Dunleavy forgets all about his child care task force and its 56 recommendations
The state child care task force launched by Gov. Mike Dunleavy nearly two years ago with great fanfare came back with 56 recommendations to deal with the child care crisis in Alaska.
Dunleavy said he needed a task force to help him decide what he should do about the crisis. Now comes the hard part, but Dunleavy seems to have forgotten about his task force.
Here is the first task force report from December 31, 2023.
Here is the second task force report from September 30, 2024.
Here is a state website with a great deal of information on the 56 recommendations.
Dunleavy set ambitious goals for this task force, calling for a plan to improve the availability and affordability of child care throughout Alaska.
He has not been ambitious in leading efforts to achieve those goals. The situation is similar to his other task forces—food security and energy task forces among them—featuring ambitious marching orders followed by little or no implementation.
One-quarter of licensed child care programs in Alaska have closed since 2019 and the lack of access to child care limits job options for thousands of parents. Child care costs many people more than rent and it is a major problem across the state, one that requires leadership from the governor.
Dunleavy complained in 2023 about a plan that advanced in the Senate to put $15 million more toward child care to help raise wages for child care workers, claiming it was a “knee jerk reaction.”
“I’m not going to support $15 million in child care because we don’t even know what the child care is we’re talking about,” Dunleavy said in April 2023 in Anchorage.
“But just to say $15 million—who knows, after the task force is done, it could be more. It could be less. We don’t know that until we go through this process.”
The state has gone through the process and the reports are in. But in his State of the State speech Tuesday, Dunleavy mentioned child care only in passing and didn’t address the 56 recommendations.
The child care task force did not talk much about how to implement its recommendations, Stephanie Berglund, executive director of thread Alaska, a statewide nonprofit, told Alaska Public Media before the legislative session.
“So some of the areas where we would see the most change for the child care sector are going to require investment,” said Berglund, one of 15 members of the task force.
It didn’t take a task force and nearly two years to find out that low wages and a lack of access to health insurance and other benefits make it hard to find and keep child care workers. A lot of workers can make more at fast food joints than in caring for children.
The task force called for creating “a sustainable state-funded wage subsidy for licensed child care professionals to support a living wage in Alaska.”
“The majority of task force members agreed that compensation should be prioritized, however, there was some division over identifying funding. The inclusion of ‘state-funded’ was approved by the majority of the task force members,” the Dunleavy task force said.
Perhaps Dunleavy will create a new task force to study the work of the first task force.
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