Letter to Chairman Blunt and Ranking Member Murray - Childcare Access and Affordability Push

Letter

Dear Chairman Blunt and Ranking Member Murray:

As you work to finalize the Fiscal Year 2018 appropriations bill, we request that you provide significant new funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. The CCAMPIS program helps to meet the urgent needs of student parents enrolled in higher education who are working to attain a college degree or workforce training to provide economic security for themselves and for their children.

Within the recent agreement to raise overall spending caps was a commitment to invest an additional $2 billion in each of the next two fiscal years on "student-centered programs that aid college completion and affordability." This new investment provides a historic opportunity to address some of the vast demand for on-campus child care from millions of students who are parents. Student parents experience the tremendous pressure of college costs for both themselves and their families and struggle to pay for child care services on top of tuition, fees, food, rent, books, supplies, transportation, and other costs.

To help address these challenges, the CCAMPIS program supports campus-based child care programs primarily serving the needs of low-income students. Approximately 1.4 million Pell Grant recipients today have with children between the ages of 0 and 5, and 4.8 million students in higher education have dependent children. Among single parents with children, 88 percent have incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Unfortunately, most students are not able to access existing child care programs, their options are often unaffordable, and child care centers located on campus are rare or often have substantial wait lists. Additionally, the current levels of funding for CCAMPIS are only able to meet a tiny fraction of student demand for accessible and quality on-campus child care.

We hope that you will consider a significant increase to the CCAMPIS program as part of the FY 2018 appropriations measure and use a sizeable portion of the new $2 billion in college affordability funding to help meet the needs of student parents. The Administration has also proposed to increase CCAMPIS funding to $50 million for FY 2018, and we ask that you substantially exceed this amount. Providing adequate child care resources to student parents will help to improve both college completion and affordability. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

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