Acton will give $3,000 toward child care costs to each eligible family

Originally Appeared in The Boston Globe
By Maggie Scales

July 27, 2023

The town of Acton is giving away $3,000 to eligible families to help pay for child care and after school programs for children ages 13 and under, Town Manager John Mangiaratti announced in a press release Wednesday.

The child care subsidy program for the 2023-2024 school year is funded through $40,000 the town allocated out of COVID relief funds it received through the American Rescue Plan Act, Mangiaratti said. The one-time payment is intended to support parents who are in need of child care, struggling to maintain employment, are currently attending school, or are unemployed but seeking are employment.

The money may be used at any child care program licensed by the Department of Early Education and Care, Extended Day through Acton-Boxborough Community Education, Acton Recreation, and Boys & Girls Club of Assabet Valley in Maynard.

Funding will be distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis, and eligibility is determined using ARPA guidelines based on household size and income, detailed in the application form. Once applications are approved, funds will be paid directly to the child care provider, the press release stated.

Laura Ducharme, Acton’s community services coordinator and the creator of the child care subsidy program, said that money for child care is the “biggest ask” she receives from community members and that this is the second year that the town has been able to provide families with child care funding. The town also gave away funds for 16 families in need of child care support in 2022, and Ducharme said the program has “helped in so many ways.”

“Often times if parents aren’t working it is because of child care,” Ducharme said. “I find that child care is the best way to strengthen families so that parents can go to work, and a lot of families use it for the after-school programs at the public schools.”

One of Ducharme’s goals with the program was to make it easy for community members to apply.

“I wanted to make it easy for families ... We didn’t want to burden them,” Ducharme said. “The application is just a list of checkboxes, so we’ve helped a lot of different types of families from people who are moderate to very needy families.”

Lauren Kennedy, co-president of Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for early education and care policy reform, said that the cost of child care in Massachusetts is “astronomical.”

“The average cost to put an infant into a child care center is more than in-state college tuition, and that is just for one child,” said Kennedy, who is also the wife of former Representative Joseph Kennedy III. “We are looking at costs north of $30,000 to $35,000 to make sure that your kid has an early level learning opportunity and parents can go to work.”

Kennedy said that since the pandemic, many child care centers have reopened their doors, but are not able to enroll as many children as they once did. And without the revenue that comes in from families paying tuition, there are not enough funds to staff an adequate amount of teachers. Because of this, Kennedy said that it is going to take substantial public investment to ensure that care becomes affordable for all families.

“Until we see significant public investment to offset the cost of childcare, we are going to continue to have this broken model where families with privilege and means may be able to find something for their children and families who don’t will struggle,” Kennedy said.