Vermont has received a nearly $13 million federal grant to strengthen its child care and pre-Kindergarten programs, among other early childhood services, officials said Monday.
The grant comes from the Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five program in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which has supported parts of Vermont’s early childhood landscape for a decade, advocates said. This year’s award is the largest one-time amount the state has received.
It’s a separate award from the regular $28 million in funding that Vermont receives via the federal Child Care and Development Fund, monies President Donald Trump’s administration sought to withhold from five Democratic-led states this month. Vermont Department for Children and Families Deputy Commissioner Janet McLaughlin said Monday that the state has not received such warnings, though a memo last week increased her team’s reporting requirements when accessing the funds.
Both the application process and the birth-through-five grant itself were much more compressed than usual, according to Morgan Crossman, the executive director of the childhood policy nonprofit Building Bright Futures.
“Generally, these grants take three months to write,” she said. “We wrote it in six days.”
A 12-month clock for the funding means that the state will be without the standard window for planning and engaging contractors, Crossman added. Nonetheless, she called the funding “critical” in a year where state lawmakers face especially tough budgeting decisions.
This new allocation will help Vermont build child care capacity, improve data management and facilitate cooperation between state agencies, advocates, and local providers, according to McLaughlin.
“We’re thrilled to have these resources right now,” said McLaughlin, adding that her team was working with “urgency and focus” to “draw down every dollar that we can.”
The grant comes in a period of fast change for Vermont’s child care ecosystem. The 2023 passage of Act 76 allowed thousands of kids to newly enroll in the state’s expanded child care tuition assistance program, and over 100 new care providers have launched statewide.
But aside from these central investments, McLaughlin said there was a “long list of projects” that could continue to expand and improve the state’s care offerings for young children and families.
Two priorities will be ensuring that child care providers have the business planning assistance necessary to survive or expand, and developing a workforce in Vermont that keeps pace with the industry’s expansion, McLaughlin said.
The state’s focus on workforce will include improvements to data and technology. The grant will allow the state to update its fingerprint-supported background-check system, delays in which have caused years of headaches for child care providers. The upgrades should “dramatically reduce the turnaround times” for checks, McLaughlin said.
Crossman said sharing information effectively between agencies and providers improves the experience of individual families, and also allows her team to do its job monitoring progress in areas like child care coverage, literacy and use of public aid programs. Vermont’s Early Childhood Data and Policy Center, a division of Crossman’s organization, is tasked with making data-based childhood policy recommendations to lawmakers based on such information.
“We’re making sure that we’re centralizing data and making it publicly available,” Crossman said.
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