The Joint Finance Committee finished their work on the state budget pretty early this morning after an all night session. The Committee adopted a motion that funded the Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy program, authored by Senator Mark Miller (D-Monona) and Representative Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee). The motion eliminated the creation of waiting lists for the program, eliminate increases in family co-payments, and fixed a bad attendance-based policy to determine payments to providers.

The motion does create procedures for establishing the number of hours authorized for a child to utilize child care that includes the following:
(a) track hourly usage of child care authorizations over a six-week period;
(b) automatically adjust authorizations where usage is less than 60% of the authorized hours in all three of the consecutive two-week periods;
(c) adjust the authorizations to reflect 90% of the maximum number of hours attended during that six-week period;
(d) provide written notification to the parents, child care providers, and local child care administrative agencies regarding the proposed adjustment;
(e) provide a grace period of six weeks such that the child care subsidy amount would not change during six weeks after the authorization hours are adjusted;
(f) require DCF to allow one week of vacation for child care providers and two weeks of vacation for parents without adjusting authorization hours;
(g) require DCF to allow one week of sick time for child care providers without adjusting authorization hours; and
(h) require DCF to promulgate rules that would specify how these requirements would be implemented.

The motion eliminates the funding for a Quality Rating System and instead requires the Department of Children and Families to return to the Joint Finance Committee with a specific plan that includes:
(a) various options for a quality rating system, with each option requiring certified child care providers to be included in the rating system;
(b) various options for quality assurance monitoring;
(c) details of estimated program expenditures, including financial incentives for providers to achieve a higher rating;
(d) the information and training for child care providers that specifies steps for improvement that are not restricted to new licensure or certification requirements;
(e) how the system would ensure that the quality rating information is accessible and presented in a way that is valuable to families and providers;
(f) the process for ongoing evaluation, which must consider input from child care providers and other participants; and
(g) any other relevant information.