Posted on May 23, 2021
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Parent Advocate Jackie Boyett Shares Her Child Care Story
Posted on May 15, 2021
Supporting our village — It’s time to reimagine child care
Unlike many developed nations, the U.S. does not fund child care as a public good. Instead, families are forced to grapple with the high cost of care as providers struggle to operate on razor-thin margins. It shouldn't be that way. It's time New Jersey reimagines a child care system that benefits us all.
ACNJ is Seeking a Health Policy Analyst/Associate
Register: #ReimagineChildCare Policy Webinar Series
Posted on May 6, 2021
Webinar Policy Series
The Child Care Staffing Crisis: Sustainable Approaches to Compensating the Workforce
Monday, May 17th
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
The child care system in New Jersey and throughout the country is dependent on inadequate government funding and fees that are too expensive for parents, yet programs cannot pay teachers a living wage. The child care system needs major, foundational reform that prioritizes the child care workforce . This town hall will include diverse voices from the field including professionals from both child care centers and family child care homes. Please join us to add your voice and amplify the needs and rights of this essential workforce.
Moving Beyond the Pandemic: Financing Child Care to Work for Parents and Programs
Monday, May 24th
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
In order to rebuild and recover from the pandemic we need to build an infrastructure that will supports families with children. However, in order to achieve this, it is critical that families have access to safe, reliable, and affordable child care. Nearly $936 million dollars from the federal government has been designated to support child care in our state and it is critical that state policymakers hear from child care providers about how these monies are used to build back better.
A Showcase of Strategies to Support Family Child Care
Wednesday, June 16th
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Registered family child care homes play an integral role in New Jersey’s child care infrastructure by providing families with a smaller group, home-based setting often located in the neighborhoods where families live. However, over the course of the last decade, the number of family child care providers has declined significantly due to a number of challenges and a lack of durable, specific investments. Over this last year, some funders and organizations have identified strategies to support and grow family child care throughout communities in New Jersey. Join us to learn more about these initiatives and how we can increase capacity and encourage additional funding for these strategies and more.
BLOG: New Snapshot Highlights Pandemic’s Effects on Newark’s Kids, Families
Posted on May 5, 2021
Every year, ACNJ releases its Newark Kids Count report in order to share information about the well-being of children living within the city. This year, Newark Kids Count looks a bit different. Rather than a comprehensive data report, ACNJ will be releasing smaller “snapshots,” featuring data showing the impact of the pandemic on children and families.
This year’s data snapshots are an attempt at providing the data we can currently obtain in order to provide some insight for stakeholders in Newark. The first, The Impact of COVID-19: A Look at the Utilization of Programs Assisting Families, looks at programs assisting families, as well as unemployment rates.
The second, due to be released in June, will look at data relating to Newark’s high school senior classes of 2019 and 2020 as they transitioned to college. These data will cover trends in college enrollment and other areas, and the report’s release will highlight young people’s experiences over the last year.
Traditional Kids Count reports rely on publicly available data from federal, state and local sources, and the most current data from many of these sources are still pre-pandemic figures. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey is only available up to 2019, and figures for 2020 will not be released until this fall. In other cases, data are simply unavailable. In the N.J Department of Education’s 2019-20 School Performance reports, data for state assessments and chronic absenteeism, among others, are not being reported due to the pandemic.
It is likely that it will be several years before we have enough data to truly provide a complete picture of the pandemic’s impact. In the meantime, experimental data products such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, provide some glimpse into the experiences of residents across the country. Data from this survey focused on households with children are available on the KIDS COUNT Data Center. However, these data are limited and are not available for smaller, more specific geographies like Newark. This is a gap ACNJ hopes to fill through our data snapshots in order to ensure more informed decisions can be made in order to help families navigate through the pandemic.
Have you checked out our Kids Count data dashboard lately?
ACNJ continues to update its Kids Count Data Dashboard on a quarterly basis, in order to provide current information to our audience. Additionally, some data sets are broken down by race, allowing us to gather a more complete view of trends impacting children. View the most current information on children, and stay tuned for our June 2021 update for data covering: children involved with child protective services, lead testing, birth outcomes and school enrollment.
