Childcare is Critical Community Infrastructure
BLOCKS has long advocated for the importance of childcare to community preparedness and its criticality to community recovery. COVID-19 has once again highlighted the fragility of childcare and head start programs. This latest long-term and ‘novel’ disaster has brought to light the inadequacies of the current childcare designation within our disaster terminology lexicon.
Childcare is critical community infrastructure. Without childcare, parents cannot return to work after a disaster, and if parents cannot go to work, communities cannot recover.
Recommendations
The 2010 National Commission on Children and Disaster concluded that childcare preparedness and recovery resources needed support. The Commission made several recommendations, including codification of childcare as an “essential service” in the Stafford Act and the need to financially support the recovery of childcare post-disaster. The time to act is now. BLOCKS is asking for support of the following…
- Updating of Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21) to include the creation of a new critical infrastructure sector : Child Support Services
- Work with DHS to revise Public Assistance and allow for
- authorization of a grant funding mechanism, such as an emergency contingency fund, to repair or rebuild private, for-profit child care facilities
- support the establishment of temporary child care
- reimburse states for subsidizing child care services to disaster-affected families
- Work with DHS to modify the current National Response Framework to acknowledge the need for a new community lifeline that addresses childcare and child support services