But funding the subsidies isn’t a given; it’s a political negotiation.

Lawmakers slashed funding for child care subsidies during the onset of the Great Recession. They were refunded with the wave of COVID-era relief dollars, which ran out. Last August, the waitlist came back.

That means Barbie Prinster, the executive director at the Arizona Early Childhood Education Association, had to fight extra hard this year to ask politicians to fund child care.

“We infused so much funding into the system during COVID that we raised the bar to where we should have been all along,” she said.

Absent another global crisis and hundreds of millions in federal funding, funding child care in Arizona will be a constant game of catch-up.

Last year, the state Legislature only gave the program $12 million, which was the first time in more than a decade the state paid into the child care program. But it wasn’t enough to make a significant dent in the waitlist.

While there’s a lot more funding this year, it’s still not clear how big of a dent it will make. Of the $125.9 million in this year’s budget for child care, $44.9 million comes from the state’s general fund and $81 million from federal sources. Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office said that that funding will cut the waitlist in half.

But her start-of-the-year budget request put $191.1 million toward the child care assistance program and also said it would cut the waitlist in half as a result. Lawmakers approved less than Hobbs requested, and since her proposal, the waitlist has more than doubled. Still, the administration has stuck to its message that the new funding will cut the list in half.

Gov. Katie Hobbs’ budget summary slideshow from Jan. 17.

In reality, no one knows how many families will get child care from this year’s budget. Some families may no longer qualify, or may never find out they were pulled from the waitlist if their address changed since signing up.

DES is triaging the funding release by sending the notices in waves, starting with those earning the least. The first 530 notices went to families earning at or below the poverty level — $32,150 for a family of four. Families above that income will be contacted in 10% increments, up to the program’s eligibility cap.

While 5% of the entire department recently got laid off because of federal budget cuts, Prinster said that doesn’t affect the child care division. It may have affected the media outreach division, however, because DES didn’t reply to our several attempts to talk about the new funding.

“It's a really good start, so we'll just have to see how it plays out. I'm sure, administratively, it's going to be really hard,” Prinster said.

Until Arizona finds a more reliable funding source than depending on lawmakers each year, qualifying families will continue to be left out. And with federal cuts looming, the gap could widen.

Parents on the waitlist don’t get a spot when someone currently using a subsidy ages out or no longer qualifies. They only get a spot when there’s enough funding to subsidize their child care, and there’s a huge backlog to get through.

“This is significant funding. It's enough to do some waitlist releases, but it's not enough to clear the waitlist and then have it open again for families to be able to apply,” Prinster said.

WW3 won’t be fought with bombs: The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran was briefly listed as a candidate running for office in Arizona after suspected Iranian hackers hacked into the Arizona Secretary of State’s campaign portal and swapped his pic for those of candidates, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes acknowledged the depth and sophistication of the hack this weekend — nearly a month after hackers swapped the pics, forcing the brief shutdown of the candidate portal. Fontes says more sensitive portions of the website, including voter data, were not accessed, though the hackers may have gotten access to personally identifiable information from the candidate portal. The cyber attack seems to have been in retaliation to the U.S. bombing of Iran last month.

Break out the scorched earth ledes: With reporters in tow, Gov. Katie Hobbs toured the destruction of the Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon this weekend, taking a helicopter tour to assess the damage and meeting with the first responders who have set up a command post there, per the Associated Press. The governor has called for an investigation into how the fire spread and took out the Grand Canyon Lodge, but says she’s not second-guessing the National Park Service’s decision not to immediately and aggressively attack the fire, which spread over several days after sparking from a lightning strike on July 4. She’s heading to D.C. this week to speak with officials from the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior decisions in managing the wildfire, per the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger.

“Hobbs, a lifelong Arizonan, said she had never before been to the North Rim,” Barchenger writes.

Victories, all the way down: Meanwhile, Hobbs made the rounds with local ABC15’s Manuelita Beck and the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest for her legislative session look-back tour, highlighting her victories like the budget, groundwater legislation, extended funding for people with developmental disabilities, stymying Scottsdale voters’ attempts to stop Axon from building its headquarters there, and offering a huge subsidy to keep the Arizona Diamondbacks from leaving.

CAPTIMES: “Some of your priorities weren’t addressed this session, which are you hoping to keep working on?”

HOBBS: “First of all, I’m really focused on what we did get done.”

Boom and…: The booming suburbs of Queen Creek and Buckeye can continue to boom now that state officials approved the first-ever groundwater transfer agreement from the protected Harquahala Groundwater Basin west of Phoenix to fuel suburban growth, per 12News’ Kevin Reagan. These groundwater transfers are one of the many ways cities and developers in the Phoenix AMA are satisfying the 100-year assured supply rule.

Thanks, Trump: President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would release some of the more than $6.8 billion in Title funds for schools that he had withheld from states, without notice, as part of a “programmatic review,” per Education Week. The administration is releasing $1.4 billion in Title IV-B funds, which helps support vulnerable students with before- and after-school education. But they’ll have to prove none of that money goes to anything DEI related. Many schools have already cut their programs and the administration is still sitting on another $5.5 billion in federally approved funds for schools. Meanwhile, the state Court of Appeals threw out Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne’s challenge to Arizona schools’ dual-language immersion program, saying Horne lacked standing to sue, the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez writes. Horne is threatening to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

We don’t get federal funds to educate people about Arizona politics and government. So we need you to pitch in if you can.

Blame the media: Kari Lake made campaign stops at the Colt Grill BBQ restaurant in Prescott, which just got busted for a sophisticated scheme to bring undocumented immigrants from Mexico to the U.S., hire them through a cleaning company and sign leases for them. Federal immigration officials arrested the owners and raided six locations, including the one in Prescott that Lake campaigned at, per the Republic’s Daniel Gonzales.

"It’s telling that The Arizona Repugnant — which refused to publish my op-ed calling this crisis an ‘invasion’ and didn’t cover the border crisis adequately for years — only now cares about illegal immigration so they can score political points against me,” Lake said.

Careful what you wish for: As the Trump administration starts hiring thousands more ICE agents, Border Patrol agents and customs officers, they should remember the disastrous hiring sprees that followed big-time cash influxes for border enforcement under previous administrations, Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes. Those sprees led to arrests for misconduct and corruption, including a Border Patrol agent in Tucson who also was a murderous drug dealer. Meanwhile, Willcox Border Patrol Agent Bart Conrad Yager was arrested last month for 24 felonies, including 10 counts of child sex trafficking, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports.

Today in real U.S. Senators of Arizona…