Jessica Dufort, Jennifer Elliott, Eashwayne Haughton, Kevin Keys, Amanda Parker
Equitable access to high quality, safe, and affordable child care is a necessity for healthy children and families. A family who secures quality dependable child care is able to simultaneously meet the needs of their children and be a productive member of the workforce. Access to child care in New Jersey is currently not equitable or affordable.
The current state of child care is filled with inequities because of policy decentralization, high cost for families, lack of funding for providers, and non-competitive salaries for employees. The overriding result of decentralizing child care policies is that eligibility for subsidized child care is geographically uneven (Black, 2020), meaning not every family in need is able to access quality child care.