A current issue /trend I’m dealing with:

Help!  Obama Care is going to affect quality in my Childcare centers.  I work for a non-profit organization and work to support 26 child care centers.  They function as small businesses, but because they are under the organizations umbrella are subject to Obama Care.   I am currently facing a huge challenge in that starting in January any employees working over 30 hours will have to come under the Health care of our non-profit organization to a tune of $970.00 per month per employee.  Our centers simply can’t afford this, but laying off workers will lead to employees leaving to find other jobs, children seeing several care givers during the day and in general low quality care.  One of my directors asked me, “How do I tell someone who is my best teacher, a single mom who has worked here for 18 years that I am going to cut their hours?”  So I have formed an ADHOC committee to address this issue.  I found a lawyer that will help us for free and a business man and also someone in Human resources.  I really need help and don’t know where to turn because there is so much inaccurate information out there.  Does anyone know of a reliable source for explaining the details of Obama Care?  I am also wondering if anyone else is dealing with a similar issue.  This is a difficult issue because families with small children need health care, but they also need high quality care.  I wish I didn’t have to sacrifice one to get the other.

An article from my web resource:

Zero To Three says policies need to be different and more specifically focused then for preschool children.  Research that shows children with risk factors have a higher incidence of developmental delays and disabilities and these disparities are seen as early as 9 months and widen by 24 months of age.  A difference in language abilities begins to emerge before a child’s first birthday and widens by age 3.4.  This is pretty staggering Data.  Follow the link below if you want to see the chart showing the data.  In addition to supporting overall reform efforts of federal programs, there were a few other ways mentioned that are very specific and crucial to early development that particularly caught my attention:

·         Create a federal Paid Family Leave program that would allow moms to stay with their babies and form attachments. 

·         Increase funding for Early Head Start to double the amount of spaces for infants and toddlers

·         Identify and address developmental needs earlier through developmental screening efforts.

·         Increase access to Early Childhood Mental Health Services

Among these initiatives is one that I have never thought about before, and that is to form a partnership between Early Head Start programs and other childcare centers.  The article did not expand on the details of what this would look like except to say that Head Start would be a model.  I wonder what it would look like and what type of partnership it would be exactly.

Resources

Zero to Three. (n.d) Putting infants and toddlers on the path to school readiness: An agenda for the

administration and 113thCongress. Retrieved June 15, 2013 from http://www.zerotothree.org/public-policy/federal-policy/2013-federal-policy-agenda.pdf