On Tuesday, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell criticized Schwarzenegger's line-item veto of funding for the CalWORKS Stage 3 program, which provides subsidized child care services to low-income families.
O'Connell said the veto will have “far-reaching effects” that stretch beyond the loss of child care for struggling families.
Schwarzenegger has issued no statements from his office explaining his decision or responding to the criticisms, although the state finance department said he exercised line-item veto power to reduce general fund spending with a view to creating “a prudent reserve.”
O'Connell held a press conference in Oakland Tuesday to discuss the issue, and was accompanied by parents who may have to choose between welfare and their jobs because they can't afford child care.
“We stand at the cusp of a disaster,” O'Connell said. “The governor's veto has set the stage for a cascading set of circumstances that will disrupt struggling parents' employment, eliminate jobs of child care workers, force the closure of child care businesses, cause loss of early learning opportunities for kids, and worsen California's economic downturn.”
As Lake County News reported last week, Schwarzenegger made the cuts to the 12-year-old program on the evening of Oct. 8.
The move was completely unexpected, according to Teri Sedrick, co-director of Rural Communities Child Care, a program of North Coast Opportunities.
In Lake County, Sedrick said 73 local families, 149 children and 100 child care providers will be impacted by the cuts to the program, which helps families that have worked their way off of welfare and have been without cash aid for 24 months. This year's budget for CalWORKS Stage 3 in Lake County was $475,458.
The program ends effective Nov. 1, although legislators have indicated they plan to try to restore the $256 million in child care funds through other avenues, including seeking funds from the California First Five Commission and using savings from Assembly budget cuts, as Lake County News has reported.
O'Connell said Tuesday that the cuts will impact thousands more children around the state.
He said more than 187,000 children are already on long waiting lists for child care services, and Schwarzenegger's veto added 54,000 more names to the waiting list, which O'Connell said is a nearly 30-percent increase.
In addition, some 1,500 names will be added to the list of those children who would have moved into Stage 3 from Stage 2, O'Connell said.
Under CalWORKS, a family usually progresses from Stage 1 to Stage 3 as their employment situation stabilizes and working parents need help to cover the prohibitively high cost of child care in order to go to work and remain off public aid, state officials reported.
“The governor's veto is turning out to be a job reduction act at a time when California's unemployment rate is at a near-record high 12.4 percent,” O'Connell noted.
That's because California's subsidized child care system generates more than 130,000 related jobs, according to a study released by the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security entitled, “Cutting Child Care Out from Under Californians,” www.law.berkeley.edu/files/chefs/Child_Care_in_California_Sept_2010.pdf.
Sedrick said last week that supporters of the program had put out a call for people to contact the governor's office to lodge complaints.
The governor's office, in turn, directed the resulting calls to O'Connell's office, which reported being inundated with messages from people told by Schwarzenegger's staff that there are other child care programs with available funding that can help them right away.
O'Connell said Schwarzenegger and his staff knew that thousands of California children are already on waiting lists for these scarce child care services. He called that message of false hope to parents “cruel and shameless.”
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