How Kentucky Achieved Bipartisan Childcare Reform
Recent legislation boosts provider benefits, raises subsidy reimbursement rates and removes obstacles for childcare providers in Kentucky.
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States are in a tough bind as they contemplate how to address childcare needs. The extra federal money from the pandemic era is gone just as they are trying to swallow higher spending and cost shifts mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans passed last year. Some states have pulled back on childcare spending, leading to a drop in spots and longer waitlists for the ones that remain.
Amid an often bleak landscape, Kentucky was recently able to pass with bipartisan support, making significant investments in childcare by improving subsidy reimbursement rates, codifying free childcare for childcare providers, requiring training to better support children with special needs and easing regulations that stand in providers’ way.
The state’s effort started in 2024 with the launch of the Kentucky Collaborative on Child Care. The project — a partnership between Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, the Kentucky Chamber Foundation and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Center for Policy and Research — convened 40 childcare advocates and leaders from across Kentucky to meet regularly in 2024 and 2025 to come up with policy recommendations for the legislature to ensure the state’s families have access to high-quality childcare.
Convergence, a national nonprofit that specializes in bringing people together with differing backgrounds and opinions, facilitated the collaborative, which was able to come to consensus on a number of polarizing issues. The nonprofit is “designed for issues where progress has stalled,” noted Mariah Levison, CEO of Convergence.
That was the case in Kentucky. It was among the many states that came to realize how many challenges plague the sector when the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into disarray. There was “a surge in advocacy around childcare,” particularly in 2022, said Charles Aull, executive director of the Center for Policy and Research at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. But while there was a lot of energy and activity around the issue, there wasn’t a shared set of goals. “There was an identified problem, we had a whole bunch of people who cared about the problem, but there wasn’t a whole lot of cohesion among those folks,” Aull said. He added that state lawmakers also understood there was a problem but, because they aren’t subject matter experts, told the advocates that they weren’t sure what exactly should be done to solve it. Some had “issue fatigue,” said Mandy Marler, a childcare lobbyist at Baldwin Consulting who participated in the collaborative.
The group debated a number of childcare solutions over the course of 18 months. Marler came in prepared to fight tooth and nail against any efforts to deregulate childcare, noting that the state already has some of the child-to-staff ratio requirements in the country.
“I had been in so many rooms and so many situations where it was, ‘We’ll just cut regulations and it won’t be a problem or unaffordable anymore,’ ” she said. But she found that “no one was trying to come for our ratios.” Instead, the conversation was about unwinding the red tape that really did get in providers’ way without changing health and safety standards for children, such as allowing microcenters that serve less than 24 children to skip some requirements intended for larger centers like having a playground or cooking meals in-house.
Meanwhile, Gus LaFontaine, another member of the group and co-founder of LaFontaine Early Learning Center — a childcare program in Richmond, Kentucky — was nervous about proposals that would have the government mandate specific training for his staff, rather than leaving the choice to owners like him. But he was eventually able to get on board with earmarking a portion of the 15-hour annual training requirement for childcare providers for helping staff better support children with disabilities. The group’s process required him to “choose wisely the hills you want to die on,” he said. “I came full circle on that topic.”
The strongest disagreement the group had was over bonuses for childcare workers, Levison said. Members couldn’t come to a compromise on the issue, so it was left out of its recommendations. Instead, they prioritized pushing the state to cover the entire cost of childcare for childcare workers — something Kentucky started doing in 2022 and has since caught on in other states but had never been codified by legislation.
“One of the things the group agreed on is it’s so important it should be in statute,” Aull said. “It should be permanent and should be funded.” And while such a program doesn’t offer childcare staff more take-home pay, it saves them a lot of money on the cost of their own children’s care. “We actually did accomplish some wage supplementation without that name on it,” LaFontaine said.
In the end, the group was able to develop everyone could agree to. That included improving the state’s existing childcare subsidy program, streamlining burdensome regulations, improving care quality, and addressing the low pay and high turnover among childcare staff. But the collaborative’s members were clear that the report they eventually produced wasn’t the end of the process, but rather the beginning. They spent a lot of time meeting with state lawmakers and sharing the results of their work. When they gave the report to lawmakers, the process and wide array of advocates brought a lot of people on board. Marler, who has worked as a lobbyist on childcare for nearly a decade, said of the report, “I have never in all my years working on any policy had that kind of endorsement.”
The group’s recommendations deeply informed , which became law in April. The legislation free childcare for providers, changed state subsidy payments to reflect the true cost of care, required training for caring for children with disabilities and modified the state’s quality rating system to better take outcomes into account. It also eased the paperwork required for employers to participate in the state’s Employee Child Care Assistance Partnership, which pools state, employer and employee money to cover the cost of care, and launched a pilot program to create one-room microcenters caring for up to 24 children.
That it was numbered six is significant, because the House saves its priorities for bills one through ten every year, Aull noted. “Even two years ago, if we had brought up the possibility of a House majority making childcare one of its top ten priority bills, you would have been laughed out of the room,” he said. The bill passed “with overwhelming bipartisan support,” Levison noted.
The group’s work also informed , which directs the state’s auditor of public accounts to study statutes, regulations and policies that relate to opening and operating childcare centers with an eye toward streamlining them to make it easier on providers. It passed the legislature unanimously.
Kentucky has made significant progress through the passage of House Bill 6 and HJR50, but moving the legislative packages forward wasn’t all smooth sailing. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear allowed HB6 to go into law . He also vetoed HJR50, that the auditor of public accounts lacked “the programmatic and policy expertise” to carry out the study and that it would require spending taxpayer dollars to hire an outside auditing service, but the legislature overrode his veto, and Aull noted that it did so with bipartisan support.
The legislature, for its part, blocked an effort that could have had a much larger impact on increasing parents’ access to affordable childcare. Last June, Beshear a “Pre-K for All” initiative and convened an advisory committee for the issue. But the legislature , refusing to include funding for it in the state budget, with Republican members citing worries about the cost of such a program and what effects it would have on private childcare providers. Instead, this May Beshear created pilot pre-K programs in two counties as a smaller-scale alternative.
The advocates who pushed for the reforms now enshrined in law aren’t done, however. “We never envisioned this as the final word,” Aull said. Next, the group plans to make sure that the legislation is implemented well. “Anytime you’re able to accomplish policy change, [there is an] importance of continued cultivation of that legislation,” he said. “You need to continue to work on its implementation phase — it takes a long time.”
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Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Her writing has appeared in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and others, and she won a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus. She has appeared on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, and other outlets. She was previously Economic Editor at ThinkProgress, Editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog, and a contributor at Forbes. She also worked as a financial reporter and head of the energy sector at mergermarket, an online newswire that is part of the Financial Times group.
