Staff Perspectives on Engaging Latinx Families in North Carolina’s Child Subsidy Program During COVID-19

• In Event: Promoting Access to Social Supports and Resources Throughout COVID-19 for Latine Families with Young Children

Abstract

Child care subsidy programs aim to expand access to child care for low-income families, and have been shown to increase the quality of care that children experience (Johnson, 2015). The largest federally funded child care program in the US is the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which is administered with significant latitude by individual states. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the child care sector substantially, with large-scale closures across the US (Lee & Parolin, 2021), and Latinx families were hit particularly hard. Latinx families were more likely to leave a job due to child care disruptions and less likely to use paid leave to care for their children than their White counterparts (Chen et al., 2021). CCDF-funded child subsidy programs scrambled to respond to families’ changing needs, but it is unclear to what extent programs met the needs of Latinx children and families.

To investigate how CCDF operates at the state- and local-level to influence Latinx families’ engagement with the child care subsidy program, an online survey with closed and open-ended questions was conducted of 189 county-level CCDF caseworkers in North Carolina in 2021. Subsidy workers in 83 (out of 100) counties participated in the survey. Approximately two-thirds of respondents were frontline staff and one third were administrators or supervisors. More than half of respondents (51%) had extensive work experience at their agencies and about 5% self-identified as native or fluent Spanish speakers and 4% as being Hispanic/Latinx. Subsidy staff reported on administrative practices related to the application process and interacting with families during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of Latinx families. Thematic coding was utilized for open-ended responses to capture nuance and explore patterns across respondents.

The majority of frontline workers and administrators (72.5% and 79.7%, respectively) reported that their agency was “very adaptable” in responding to the pandemic. Just over half of administrators (56.5%) reported that families continued to come into the office in person during COVID, and 9.2% of frontline workers and 31.9% of administrators reported that their office physically closed for some amount of time. From the qualitative data, subsidy staff reported that many application procedures became more flexible as families were able to send materials electronically and did not need to come to the office in person. This appeared to be helpful overall but caused difficulties for some Latinx families in terms of new technological and linguistic barriers, and many families continued to prefer in person contact. Changes were also noted in terms of fee waivers and extensions due to the pandemic. Subsidy staff recommended several changes to improve subsidy access for Latinx families, including increasing community outreach, providing more training to staff, addressing immigration concerns, and ensuring that materials and services are provided in Spanish. Differences in perceptions by staff characteristics and county-level Hispanic density will also be explored. Implications about how to facilitate child care subsidy use among Hispanic families and whether there are COVID-related adaptations that could be scaled will be discussed.

Authors

• Abigail Palmer Molina, Erikson Institute
  Presenting Author

• Danielle A Crosby, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Julia Mendez, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Christina M Stephens, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Rosy Gonzalez, University of North Carolina Greensboro