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Initially, the Let’s Grow Kids team wondered if they should take a hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic and stop working on their plans for child care infrastructure, given the uncertainty and enormity of what they were facing.��

But, almost immediately, they began hearing from child care providers who needed their help. And they realized that Let’s Grow Kids was in the best position to respond and take action.��

Well before the pandemic shut down the country, Let’s Grow Kids had a strong presence in the lives of early educators. Much of this traces back to the original initiatives: Vermont Birth to Three, Vermont Birth to Five, and the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children. These groups had worked with child care providers to improve quality. Their work had been so successful in bringing more child care providers into the Quality Rating and Improvement System, which the state used as a quality metric, that Vermont’s state government contracted with Vermont Birth to Five to run the entire statewide professional development system for child care from January 2017 to February 2018. Let’s Grow Kids had also seen significant success with its Make Way for Kids grants, which gave child care providers access to capital to expand their programs and create new slots. The Make Way for Kids grants were funded by philanthropy for the first year, but when Vermont’s Child Development Division, the state agency overseeing child care, saw that the program was effective, funding was appropriated by the state legislature to continue the program.��

So when COVID-19 hit, Let’s Grow Kids had over a decade of experience working with child care providers and had spent years building a field team of nine organizers across the state.��

Vermont is the sixth smallest state in the country by geographic size. Most locations within the state are only a few hours away from each other by car. Yet having nine program staff working in the field was the right number. Because when the pandemic shut down the state, Vermont—like every other state in the country—was about to learn just how vital child care is to the economy and to family stability. They would need each and every member of the Let’s Grow Kids field team to make sure child care providers and the families they served had what they needed.

“We knew what was needed,” said Sherry Carlson, who served as Let’s Grow Kids’ chief program officer. Carlson had extensive experience as an early educator; for two decades she was the director of early childhood programs for the Greater Burlington YMCA. When Rick Davis brought her on board as a consultant in 2008 for what was then the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children, Carlson hadn’t expected to stay long, let alone eventually step into a full-time role.��

As the programmatic work began to take on an even bigger role, so did Carlson. Her experience as a leader in early childhood education gave her insight into what providers would need in the time of a crisis, even one as unprecedented as COVID-19.

Let’s Grow Kids partnered with Vermont’s Child Development Division to make sure essential workers had access to child care. Erin Roche, who worked on Carlson’s team, set up a database using a Google form that essential workers could fill out if they needed child care. Each day, Roche and her team downloaded requests, reported them to the state, and helped match people with available spaces. They also created a partnership with Vermont Community Foundation and New England Federal Credit Union (now EastRise) to offer low-cost or no-cost loans, if child care providers needed access to immediate funding. This was crucial in the early days of the pandemic emergency, when many providers paused collecting tuition from families but still had rent and salaries to pay.��

��“Thirty percent of the child care programs in Vermont never closed at all,” said Carlson. Within a handful of days, Republican Gov. Phil Scott provided an outline for what , and child care programs pivoted to providing care only for children of essential workers.��

“We pivoted right away to focus on the 30 percent,” said Carlson. Let’s Grow Kids had strong business and philanthropic connections and was able to help with sourcing materials like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and gloves, which fell into short supply in the immediate weeks following the shutdown. Child care providers would fill out a form, detailing the supplies they needed. Let’s Grow Kids would find the supplies, and a program staffer would deliver them to their doorsteps, at no cost to the providers. One of their business connections had access to a fleet of trucks and was able to help move supplies around the state.

Delivering much-needed supplies to child care providers did more than just keep child care programs open. It deepened the relationships between Let’s Grow Kids and the providers, some of whom had been skeptical of the group’s efforts to overhaul a system they saw as intractable. Providers had good reason to be skeptical: Despite that showed support for child care, at the time there was no statewide precedent in the country for significant investment in child care infrastructure, and historically, federal efforts to invest in child care had been , , or .

By August 2020, 76 percent of Vermont’s child care programs were back open, according to . Sourcing supplies became easier, and Let’s Grow Kids phased out doorstep delivery programs. They could see that their work had served its purpose. Child care programs would remain open, and the connections forged during the early months of the pandemic had “exponentially expanded our network of supporters,” said Carlson.��

Vermont, like all states, began to see federal money from pandemic relief. First, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 provided supplemental Child Care and Development Block Grant funding for states. Then, in 2021, substantial funds came from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which had both supplemental Child Care and Development Block Grant funds and, the first of its kind, child care stabilization grants. Let’s Grow Kids, utilizing its network, acted as advisors to the state CDD to create an application process for child care programs to access the grants.��

The Let’s Grow Kids team soon realized that many providers needed their encouragement and support to apply, recalled Carlson. Child care providers were not used to receiving government funds in such an unfettered way. The CDD gave Let’s Grow Kids a list of the programs that hadn’t yet been applied for. The team would reach out, explaining the unusual nature of ARPA and why child care programs that intended to stay open should apply for funding.��

“We would help people apply, we put on webinars, and sent it through our large distribution list to get the information out,” said Carlson. Some providers weren’t accustomed to using email or video services like Zoom, so they spent time helping early childhood programs access technology. This was particularly crucial for providers that relied on a system of receiving paper checks from parents. Shifting to electronic payments, which didn’t require a check drop-off, was a game changer. They were able to convince all but one to apply for the funds. Vermont had for child care funding through the on child care programs and stabilization (approximately $29 million in stabilization grants and $18 million in child care block grants), helping about .��

As the emergency phase of the pandemic subsided and life began to resume a cadence more similar to pre-pandemic times, not all child care programs resumed the same operations they had prior to March 2020. Many lost staff, Carlson noted, and while most reopened, they did so at reduced hours, such as closing at 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., or with capacity for fewer children if they didn’t have enough staff to keep all their classrooms open.¹ The reduced hours were a particular equity issue, said Carlson. “The people who can get their kids at 4 p.m. are the ones with easy, white-collar jobs. It’s people in the service industry who get locked out.”

COVID-19 had also helped create a new cadre of business champions who were able to witness firsthand how the lack of child care hobbled their employees, and thus their own businesses. Let’s Grow Kids had made the determination to continue with the planned legislative strategy even during the shutdown and emerged with stronger relationships with both the business community and the provider community heading into the 2021 legislative session.��

By 2021, Let’s Grow Kids had six years of relationships with providers and legislators, strengthened by their work during the pandemic as organizers of personal protective equipment and federal pandemic-relief funding. The team was ready to approach the legislature with what would be an ambitious stage-setting ask: legislation that would begin to build the foundation for robust child care infrastructure.��

“COVID became about how do we get people to work? You have to have child care,” said Adam Necrason, Let’s Grow Kids’ lobbyist. “Child care is essential, and ‘essential’ became the one word [we used].”

It had been over a year since Kenney, Ramos, and Necrason had pivoted to Zoom meetings and texting with legislators about what could be done to ameliorate the ongoing child care crisis. Legislators had been hearing from child care programs in their area and from parents—some had their own child care crises to contend with—and wanted to do something. This was when they came up with a three-year mini campaign to pass transformative legislation with big investments, as Kenney described it.��

“We didn’t know why the system didn’t work,” said Ramos. Legislators understood there was a problem in child care, but there wasn’t official state documentation of how many kids were involved or how many needed care but couldn’t access it. “What needs to happen in the system so that it’s strong and can handle these investments?”

In 2021, Let’s Grow Kids had six : expand child care subsidies, increase compensation for early educators, expand access to care, modernize the technology required to run such a system, streamline early childhood administrative oversight, and identify a long-term funding plan.

Expanding the subsidies was part of the larger plan to continue to widen the eligibility so that more families qualified for state assistance.² The legislature agreed to provide an additional $5.5 million for the state’s child care subsidy system. That money allowed for increases in eligibility, the reimbursement rate, and the number of families who could access child care without co-pays. Eligibility for child care subsidies was raised from 300 percent of the poverty level to 350 percent (it would later move up to 575 percent ). Providers would , more in line with the most recent market rate survey data, conducted annually by the state. They also changed how family co-pays are calculated by the Child Care Financial Assistance Program. Now, family co-pays would be calculated solely on the youngest child, meaning that families with multiple children in care would have no co-pays for older children and see significant cost savings.³ In addition, more lower-income families would receive full payment for child care, with no co-pays at all.��

Second, the legislators agreed to spend $4.5 million to modernize IT systems. The IT infrastructure that the state used to administer the child care subsidies had been built on Microsoft Access and was unable to do the calculations necessary to increase eligibility or make other changes to the program. An later described the state’s child care information system as “an outdated system that lacks modern functionality.” Any major changes would need a serious overhaul of the existing IT systems to be successful. The legislature had added $1 million in funding for an IT systems upgrade in 2019, but that had primarily been used for a systems survey by the state CDD—which learned it would cost more than $4 million to do a proper system update.��

Third, the bill included $2.5 million in workforce stabilization initiatives, including scholarships for current and prospective early educators and a new student loan repayment support program.

Finally, the legislators provided $200,000 for a systems analysis of Vermont’s early childhood education system and granted authorization to hire a contractor for a financing study. Though the reimbursements were the immediate shot in the arm that child care providers and families needed, it was the studies that the legislative team knew would be necessary for the way forward. They would produce critical information for the state to help shape a child care program, such as the economic impacts, overall potential costs, and potential financing mechanisms.

But the biggest outcome of H.171, according to Kenney, was that it set goals for the state: no family spending more than 10 percent of their income on child care, child care providers receiving compensation that is commensurate with peers in other fields, and a true cost of care model instead of one based on lower market rates.

Nationally, attitudes on child care were beginning to shift. The pandemic pulled child care out of the shadows and gave it new attention as a major economic issue that impacts employees, businesses, and communities. Attitudes and understanding were changing: showed 80 percent of voters viewed support for child care as a good investment, including over 60 percent of Republicans.

State lawmakers described their own challenges affording child care and the toll taken on staff who worked in the field. On the floor of the state Senate, Sen. Christopher Pearson of the Vermont Progressive Party spoke of bumping into one of his children’s former preschool teachers, only to discover she had left the profession.

“She left working at preschool—a job she loved—to bus tables. She could make more money busing tables than looking after my kid. That’s criminal,” .

“Everyone had a front-row seat to the crisis in child care and it was impacting their constituents and some legislators so directly that they had to do something,” said Kenney. “It was a relatively low price tag,” Kenney said of H.171. “It helped that there was a lot of federal pandemic funding coming into the state so the state budget was flush and the bill didn’t involve any additional taxes.”

H.171 had little to no opposition: It passed unanimously in the Senate and with only a single no vote in the House. The words “freaking idiot” can be heard when the no vote was cast, in what appeared to be an unintentional slip on a live microphone (it was still the early days of Zoom).⁴ But the offhand insult was meaningful to the Let’s Grow Kids team. “It was becoming obvious to so many legislators that the smart thing to do was to vote for child care, regardless of party,” said Kenney.��

On June 1, 2021, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed H.171 into law.

Passing child care bills like H.171—measures that didn’t require additional taxes—was one thing. Building a system with a dedicated funding source was something else entirely. Let’s Grow Kids continued to publish its Stalled at the Start report every other year, but had so far avoided proposing options for revenue generation, specifically raising taxes.

Raising taxes was a political nonstarter. Gov. Phil Scott had vowed to veto any tax increase, and the business community was unlikely to support one. While goodwill toward child care had surged during the emergency phase of the pandemic, it was unclear whether that support would endure. Would business leaders continue to see child care as an economic necessity once the crisis faded?

There was only one way to find out.

To pass anything that resembled a tax increase, Let’s Grow Kids would need more than kind words and token support for child care providers. They would need more than laments about people leaving the field to bus tables or tales of parents stressed by children at home interrupting Zoom calls. They would need the business community to come fully on board as outspoken advocates ready to testify that this investment made economic sense.��

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, they set out to organize the business community and build that case.