Virginia’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year does not include funding requested by a coalition of lawmakers, business owners and advocates to fully fund slots for thousands of children currently waitlisted for subsidized child care programs in the commonwealth.
State officials estimate about 4,000 children will be able to move off a waitlist for the Child Care Subsidy Program in the new fiscal year (which runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026), but thousands of additional families will remain waitlisted.
Jenna Conway, Virginia’s deputy superintendent of early childhood care and education, worries that failing to fully clear the waitlist is creating “a real disconnect and disruption in the system” for both providers and families.
“You can’t pay payroll with a waitlist spot. You can’t pay your tuition with a waitlist spot,” Conway told VPM News. “All you can do is wait.”
The waitlist jumped from approximately 3,000 kids last August to over 12,000 kids by Jan. 1, but has plateaued in recent months.
Because the waitlist isn’t budging, Conway said, families who’ve been on it are giving up hope of receiving subsidized child care and instead opting out of the workforce.
“They feel stuck; that’s what we hear from providers,” Conway said. “These working families are in an impossible situation.”
Conway said families opting out of the workforce will have both short and long-term consequences for those Virginians, their children – and the economy. She said when the needs of low-income working families are met, data shows economic growth and lower unemployment.
Conway also said data shows those least prepared for kindergarten are kids in low-income households whose parents didn’t send them to preschool in any setting, whether it be Head Start, family child care, a faith-based center, a school-based center or private preschool.
As of May 1, about 4,820 infants and toddlers, about 3,070 preschoolers and about 4,540 school-aged kids were on a waitlist for spots in the Child Care Subsidy Program across the state. The program has been popular with parents and caregivers because it provides full-time, full-day care.
In order to move about 4,130 kids off of the waitlist, the state is reallocating some funding and making some policy changes – including increasing the copayment rate for families.
"The sector responded"
Earlier this year, some Virginia lawmakers expressed concerns that even if additional state dollars were poured into funding more slots for waitlisted kids, providers wouldn’t be able to keep up staffing to meet the additional demand. But Conway told VPM News data from the last few years suggests otherwise.
In 2022, the state eliminated the waitlist for the Child Care Subsidy Program to help get families back into child care after a big dropoff in enrollment during the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the program served around 20,000 kids; at its lowest point, enrollment was down to 12,000 kids, according to Conway.
“You would assume, okay, well, it'll come back to what it was,” Conway said. “But if there's a limited amount of supply, then at some point that will create a stopping point. And we just didn't see that happen.”
Now, the program is enrolling more than twice as many kids as it served during the pandemic.
“What we thought would happen was, if families come forward, there wouldn’t be enough supply,” Conway said. “But what actually ended up happening is that the sector responded and figured out how to build supply and absorb the kids.”
Ongoing waitlist affects providers’ plans
Child care providers hoping to grow their networks by opening new centers and classrooms are also left in limbo by the lingering waitlist.
Some lawmakers hoped that a $25 million pilot program that would have employers share the cost of child care with the state and families would also help address the CCSP waitlist. Gov. Glenn Youngkin ultimately vetoed the pilot, saying it would be better tested “at a smaller scale to determine program effectiveness and scalability.”
Conway said it wouldn’t have been feasible to address the waitlist through this pilot because it wouldn’t have been affordable for families or employers. The proposed family copays would’ve been higher than what’s allowable in the Child Care Subsidy Program, for example. And the pilot would have relied on employers volunteering to participate, opting to cover part of the cost for their workers.
“We just didn't imagine that any of the children served in that program in FY26 would help with the waitlist,” Conway told VPM News.
