AUSTIN (KXAN) — After Travis County overwhelmingly voted to approve a tax rate hike for affordable child care in November, the county is starting to provide some of those early services this summer and fall, according to recent updates from staff.
The approved 2.5-cent property tax rate increase would generate roughly $75 million for the county in the first year, we previously reported. It will cost the average homeowner roughly $125 in the same time period.
Travis County has previously said the money would do the following:
- Create roughly 1,900 child care slots for babies and toddlers of low-income households
- Create nearly 3,900 after school and summer school slots for elementary-age students
- Create incentives for businesses to create or expand childcare options for employees
When will you see the services?
County staff say they’ve completed one round of public engagement already. They’re also working on putting together a community advisory council, which would start meeting in September.
As for direct services — because of how long it may take to get longer-term operations up and running — county staff say they’re working to pilot short-term investments this summer and into the fall.
“We want to make sure that we’re expanding existing services while we’re procuring the long-term investments,” Pilar Sanchez, county executive for Travis County, said.
Some of those early investments will be:
- Fund child care and out-of-school time slots on the Workforce Solutions waitlist
- Support parents who need to go back to work or do training/go to school
- Expand existing child care programs (for example, temporarily expanding services already offered by Travis County partners or school districts)
“The needs are there now, and we can’t hold on to funds that we have already collected while we know that the needs are there now,” Sanchez said.
Community feedback worked into early investments
Several speakers showed up to a May Travis County Commissioners meeting to talk about the need to expand existing child care services now — particularly for the youngest of children, ages 0-3.
One of those speakers was the executive director of Open Door Preschools, Cynthia Smith McCollum, who said the gap between providing services and the subsidy received by child care providers is getting larger.
“Closing the cost of the quality gap will support that quality improvement that is a goal…it’s very well documented that the quality of an early education classroom is what makes the most significant return on investment for these public dollars,” Smith McCollum said.
Colin Denby Swanson, the executive director of Mainspring Schools, shared similar concerns.
“75% of the families at Mainspring are subsidized one way or the other, which is twice the capacity rate of most other centers because that’s our mission…early education is a stabilizing force,” Denby Swanson said.
Denby Swanson said their waitlist has more than 500 kids on it, 75% of those kids are under the age of three — the school has 95 total slots.
In a meeting several weeks later, Sanchez thanked community members for showing up to speak, and that the county had made changes as a result.
“For example, we’ve moved up our gap funding initiative closer in the timeline than it was before…we’ve also moved up our work with the city of Austin,” Sanchez said.
According to Travis County, the next update from county staff will come July 15.
