Early Ed Act reforms being implemented: Department of Early Education and Care is updating regulations for the Child Care Financial Assistance Program

In 2024, the Massachusetts legislature passed a suite of policy reforms through the FY2025 budget which advocates had been pushing for since 2020. These included increasing income eligibility for the Child Care Financial Assistance (CCFA) and reducing challenges for eligible families to obtain care. CCFA helps lower income and other eligible families pay for child care and out-of-school time programs The Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) is now proposing changes to CCFA Program Regulations to put these reforms into practice. This is the first step to making these reforms a reality for families. However, for families to feel the impact of these changes, there are additional steps to approve and implement the regulation changes and significant additional state funding is needed for more families to obtain access to reduced-prices care through this program.

Here are the proposed regulation changes and what they mean for families in practice:

If you want to review the complete changes to the regulations, you can find them on the Department of EEC’s website here. There will be a virtual public meeting on April 3, 2025, at 6:00pm where anyone can share live feedback. More information on the meeting is available here. The public comment period is for 60 days. Written comments are due by April 15, 2025, at 5:00pm.