The hearing was held in Washington on Wednesday.
Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) co-chaired a bipartisan hearing on Wednesday in Washington which was looking into the Child Care Development Block Grant Act of 2014. “The first bill was under the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990,” she says. “And because of that, we laid the predicate for federal investment but not federal micromanagement of day care.”
A bi-partisan committee of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held the hearing.
According to Mikulski’s office, the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014 is improving the program’s quality, addressing nutritional and physical needs of children in child care settings, and strengthens the coordination and alignment to a more comprehensive early childhood education and care system. It also meets the needs of children with disabilities in the program and provides much needed stability to families, according to a statement from Mikulski’s office.
But Mikulski says the committee will hear from those individuals who are involved in child daycare programs. “This is not one of those hearings which is a spring hazing of people who run the programs. But really to hear what’s working and what needs adjusting,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, our client and our constituent is a child working with the most important child care provider, their parents, and then with those agencies.”
The Child Care Development Block Grant Act of 2014 is meant to help working families provide quality child care. “Child care is one of the most important decisions a parent will make when it comes to raising their children,” she said. “But we live in an age of scrimp and save, where times are tough and budgets are tight.”
Mikulski’s office say more than 1.4-million children are served each month by this program, including 18.000 in Maryland.
The hearing was also co-chaired by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC).