In Kansas City, Missouri, There are still delays that hurt the state’s child care business, so Governor Mike Parson is asking the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and its contractors to get government funds to daycare providers faster.
This call to action comes after problems kept happening with a new online system that was supposed to handle these payments.
When it went live in December, the system was overseen by DESE. It was made to make applying for childcare funding easier by being on the web. Families who want subsidies must use this new Child Care Data System to apply.
The money that is supposed to go to daycare providers will be sent straight to them. However, technical issues have slowed down the system and made it take a long time to process applications. Some applications have been waiting since fall, which means that many daycares are short on money.
There are big effects from these delays. Daycare centers are usually full, but all of a sudden they have a lot fewer kids enrolled as they try to make ends meet. A number of companies have said they have been using their own money to cover costs, and some have even been shutting down.
When Governor Parson talked about the problem, he stressed how important it was to fix the payment problems right away.
“We need to push these contractors to make sure they’re giving us the right information so we can get the money out.” If you have the money, getting it to those people is the only thing that stands in your way. “That’s something we need to do better,” Gov. Parson said earlier this week.
Because of the backlog, DESE has hired more people through a staffing firm to deal with the large number of applications, with the goal of finishing the process by the end of September. The office has also started cross-training more employees to make sure that full and partial payments to vendors are processed faster.
The ongoing payment issues, which are being talked about a lot at two important meetings, are likely to be at the center of attention next week.
The Missouri House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education will meet on Tuesday to work on a plan to make sure that daycare workers get the late payments. On Wednesday, the House Budget Committee will meet next.
This situation shows how hard it is to improve government systems and how those changes can affect basic services like child care.
What happens at the next committee meetings could have a big impact on how quickly and effectively these payment issues are fixed, which will have an effect on many Missouri families and companies.