The Joint House and Senate Health Appropriations Committee met on March 5, 2019.
Child Development and Early Education
Deborah Landry, Fiscal Research provided a presentation on the Division of Child Development and Early Education Base Budget Overview.
One significant legislative action mentioned was the requirement of the Division to develop a separate birth through 2 years of age, star related licenses for child care facilities.
Landry noted that County Departments of Social Services receive 4% of the county’s total child care subsidy allocation for administrative cost or $80,000 whichever is greater. Counties may use up to 2% of their allocation for fraud detection.
65,247 children utilized the Child Care Subsidy in 2018. The waitlist includes over 29,000 children.
NC Pre-K and Smart Start
Deborah Landry, Fiscal Research provided a presentation on NC Pre-K and Smart Start Overview.
NC Pre-K
The NC Pre-K Program had 29,791 slots in 2018-2019. The estimated unmet slot need is 4,219. Private child care centers, public schools, and Head Start are the three participating Pre-K avenues.
There were 33 counties who did not request additional slots for one or more of the following reasons: no waiting list, inability to locate qualified teachers, capacity, no local dollars to supplement state funding.
Smart Start
Smart Start is a network of 75 nonprofit local partnerships that serve all 100 NC counties. $7 million was appropriated for FY 2018-2019 for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. 208,488 children are currently enrolled in the program. 35% of these children are under the age of 5. As of February 2019, 1.46 million books have been mailed to NC kids.