Here's what Salt Lake County plans to do with child care sites after funding cuts

KEY TAKEAWAYS

After Salt Lake County-funded childcare programs ended in May, new partnerships with nonprofits will provide childcare at Magna and Millcreek sites.
A Salt Lake City facility will also provide after-school programs through another partnership.
Critics argue the new programs don't address the broader childcare affordability crisis.

SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake County officials announced several new partnerships to provide childcare for low-income families and youth programming after the council voted last year to end funding for county-subsidized childcare programs.

Childcare programs at four Salt Lake County-operated facilities ended in May. Two of those sites — in Magna and Millcreek — will soon be home to new childcare programs run by nonprofits, while a facility in Salt Lake City will be home to an after-school program for youth, the county announced Tuesday. The fourth site, in Kearns, will be used temporarily to store equipment for county programs "while long-term opportunities for the facility continue to be evaluated," according to a press release.

"Although this transition has not been easy, our priority has always been supporting children and families as well as our dedicated staff while making thoughtful use of county resources," Mayor Jenny Wilson said. "Thanks to the incredible efforts of county staff and the collaboration of outstanding community partners, these facilities continue to serve families and remain valuable community assets."

Some critics of the funding cuts have given the new partnerships mixed reviews, saying they're glad to see some services still available but criticizing the council as not doing enough to make life more affordable.

The county council voted last fall to end funding for the parks and recreation childcare program after commissioning a consulting firm to study the program's financial viability. The decision was controversial as it provided relatively cheap childcare to some 271 families year-round.

But Councilwoman Aimee Winder Newton said the program lacked income requirements, allowing even high-income earners to receive subsidized childcare.

"If you're going to give any government help to somebody, it needs to be the most vulnerable, so it just wasn't the right policy for what we needed," she told KSL. She said that only about 17% of the beneficiaries of the old program would have qualified for the state's childcare subsidy for low-income families.

The council passed legislative intent language earlier this year directing the sites be prioritized for use by low-income families.

The Magna Recreation Center and Millcreek Activity Center will offer childcare and other family services through the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in partnership with the county, the county announced. Utah Community Action will expand existing programs in Magna, and Centro de la Familia will provide services in the Millcreek facility, which is owned by the Granite School District.

Utah Community Action's programs provide "high-quality early childhood services for children zero through five years of age," according to CEO Jennifer Godfrey.

"Head Start and Early Head Start look very different than what you would typically see within a childcare center," she said. "We do everything from health screenings to nutritional and food insecurity. ... All children are assessed for hearing, vision, speech and language, developmental, special needs screening and mental health screening."

The program serves families who are at or below 100% of the poverty line at no cost, she said. A recent report on the program's effectiveness showed significant improvement in the share of children who were meeting kindergarten literacy and numeracy benchmarks after leaving the program.

The Northwest Activity Center in Salt Lake City will begin serving youth through Salt Lake City Youth City's after-school program.

Not everyone is satisfied with the new programs.

Jefferson Curtis was one of the people who was left scrambling for new childcare options when the funding ended earlier this year. He is also a member of the leadership group of Utah Works for Families and said the new partnerships do "not solve the problem" the council created by cutting funding.

He said he is supportive of giving access to childcare to lower-income families, but said childcare costs are pricing out many in the middle class as well.

"This affects the entire working class," he said. "(This) does nothing to address the larger crisis, and we don't believe that the county is really doing enough to help families to begin with."

He said his organization believes that "everybody should have access to quality pre-K education and care, regardless of their financial position or location. That should be one of the goals of our local governments."

"There's already a childcare crisis in the state," Curtis said. "And what the county council did was just make that void wider and then come back a few months later and slap a band-aid on it and pretend that they solved the problem when they did not."

Curtis suggested the county fund childcare facilities again and do more to promote and grow those programs.

But that doesn't seem likely in the near future.

"I don't see any scenario where the county is going to decide to be in the day care business," Winder Newton said. "When you run the numbers of how many kids under 12 are in Salt Lake County and times that by even the smaller subsidy that we had for our previous program, it's going to break the bank."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.