Child Care

St. Louis City/County
Area Resources for Community and Human Services

 

Core Result: Parents Working
Benchmark: Access to Child Care

 

February 2002

Objectives:
To increase the number of school-age children served in no cost / low-cost childcare, from 300 to 620, by the end of the 2002 fiscal year.

Population targeted:
Families with school age children in neighborhoods served by Caring Communities schools.

Strategies:
Low and moderate-income parents must contend with a number of barriers to finding employment and accruing job tenure. Among the most difficult is the challenge of providing a continuity of supervision for their school -age children, while they meet their job obligations during business hours. Once children reach school age, parents have a responsibility to insure that they are well supervised in safe and secure environments during those hours immediately before and after school.

The approach taken included:

• Organize community engagement forums to determine potential expansion locations, where other ARCHS/Caring Communities Sustainable Neighborhoods activity is already in place.
• Leverage additional in-kind contributions (custodial services, space, utilities, payroll functions, extended hours of operation) within St. Louis Public School facilities.
• On-site screening for identifying potential target population, done in connection with assessments of student and family needs.
• Make access to service convenient for target population by utilizing the St. Louis Caring Communities concept to greater benefit the needs of working parents.

Results: The current enrollment is 371, which indicates that we are making steady progress toward our target.

Note: number enrolled may exceed the number of slots due to turnover during the period recorded

Funding:
Services through ARCHS/St. Louis Caring Communities Pre-employment Training Component compliment Latchkey and Welfare to Work Initiative efforts, providing a multi-layered approach to removing barriers to employment. Most funding is public, due to the state’s policy commitment to reduce the cost of public assistance (through welfare reform) and to increase the overall level of employment in the state over a short period of time.

Barriers:
Meeting targets for additional child care service depends on the success of new capacity development efforts. Reductions in state funding levels have had the effect of limiting the number of new child care slots. An additional barrier is the persistently low child care worker compensation levels, which make recruitment and retention of competent staff very difficult.