by Dave Ranney, KHI News Service
Officials with the Kansas Department for Children and Families on Tuesday downplayed the likelihood that new federal regulations mean the state will need to alter its approach to licensing child care facilities and helping low-income families find affordable child care.
“We do not believe there’s a conflict, and the feds have not said anything to indicate that they think there is one either,” said Sandra Kimmons, director of economic and employment services for DCF.
Kimmons and Theresa Freed, the department’s director of communications, disputed child care advocates’ concerns that DCF policies are on a collision course with several reform provisions in the federal government’s Child Care and Development Block Grant program.
The grant funds almost $79 million in Kansas programs annually, including $16 million in state funds, $42.2 million in direct federal funds and $20.4 million in funds transferred from the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families allotment, which also comes from the federal government.
Last week the nonprofit group Kansas Action for Children held an informational forum on the reforms, which national experts said are meant to improve quality and ensure low-income families access to services.
According to the experts, states need to be looking for ways to cover the costs complying with the new federal regulations, which call for tightening background checks for child care providers, exposing providers to additional on-site inspections and enacting polices to ensure low-income families have access to child care subsidies.
State reform plans are due March 1, 2016. The reforms are expected to take effect in September 2016.
No one from DCF or from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment attended last week’s KAC-sponsored session. Instead, DCF invited stakeholders to Tuesday’s meeting of the KDHE-led Child Care Licensing Systems Improvement Team.
During the meeting, Karen Beckerman, director of family strengthening services at DCF, assured the advocates in the room that they would be invited to participate in monthly work group meetings that will help DCF and KDHE assemble the state plan. The draft plans, she said, should be available for review in January.
Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of Kansas Action for Children, said much of Tuesday’s meeting was a rehashing of what she and other advocates already knew.
“The good news is that this provided stakeholders with an opportunity to ask questions, of which there were many,” Cotsoradis said. “That was an important conversation to have.”
Cotsoradis disputed assurances from Freed and Kimmons that DCF won’t have to alter its policies. Among other things, she said, the reforms require states to help low-income families pay for child care for at least a year after they’re declared eligible for a subsidy, but DCF policies allow the department to drop families it considers to be uncooperative with state regulations.
The state policies that potentially conflict with the new federal regulations, Cotsoradis said, are spelled out in the HOPE Act, a welfare reform law the Legislature passed earlier this year. DCF has delayed implementation of several parts of the law —including limits on family assistance — for six months.
“The reason we’re raising the red flag is that typically these are things that would be contained in administrative policy that could be quickly changed,” she said. “But when the Legislature chose to put all of that in statute, they made it far less nimble. So if there are conflicts, which we may not find out about until early next year, we’ll have very little time to change it.”
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