Parents and child care providers across Ohio are experiencing delays this school year in receiving child care benefits, and advocates say it's causing a drop in enrollment at child care centers and challenges for working parents.
The state rolled its Publicly Funded Child Care application into the state's central portal for other benefits like SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps, and Medicaid earlier this year. It was previously a shorter application for a single program. Now, parents must fill out a much more extensive 22-page application with their county job and family services center. Advocates say that and other changes to the process have meant longer wait times for caregivers to receive the child care benefits.
Zshavina Kennedy, owner of Little Critters Early Learning Center in Cleveland, said her center has lost clients because they can no longer pay for child care due to the delays in receiving benefits. Caregivers are required to be working or looking for work when applying for the benefit, and that can be challenging without having child care, especially for parents of young children, she said.
"A lot of the time you know these parents who have infant and toddlers, they don't have any alternative sources of child care if they're applying for vouchers, and they (the county) are taking 60, 90 days to respond, so they're losing any job opportunities that they had, so we've had several families who have lost out on a job, and, you know, then they have to find additional employment," Kennedy said.
Kevin Gowan, director of Cuyahoga Job and Family Services, said school districts previously could fill out applications for public funding for caregivers sending their kids to preschool. Now, that burden is on the county. He said the county has seen a significant jump in the number of applications it is processing because of that, about 100 more per week, increasing wait times for caregivers.
The county has increased staffing in response, Gowan said, but he acknowledged it's still a lengthy process for caregivers to get approved, at least 30 days, and that's not counting if caregivers run into issues with documentation like birth certificates and pay stubs.
"A lot of these requirements are brand new to someone who's in the program, especially if they'd never applied for... child care or for SNAP or for Medicaid," Gowan explained. "They may be completely unfamiliar with our processes."
The Ohio Legislature in the latest budget also removed a measure called "presumptive eligibility" from the Publicly Funded Child Care program, said Tamara Lunan, who leads a statewide collaborative on child care issues called the Cares Economy Organizing Project.
"What that (presumptive eligibility) meant is that when someone files an application, they (the state) would just assume that person was eligible for publicly funded child care, and the providers would start to care for those kids immediately," Lunan said.
She said the loss of that eligibility is also causing headaches for parents and centers.
Even before that change, however, she said she was hearing from providers and parents around the state about wait times as long as a month and a half or more to get child care benefits approved from their county Jobs and Family Services site.
The Ohio Department of Children and Youth, which oversees the child care benefits programs, did not respond to a request for a comment sent Wednesday.
Cleveland school issues
With the start of the school year, Cleveland Metropolitan School District teachers say it's also been slow to get students into preschool classrooms. Shari Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, said it appears to be due to the issues with the state application but also with the district moving to its own centralizing application process.
Previously, caregivers would apply at their own school for CMSD's free preschool program, Obrenski said. Now, families are asked to apply online or through three central sites at the district, said Darrielle Snipes, digital content and media relations manager, which she argued is a better process due to schools being closed during the summer.
Jon Benedict, the district's communications officer, said that enrollment in CMSD preschool is actually higher than usual this year, with 1,400 students enrolled, but he acknowledged that as of Thursday, an additional 200 to 250 families were still working their way through the district's application process.
Despite the district's assertions, Obrenski said teachers are seeing fewer students in their preschool classrooms.
"They're saying we're seeing an increase in preschool enrollment, but my teachers are saying they're not seeing the students in their rosters," Obrenski said.
CMSD CEO Warren Morgan acknowledged the state's change in application process has added new challenges to the district's preschool enrollment.
"It's added a step in the process, and so we're working through that," Morgan said after the Tuesday board of education meeting.
Cuyahoga County Job and Family Services' Kevin Gowan said his office is working with the district and state to speed up securing funding for parents going to preschool.
"The school district wants to know who's been approved, who's not, and we can't share that with them," he explained. "All applications with us are confidential. So there's a communication gap there."
Broader issues in the child care sector
Zshavina Kennedy at Little Critters Early Learning Center said the broader child care industry in Ohio is in a state of crisis as the cost to provide high-quality care has outpaced parents' ability to pay.
And the benefits the state provides have very low thresholds, she argued. The Publicly Funded Child Care program is only for caregivers at or below 145% of the poverty line.
"It's just in no way enough money for you to pay for child care. That's like $15 an hour," she explained. "To think about paying $350 a week in child care, that's just one kid, on a $15 an hour salary."
The state's other child care assistance programs have higher income thresholds, about 200% for the Early Childhood Education grant. The new Child Care Choice Program Voucher, introduced last year, is meant to bridge the gap between those earning 145% and 200% of the poverty line. But even then, Kennedy said parents can only use either the Early Childhood Education grant or the Publicly Funded Child Care benefit, not both, another measure the state changed last year.
Ohio has the third-lowest eligibility for its publicly funded child care program in the entire country, according to a 2025 analysis from Policy Matters Ohio, a progressive public policy think tank. The number of families receiving that benefit has dropped by about 32,000 people between 2019 and 2023. The median hourly wage for child care workers in Ohio, meanwhile, is $13.44, leading to issues with retaining that workforce, the analysis found.
