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Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I will start by thanking my colleagues, especially Senator Murray, for organizing this effort and also for her life of being a passionate advocate for kids, especially as an early childhood educator.

And I will start in another way that is a little nontraditional and just be a proud dad. I have three adult children, and I am proud of them all for different reasons. But my middle son, I am proud of him because he is my only Phi Beta Kappa, and he also is an early childhood educator. He decided that working as a childcare provider is what he wants to do, and he has worked in both pre-K classroom settings and also individually for families.

I know how little he makes, 10 years out of college. I know how he loves to find some extra hours where he can make a little bit more. I was excited that he was excited, a few years ago, when he told me that he had picked up extra hours shoveling snow at the pre-K classroom. Because he lives in Minnesota, there is a lot of snow to be shoveled. So on nights or on weekends when there is snow, he is going to make a little bit more by being the snow shoveler, so that kids, parents, and teachers can come safely to school that day.

The stories that I hear traveling around Virginia are the same that my colleagues have shared, but I just want to share two, one from a parent and one from a provider.

Heather is in Fairfax City, in the most populous part of Virginia. Here is what she told us:

One of the reasons my family ended up homeless was because we didn't have access to quality, affordable childcare for our boys when they were little. They also lost access to programs that would allow them to be school-ready.

When I was pregnant with our twins, I was hospitalized for almost 12 weeks, and we couldn't afford childcare for our boys, so my husband would drop them off at the hospital so that he would be able to go to work.

Unfortunately, without access to child care and a hospital being no place for kids to stay all day long, he ended up losing his job, which in turn meant we lost money to provide for ourselves. We had to go on SNAP to have food, and eventually, he lost his business, and we became homeless. . . . One of the biggest contributing factors was the lack of access to affordable child care.

At the time there was not enough space in programs like Head Start. Without access to affordable, quality child care, families are hurting. The lack of access to this vital service has forced families to not be able to go to work, go to school, or even leave kids at home in compromising positions just to be able to put food on the table.

I forgot to include that at this time, we were considered middle class before all this; both my husband and I are college educated. I was working at first, too, but also had to leave my job because we couldn't afford the child care for both of us to work. And my husband is an honorably discharged combat veteran. I meant to add this to help demonstrate how far-reaching this is and to break down myths about who this affects.

Quickly, at the other end of my State in Appalachia, Kristi, the owner of a childcare center in Blacksburg:

Since the pandemic, we have had to decrease the number of families that we were able to serve because we are having such a difficult time with our staffing. Being able to pay early childhood teachers has always been a significant difficulty for us, but since the pandemic, it has [become] tremendous. . . . I think what the Senate needs to understand is that if this industry collapses, and I would say we are very much on the verge of a major collapse, it is going to have a detrimental impact on the workforce [and our economy].

That is why we have to act to restore the childcare funding that created breathing room for our providers and our families, and I stand together with my colleagues to do all we can to support President Biden's request that we have $16 billion in childcare funding at this most critical time.

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