| 2 |
021015 |
htm |
PioneerP |
Serious Child Care Support
- New parents need seriously subsidized day care
- "Have you figured out what you'll do with the baby once you go back
to work?''
- the average cost of day care
for an infant in Ramsey County is $12,000
- U.S. Department of Education's Early
Education Finance Demonstration Project has given the Greater Minneapolis
Day Care Association a $350,000 grant to come up with some solutions, possibly
college-style financing for little kids.
- After all, unlike the heavily subsidized state university system,
early child-care costs rest entirely on parents,
- more than 70 percent of
mothers of young children are in the work force
- This may explain why I am No. 144 on a waiting list for the infant
room at a highly recommended college campus day- care center. The staff says
the list is now three years long, which is why the woman who is No. 143 is
not yet pregnant.
- This may also explain why I wept at one day-care center we visited,
where the children had runny noses and rasping coughs, and half the staff
stood outside in the cold taking an indifferent cigarette break.
- And yet, if child-care costs continue to spiral - they've already
gone up by 58 percent in the last decade, double the inflation rate
|