Berea, KY — For years, Christy Johnson spent almost her entire paycheck on child care.
Johnson is a preschool teacher at the Child Development Lab, a child care center that’s part of the Child and Family Studies program at Berea College in Kentucky. She and her husband have three children. Their youngest son attends the center.
She’s been working with kids at the CDL for the last seven years and loves her job. But for many years, it was hard to make ends meet with her low pay.
After child care costs, all her salary covered was her car payment.
“I couldn’t afford to help my husband pay any other bills,” she said.
In 2022, the Johnsons’ financial situation improved when Kentucky became the first state in the country to offer a child care subsidy to providers. The subsidy covers the cost of child care for staff who work in licensed child care programs across the state.
“If they ever took it away, it’d probably be the worst mistake that Kentucky ever made,” Johnson said.
Sarah Durham, family and community services coordinator at the Child Development Lab, called turnover and staffing shortages in child care a nationwide crisis.
“You can’t get people to work in child care because a lot of it is underpaid and you’re overworked,” she said.
Child care centers everywhere struggle with thin profit margins and high staff turnover. The benefits they offer are typically slim-to-none. That makes it hard to attract and retain good staff without raising salaries — something providers usually can’t afford without passing that cost on to families.
Child care workers are among some of the lowest paid professionals in the country with an average hourly wage of $15.41 last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“People don’t say, ‘When I grow up, I want to work at Target and stock shelves’,” said Sarah Vanover, policy and advocacy director for Kentucky Youth Advocates.
“Many people say, ‘when I grow up, I want to work with kids,’ but if the salary doesn’t allow them to support their own family, then they’re going to leave,” she added.
‘We’re keeping qualified teachers in the field’
The idea for Kentucky’s expanded child care subsidy took root during the pandemic. Preschool teachers were leaving their jobs in droves and many child care centers were closing. Vanover, then the director of the Kentucky Division of Child Care, was searching for a solution.
What if we could waive their child care? she wondered. Would it be enough to bring them back?
“Private child care programs have been waiving tuition to get staff for years,” said Vanover.
“Centers were giving up some income in order to get staff. My idea was, what if we could do that for the staff, but the center didn’t have to lose the money?”
To implement free child care for child care workers, Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Care adapted the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, which helps low income families afford care. It mandated an exemption to the program’s income limit for licensed child care providers and their employees and utilized about $10 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to fund the program’s expansion.
Kentucky’s Chamber of Commerce partnered with Vanover’s office to push for the budget adjustment.
“It had a really powerful effect on staffing, which has a big impact on business capacity, and therefore helps more families get into the workforce,” Vanover said.
There is one significant exception to the program. Parents cannot receive funding to care for their own children. To qualify, child care must take place outside their own homes, or in a different classroom at the same center where a parent works — so in-home providers caring for their own children don’t qualify.
Ohio lawmakers considering similar initiative
Today, about one-third of the teaching staff at the Child Development Lab in Berea receive the subsidy.
“We’re keeping our qualified teachers in this field,” said Tammy Carter, CDL’s daily operations director, who noted that young women make up a majority of the child care workforce.
“A lot of those young women either already have young children or they’re planning to have them.”
Cindy McGaha is the CDL’s program and curriculum director. She said the subsidy has helped reduce turnover, which strengthens the quality of the program.
“To maintain relationships, you’ve got to have consistent staff. We’ve been able to do that by keeping staff longer,” said Cindy McGaha said, program and curriculum director at the CDL. “Also the staff that we have are less stressed, not worrying about the cost of child care.”
According to the Alliance for Early Success, about a dozen other states have passed similar legislation or are considering it, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arizona, and Iowa.
Ohio legislators recently introduced a bill to provide free child care to child care workers. It’s currently under review in the Child and Human Services Committee.
Meanwhile, Kentucky officials say they are closely watching child care program staffing and child enrollment numbers to see how this subsidy has impacted the child care system throughout the state.
The results look promising.
Beth Fisher, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said in an email that the number of child care workers who have received the subsidy has steadily increased from 813 childcare employees in 2022 to more than 5,400 in 2025.
Since 2022, provider capacity growth has been significant, she added.
“Kentucky now has more than 2,000 licensed and certified centers statewide, with available slots rising from approximately 160,000 in 2022 to nearly 169,000 in 2025,” Fisher said.
Kentucky legislator: Supporting child care workers helps get more families in the workforce
In 2024, Kentucky’s subsidy for childcare workers was one of several pandemic-era investments the state continued to funding after the ARPA money ran out.
To ensure the program’s existence, the state passed House Bill 6, which included a $60 million child care investment, the first of its kind in the state’s history, according to legislators.
Those funds include a $26.25 allocation over two years to continue helping child care teachers with their own child care costs.
Vanover said Kentucky’s legislature tends to be frugal and fiscally conservative. She believes lawmakers got on board because the provision ultimately bolsters the economy.
“Our senate chair for appropriations told me, ‘You know, I’m really excited about this free child care for the child care providers, because it’s different than just throwing money at a problem. It shows a return on investment, and it’s going to get more families in the workforce,’” she said.
Kentucky Sen. Danny Carroll said states must find long-term solutions to challenges facing the child care sector.
“A lot of states are setting up trusts and things like that. I think that’s the way to go,” he said.
“We can’t do it budget to budget. There has to be some permanency to it for entrepreneurs to buy in, and for expansion in the areas that we need,” he added. “It’s going to have to be sustainable. We need to commit to it and quit dancing.”