MONDAY, MAY 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY CASEY PARKSGov. Michelle Lujan Grisham
(D) announced Thursday that
New Mexico will cover the costs
of child care for most residents
through June 2023. The benefit,
which covers families earning up
to 400 percent of the federal
poverty level, makes New Mexico
the first state to offer no-cost care
over such a broad range of in-
comes, officials said.
“It’s free, no more co-pays, no
more waiting,” Lujan Grisham
said to a crowd of preschoolers at
East Gate Kids Learning Center
in Albuquerque. “This is the road
to a universal child-care system.”
The median household income
in New Mexico is $51,243. Under
the new program, which began
May 1, a family of four earning up
to about $111,000 would be eligi-
ble for free child care. The state
recently expanded a federal
child-care subsidy to middle-
class families. On Thursday, Lu-
jan Grisham said it would elimi-
nate co-pays for them, too. Offi-
cials estimate both changes will
make child care free for a total of
30,000 families.
Advocates welcomed the ini-
tiative at a t ime when families a re
still recovering from the eco-
nomic fallout of the pandemic
and are grappling with rising
prices. “It is hard to overstate the
impacts of ensuring that all fami-
lies can afford great child care,”
said Amber Wallin, executive di-
rector of New Mexico Voices for
Children, an advocacy group. “It
helps our families. It helps our
workforce. It helps our business-
es. It’s such an important step
forward for New Mexico, and it
comes at a t ime when families are
in real need of any economic
relief.”
Mario Cardona, the chief of
policy and practice for Child Care
Aware of America, a nonprofit
that advocates for affordable
child care, called the announce-
ment “the type of thing that we
should be seeing across the coun-
try.”
Though other states, including
Georgia, Virginia and Kansas,
have expanded eligibility and
made child care more affordable
during the pandemic, none have
gone as far as New Mexico, which
has committed a historic and
unusual amount of resources to
the sector, Cardona said. Other
states have largely relied on fed-
eral relief from the Cares Act and
the American Rescue Plan Act to
pay for child-care improvements,
but the last of those dollars ex-
pires in 2024 and lawmakers may
be hesitant, Cardona said, to roll
out new programs using tempo-
rary money.
New Mexico, by contrast, has
created permanent pots of mon-
ey. In early 2020, the state spent
$300 million to create its Early
Childhood Education and Care
Fund. The endowment, which
draws on taxes from oil and
natural gas production, is pro-
jected to be worth $4.3 billion by
2025.
That dedicated fund “has al-
lowed us to think big now with
the federal dollars,” said Eliza-
beth Groginsky, the Cabinet sec-
retary for early-childhood educa-
tion. “The reason this was so
important right now is we’ve seen
for all families the rising cost of
gas, food, all the things, and so we
said we’ve got to use these federal
relief dollars to help families
right now because they want to
go back to work. We need them to
go back to work. And we have to
remove barriers that are prohib-
iting people, especially women,
coming back into the workforce.”
Melissa Martinez, a single
mother of a 3-year-old son and a
4-year-old daughter, said the
news came as a great relief after
the pandemic. Martinez said she
has experienced tremendous fi-
nancial setbacks over the past
two years and has found herself
unable to afford child care at
times. The co-pay waiver will save
her $120 a month.
“Unfortunately, $120 does go
really far in a single-income
household,” Martinez said. “That
goes to pretty much all of our
necessities, basic necessities like
shampoo. You would be sur-
prised how many bottles of soap
I’ve been through because my
little guys love to play in thebath.”
Martinez volunteers with OLÉ,
a nonprofit coalition of families
and early-childhood educators,
and she said she has met dozens
of low-income families who have
long been afraid to earn moremoney because they worried they
would no longer qualify for the
federal child-care subsidies
states give low-income parents.
By expanding the eligibility for
the program, Martinez said, she
and other parents will feel em-powered to look for better-paying
jobs.
Still, Martinez said, even with
the waiver, she worries she won’t
be able to find child care. She
lives in Albuquerque but works in
Santa Fe, and the providers she
has called all have waiting lists.
Lujan Grisham also said
Thursday that the state will
spend $10 million in discretion-
ary funds from the American
Rescue Plan to expand the state’s
supply of day cares. The state will
offer grants to business owners
who either want to expand exist-
ing child-care centers or create
new ones.
Parents, providers and activ-
ists have been pushing policy-
makers for nearly a decade to
improve the state’s early-child-
hood programs. New Mexico of-
ten falls at t he bottom in rankings
for child well-being, and in 2018,
when Lujan Grisham was run-
ning for governor, the Annie E.
Casey Foundation deemed the
state the worst in the nation for
child well-being.
“For so many years, we werejust told we can’t d o that, we can’t
do that,” Wallin said.
In 2018, OLÉ and the legal
group New Mexico Center on Law
and Poverty filed suit against the
state’s Children Youth and Fami-
lies Department, alleging that the
state arbitrarily and illegally de-
nied families access to child-care
assistance. Lujan Grisham set-
tled with the plaintiffs last year.
As a candidate for governor in
2019, Lujan Grisham promised to
make child care affordable for
more New Mexicans. In July
2020, she established the New
Mexico Early Childhood Educa-
tion and Care Department as a
Cabinet-level position. Since
then, the department has ex-
panded its subsidy program to
bring in more families and
waived co-pays for families who
earn up to 200 percent of the
federal poverty level. It also in-
creased the subsidy rates that it
pays providers by basing them on
how much it costs to provide
care, as opposed to the more
commonly used method of bas-
ing them on a percentage of
market rates. This year, it also
became one of a handful of states
to roll out its own state child tax
credit.
Lujan Grisham said that while
the announcement is significant,
it’s not enough. New Mexico still
ranks near the bottom for child
well-being, a reality she ascribed
to the state’s high poverty levels
and a lack of action on behalf of
past governors. The only way to
improve the state’s rankings, Lu-
jan Grisham said, is to give fami-
lies financial support. She hopes
to pay for universal no-cost child
care using roughly $127 million a
year from the state’s multibillion-
dollar Land Grant Permanent
Fund, but voters must first ap-
prove a constitutional amend-
ment this fall to allow the state to
use the endowment on early-
childhood education.
At the news conference, she
said she wished the state was able
to provide free child care to many
more families. “But what you
should hear and feel is that this is
the path to that reality. And we
are the only state in the nation
that is leaning in to make that
happen,” she said. “We can and
will be first in the country to
achieve this incredible goal.”N.M. to o≠er a year of free child care to most residents
Plan makes state f irst to
provide benefit over such
a broad income rangeMELISSA MARTINEZ
Melissa Martinez, a single mother who lives in Albuquerque, said the a nnouncement will save her $
a month — money she plans to use for basic necessities for her son and daughter, ages 3 and 4.MORGAN LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), seen speaking in
March, called the plan “the road to a universal child-care system.”CO-ORGANISATORS FOUNDING PARTNERSBOOK YOUR PASS ON VIVATECHNOLOGY.COMACCELERAACCELERATE YOUR BUSINESS. TE YOUR BUSINESS.25% OF ANNU25% OF ANNUAL LEADS GENERAAL LEADS GENERATED DURING THE EVENTTED DURING THE EVENT..EUROPE’S BIGGEST STARTUP & TECH EVENTSAVE UP TO 25% OFF YOUR PASS(BEFORE MAY 10)