Child Care Causing Concerns for Parents/Workers

With kids out of school for summer vacation, working parents face the higher seasonal costs of child care. In Washington state, care for a child younger than four can range from eight-thousand to nearly $1,600 a year, which is about the same as in-state tuition for a public college.

A report from Child Care Aware of Washington found the state lost more than 16-hundred child-care providers over the past six years. Carolanne Sanders, a policy associate with the Economic Opportunity Institute, says the low wages child-care workers such as Jones receive are part of the reason for the state's child-care crisis.

"Our child-care workers are overworked, they're underpaid, they're leaving the workforce, and this is having a real detrimental effect on our child-care system as a whole, and it's really straining families to a breaking point."

Sanders says the current system where every family has to fend for itself isn't working and a greater number of public dollars needs to be invested at every level of government, including programs such as Working Connections.

"We need those funds going straight to families, we need those funds going into the centers so that they can open up more slots for low-income families and working families, and we need those funds to be going towards teachers."