Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media
Ngoc Ho teaches kids words in English and Vietnamese through songs and other activities.
A new Harris County education coalition establishes a pathway to help local child care businesses achieve lucrative certifications and exceed minimum state standards.
The demand for child care subsidies soared during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains on the rise. In Harris County, around 30,000 families are on a waitlist to receive state scholarships for child care services through the Texas Workforce Commission, according to a recent University of Houston study.
An initiative championed by Harris County Commissioners Lesley Briones and Adrian Garcia, which passed at Thursday’s commissioners court meeting, aims to reduce the number of families waiting for those services by helping child care businesses get certified through the Texas Rising Star program, a state quality rating system. The effort is part of the Harris County Coalition on Early Childhood Education and Care, which was launched by the commissioners’ precinct offices in January, and aims to expand child care opportunities across the county.
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Though the state certification is not required for providers to operate child care businesses, children receiving subsidies through the state program are often limited on options. The local initiative aims to help businesses serve more children who receive subsidies through the state.
The commissioners on Thursday supported the cost-free efforts to advance child care — including ways to help businesses get permits to operate more quickly and increasing efforts to connect families with available resources, Briones said in an interview with Houston Public Media this week.
Expanding child care accessibility in Harris County also is being proposed as one of the county’s legislative priorities.
“If you’re going to address something that is so critical to both the future of education in the state of Texas and the economy of the state of Texas, we need a plan that is sustainable and scalable and it really is drawing down additional federal and state funds to this region, but it’s also working in partnership again with this broader ecosystem,” Briones said. “And so we believe it’s the right time to do this thing in the right way.”
In 2023, Harris County commissioners passed an early childhood education initiative to create up to 1,000 affordable child care slots for children in Harris County. Child care providers that received funding through the county program were required to increase pay for teachers up to $15 an hour.
The program was funded by temporary pandemic-era federal dollars.
A tax hike proposal to support the program failed to meet a key deadline last year after Harris County commissioners said County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s efforts to pass that measure disrupted decorum as a flurry of children packed the meeting. The proposal would have given Harris County voters a say on whether to support a tax increase to continue funding certain child care and education training programs.
Hidalgo brought up that failed proposal in a statement released before Thursday’s vote. While expressing support for the new measure, she called it “innocuous, if repetitive,” saying it “mostly proposes initiatives that already exist and does not allocate any significant funding to continue those initiatives.” She said her office was recently briefed on the commissioners’ initiatives.
“I think that the only way to explain the proposal today is that some members of Court are having buyers’ remorse about the fact that, with their vote last August to not let the voters decide whether they wanted to continue our early childhood programs, they functionally voted to end programs that have served more than 97,000 families and kids since 2022,” Hidalgo said in a statement Thursday.
Garcia told Houston Public Media that the newly established childhood education coalition and working groups will deploy already existing resources to keep costs low.
“So we have to bring everybody together so we can really define the system and then decide what it might cost,” Garcia said. “But let’s go for the existing dollars that are either at the state level or at the federal level and then we figure it out because Harris County has put money on the table.”
Harris County is home to about 322,000 children who are 4 years old and younger. Of those, at least 166,000 children — more than half — are eligible for subsidized pre-kindergarten, according to the University of Houston study.