Data needed to 'map the gaps' in South Dakota's child care funding

Sep. 21—State legislators, including Rep. Linda Duba from Sioux Falls, Sen. Sydney Davis from Burbank, Sen. Tim Reed from Brookings, attended a Hunt Institute leadership conference on early childhood learning early September.

The solution to filling the need for child care in South Dakota, they found, is not easily attainable. That's why the first step forward is drawing up a good map.

"In order to approach it in a thoughtful, successful way, I think we really need more data to understand all the different funding streams, understand the need, understand where the gaps are, where are the childcare deserts, where is the poverty," Davis said.

The inflated cost of child care has sucked money out of parents' wallets across the country, and a lack of available resources has caused some child care centers and private child care providers to close all over South Dakota.

State and federal funding sources cover $247 million of the of the estimated $347 million price tag for South Dakota's child care system, according to a report on

child care workforce and market rates prepared by the Department of Social Services

.

Even with such a price tag, it's difficult for state agencies, or anyone, to determine whether that money is being used in the most efficient way possible.

"We needed to map out all the sources of funding, where they were coming from, who manages those sources of funding and if they are being leveraged correctly," Duba said.

While the way forward was not immediately clear, the conference, legislators said, was motivating.

"Some of the things they suggested was expanding postpartum Medicaid coverage to a full year," Davis said. "Frankly, there wasn't a whole lot on that list of policy suggestions that we weren't already doing. So that's great news, which is great, but also frustrating in the same breath, because I know our maternal mortality rates are not exactly where we want them to be."

Davis said South Dakota has unique challenges when it comes to child care, such as the disproportionate spread of population between rural and urban areas. Learning more about those segments of the population that experience a chronic shortage of child care might help the agencies responsible for allocating state and federal child care funds to develop a better strategy for meeting families' needs.

Davis said she recognizes how futile "gathering data" can sound to those families who can't find adequate child care.

"That's going to be really frustrating for a lot of people to hear, it's frustrating for me to even hear that as a full-time working mom," Davis said. "But in order for us to offer some solutions, and especially any solutions that have any funding tied to them, we've got to have the information and the data to make sure we're putting our resources and our attention in the right places."

Davis said when her toddler missed out on a lot of social interaction when the COVID-19 pandemic put his first-grade class online. That barrier put an impediment on his and his peers' social skills, like standing in line or raising their hand to talk in class.

"It's like, the whole class was just a little behind on social-emotional regulation and understanding," Davis said.

The summit was about how the trajectory of the child doesn't start in kindergarten, or even pre-K, but from the age of zero. Proper education, mental health care and emotional and social training are all ongoing learning outcomes that exponentially impact children later on in their lives, Duba and Davis said.

When those skills aren't learned early on, they create problems for the child and teachers down the road. Student counselors are reporting more and intensified cases of depression among students, and across the country, teachers are resigning from their positions, citing excessive behavior problems from their students as what pushed them out of the classroom.

The South Dakota Department of Social Services even

started a program to help pay for behavioral health costs for South Dakota childcare providers and employees

, to help them keep doing their jobs while managing the mental health burdens of the profession.

Duba, who attended this summit by herself last year and encouraged her fellow legislators to attend this year, said one of the next steps for improving early childhood learning in the state of South Dakota is getting state agencies, like the Department of Social Services, to cooperate in mapping out those funding streams.

"We need agencies to have skin in the game and participate, as well as legislators, and we may need some external source people like lobbyists who may represent groups that would be impacted by this," Duba said.

A better understanding of the funding streams for child care and the available subsidies for low-income families is the best starting point she and other legislators have for improving early childhood education in the state, she said.

"This isn't something that you just go to and set aside," Duba said. "We've really got to give it all the attention that it deserves."

Duba said she is meeting with those legislators, along with Senior Policy Adviser to the Governor Laura Ringling who also attended the summit, before the summer ends to continue the conversation, and perhaps but forward some ideas to bring to the legislature in the winter.