The Mayor and Commission referred this item to the Finance and Citywide Projects Committee at its July 17, 2019 meeting. Vice-Mayor Ricky Arriola is the sponsor.

BACKGROUND

AYUDA, Inc. is a local, non-profit agency that provides a variety of services to city residents including child and teen counseling, parenting skills training, tutoring, and crisis intervention, among others. The agency is funded by the city to provide a mental health assessments and counseling to youth enrolled in the city’s Success University program.

AYUDA submitted the attached proposal to Vice-Mayor Ricky Arriola proposing “a recurring line item in its financial plan of $35,000 in the 2019/20 budget to aid 17 to 34 children of low income families attend child care, in a safe, learning environment with professionals that will be able to guide the families into employment and to become nurturing parents.” The program would serve children living in North Beach with seven to 10 hours of child care per day for three months at Happy Kids Childcare. The reduced rate would be $100 per child (that’s 50% of the regular rate for these services) for service from 7am to 6pm. Participants would be evaluated on the third month for ongoing services with programming ending once stable employment is achieved. The maximum service length is six months. AYUDA would provide a social worker to provide in-kind counsel to the families served including linking “them to community support networks and service referrals, medical orientation, employment, housing and more.”

AYUDA proposes using developmental screenings “that are measured quarterly through observations, progress reports, Ages & Stages Questionnaires (ASQ), Voluntary Prekindergarten Education (VPK) assessments and parent interviews. The proposal did not mention specific outcomes or performance targets for youth benefits. AYUDA has the capacity to track parent employment and job retention.

High quality child care is seen as an economic empowerment tool for low-income parents and their children. The New York Times reported on a 35-year study of child care programs in North Carolina that found that families (specifically mothers) who accessed free, high quality child care earned more than those who used poorer quality child care or stayed home instead of entering the workforce (control group).

The positive impact continued as the children became preschool-aged and the parents accessing the high-quality child care earned more than the parents in the control group who either stayed home with their children or used poorer quality child care providers. The benefits extended directly to the children attending high-quality daycare who eventually achieved two more years of education and earned about $2,500 per year more by age 30 than their control group counterparts. The economic benefit was greater for boys receiving high quality child care as they earned $19,800 more than their male counterparts in the control group. The study found that the return on investment (ROI) was $7.30 for every dollar spent on a high-quality child care program.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which conducted the study, published an updated draft to its study this year which validated the ROI and delineated that the high-quality, educationally-focused child care centers that proved so effective “supported language, motor and cognitive development as well as socio-emotional competencies including task orientation, the ability to communicate, independence and pro-social behavior.”

Attached is the Parent Checklist for Quality Child Care produced by the Office of Early Learning and distributed by the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade/Monroe as well as a list of local area child care centers as designated by the Florida Department of Children and Families.

The city has previously used Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to support child care services for low-income families at Rainbow Intergenerational Child Care and Raindrop Child Care at Feinberg Fisher K-8 Center specifically targeting low-income households eligible for federal aid. In the mid-1990s, the city considered the importance of child care from two vantage points: the provision of quality child care for its employees and the subsidy of child care for low-income families. While the city had considered establishing its own child care center, space and cost constraints derailed the effort. The city has funded non-profit day cay providers in the past with CDBG funds as a means of providing economic support to low-income, working households while providing youth with a supportive entrance to elementary school. Since federal funds were used, only those who met federal eligibility criteria could be served.

With 16.6 % of the city’s residents living in poverty according to the US Census Bureau, economic empowerment of low-income families remains an area for improvement. Poverty is greatest among married couples with children (46.4%) but closely followed by family households led by women (40.5%) (Source: City-Data) The poverty rate is higher for foreign-born residents (16.8%) than native-born residents (9.1%), according to City-Data.

The city’s 2019 Strategic Plan: Through the Lens of Resilience prioritizes educational excellence as a management objective. In addition, the Resilient Greater Miami and the Beach Resilient 305 plan identifies the need to build an inclusive economy (Objective 6: Cultivate Financial Stability, Action 20: Build an Inclusive Economy) in order to strengthen economic resilience. Clearing the pathway to careers for many will require overcoming the absence of child care for their children who have yet to attain school-age.

The administration recommends that, should the decision be made to proceed with the provision of child care services to empower working parents in our community, a competitive procurement process is followed with specific benchmarks and performance targets for both the child and parents served. The goal would be to align the initiative with goals within the city’s Strategic Plan as well as strengthen our existing educational objectives.