Low-income families struggling to find daycare providers in Missouri

MISSOURI – Some foster parents and low-income families are struggling to find daycare providers.

The issue, according to parents and providers, is that some of these daycares are not receiving the money they are supposed to get from the state of Missouri.

That money comes in the form of subsidy payments from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

OzarksFirst reached out to DESE and they acknowledged there is a problem.

“It’s already at a place where providers are stopping accepting state-paid children and turning them away,” said foster parent Mandy Bunch.

Families we spoke with have spent hours on the phone trying to get answers.

“You have providers that are not wanting to take these kids, and it’s totally understandable because they can’t, they’re not getting subsidy for those kids,” said Jamie Ward, a foster parent in Ozark.

Both Bunch and Ward said they’ve been paying out of pocket for daycare but the state isn’t reimbursing them.

They said the problem started months ago when the state made changes to its website.

“What we’re being communicated is that they’ve created this new software to make it more simple and easier to distribute funds,” Ward said. “And what it has become is just actually a very huge headache.”

OzarksFirst reached out to DESE about the issue (full statement at the end of this article). A spokesperson declined an on-camera interview but the agency acknowledges a few system-wide issues they are working to resolve.

“We were starting to call weekly or biweekly us and our provider, we were getting the same story like, ‘Yes, that’s a problem. We need to fix that.'” Ward said. “But then nothing was actually happening.”

April Thomas owns three daycares in the Monett area. She said her business is losing thousands of dollars a month.

“I am essentially floating the cost of all of my foster kiddos, adopted kids and any kid low income on subsidy,” Thomas said. “I have not been, I have not got a payment for any of them.”

Thomas saID some parents have to make tough choices when it comes to their jobs and daycare for their kids.

“It breaks my heart because I don’t want to turn any of them away,” Thomas said. “But also I have staff to pay and bills to pay.”

OzarksFirst spoke to a few other small daycare providers, who said they are slowly starting to get a few months’ worth of payments back.

The new Child Care Data System (CCDS) allows families and providers to have a web-based, near real-time system to enter and view their information for child care subsidy. DESE’s Office of Childhood (OOC) launched the CCDS in December 2023, and there have been a number of unforeseen challenges during the transition, which involves loading family and provider data from the existing, outdated state systems into the new CCDS. The OOC is working hard to mitigate these issues and sincerely apologizes to the child care providers and families affected.

OOC and its vendors have been focused on addressing the systemwide issues related to provider payments to ensure child care providers can receive accurate subsidy payments as quickly as possible. Payments are now being processed daily for attendance claims and corrections submitted by providers.

While there are a few systemwide issues left to resolve, if a child care provider has attendance claims that have not been processed yet, is most likely because the provider is not yet authorized to provide child care for the family or the provider and/or family account is missing information, which is preventing the payment from being processed. OOC staff are also working to process payment corrections from earlier this year. Most of those issues will require manual fixes by OOC and vendor staff; this work is underway but will take longer to complete due to the high volume of requests in recent months.

OOC continues to communicate with families who need child care assistance to address their account issues and would appreciate media partners sharing this information with viewers/readers as well. There are two primary issues with family accounts in the CCDS:

• Families who had a subsidy account before the CCDS transition in December 2023 must connect their information to their new CCDS account. Families can learn more here.
• Once approved for subsidy, families must select or change their child care provider in their CCDS account. That ensures the child care provider receives subsidy for the correct children. Families can learn more here.

Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

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