Kenney/Stephen: The $15 Million We Promised New Hampshire's Child Care Professionals

By John Stephen and Joe Kenney, NH Journal

Every conversation about the New Hampshire Advantage arrives at workforce, and every conversation about workforce arrives at child care. A parent who cannot find care cannot take the job. A business that cannot staff its shifts does not expand. There is no version of this state’s economic future that does not run through a child care program, and too many of those classrooms are sitting empty right now for want of a teacher to stand in one.

The inability to build adequate child care capacity is one reason New Hampshire’s workforce has yet to return to the levels it reached before the pandemic. That shortfall means missed opportunities for professionals, families, and employers.

It is worth being precise about the shape of that problem. New Hampshire is not short of buildings, licenses, or curricula. Programs across the state are keeping rooms closed that they are licensed to open because the people who used to work in them left for jobs that paid better and asked less of them. Every statewide survey of the field since 2020 has come back with the same two priorities at the top: keeping the staff you have and finding the staff you need. Nothing else has come close.

The legislature understood that. In 2023, it appropriated $15 million for grants paid directly to child care employers to do exactly those two things. That first round reached programs more than a year late, and directors put it toward retention bonuses, raises and help with health insurance. When lawmakers asked whether it had worked, providers came to Concord and told them it had. The legislature responded by funding the program again in 2025 with an additional $15 million in the current state budget.

That second round has never arrived. Not one dollar has reached a single child care program.

What did arrive at the Executive Council in May was a request from the Department of Health and Human Services for another $1.3 million for workforce development for existing child care professionals. It was money to train professionals in material many of them already knew, rather than money to make their pay competitive.

The contract in question already carried $2.4 million and ran through June 2028. It was operating, was fully funded, and was the second time in nine months the department had asked to add to it.

We voted no, and we would vote the same way again. Nothing about that vote interrupted a single training session. The coaches kept their positions, quarterly quality payments to participating programs have gone out on schedule, and Granite Steps for Quality remains intact. Two of its three tracks were untouched, and the one affected track drew the least participation from the field.

The obvious question is why a department carrying an unmet $15 million obligation to child care professionals was at our table asking to add money to something that was already funded. The answer we have received every time is that the federal government will not permit the workforce grants. Legislators from both parties asked to see that refusal in writing. They asked again, but the documentation never came.

So, we wrote to Washington ourselves, and officials there answered. They said federal child care dollars can be spent on bonuses and retention payments for the child care workforce. A lawful route to fund these grants was available to New Hampshire, and there is more than one way to get there.

Roughly 7,000 people work in early childhood education in this state, with median annual earnings of about $34,500. Spread among them, $15 million comes to more than $2,000 apiece over the two years of the budget. That is close to a 6% raise and, for a good many of them, the difference between staying in the field and leaving.

Each program would decide how best to use the money, whether as a signing bonus, a raise or help with the cost of health insurance, because employers are the ones who know what their people need.

None of this is a question of the state’s capacity. The Department of Health and Human Services is operating on $7.1 billion this biennium, and $15 million amounts to two-tenths of 1% of that.

We are working on this alongside Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who has led the charge on child care access since the day she took office. She has said plainly that access to care matters as much to the quality of life in this state as housing does, and she has backed it up. She signed the new Child Day Care Creation Tax Credit to encourage employers to invest in care for their own workforces, opened the child care scholarship program to grandparents raising their grandchildren and pushed to clear the zoning barriers that keep new programs from opening their doors.

That is the right agenda, and delivering the $15 million the legislature has already appropriated belongs on it.

We are told the training contract will come back to the Executive Council, and our answer will be the same one we gave in May. That program is funded through 2028, and it will keep running. Not another dollar should be added until the department can tell the Council how it intends to deliver the money the legislature appropriated to recruit and retain professionals. Training has real value, and so does keeping the people you would otherwise be training.

Solve child care, and New Hampshire’s workforce problem gets considerably smaller—and the Advantage this state sells itself on holds. Leave it unsolved, and no tax rate in the country can make up the difference. The money is appropriated, Washington has answered, and the department should act.

Joe Kenney of Wakefield represents District 1 on the Executive Council. John Stephen (R) is the Executive Councilor for New Hampshire District 4. They wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.