Over the past decade, child care prices have risen steadily while child care providers have operated with low profit margins at best and, in most cases, struggled to keep their programs afloat. This worsening situation has led families with young children and early educators alike to call for public investments to lower the price of care, build child care supply, and invest in the early educator workforce. Temporary federal investments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated what public investments could achieve—but those investments are over, restarting the search for solutions. Child care advocates in a growing number of states and localities are using ballot measures to increase public funding for child care, enabling governments to solve for the broken market by subsidizing the cost of care for families and expanding and stabilizing the supply of child care options. These campaigns can take a long time, so those interested in using this tool to improve child care and early learning in their communities should start now.
Ballot measures are an important form of direct democracy, offering citizens the opportunity to approve or reject legislatively referred laws or to introduce new laws that reflect their specific values and needs. The latter is particularly important when federal policy does not align with voters’ values or needs. For example, progressive states have used ballot initiatives to legalize abortion, same-sex marriage, and marijuana use when these policies were criminalized at the federal level. Ballot measures also offer important opportunities for collaboration, as state or local policymakers often require voter approval to introduce bonds, levies, or tax changes.
Child care ballot measures create public funds that help meet the gap between existing small pots of federal and state funding and the true cost of care. These state and local sources of funding will be especially important as the Trump administration’s attacks on Head Start, the U.S. Department of Education, and the federal workforce that supports child care programs decrease child care and early education opportunities.
This commentary draws on lessons from successful campaigns over the past decade and recommends strategies for developing successful child care ballot measures. Here are the top six suggestions for parents, providers, and policymakers considering ballot measures as a means to improve child care options in their communities:
- Create a public child care fund.
- Center the community.
- Find solutions to multifaceted challenges.
- Utilize broad coalitions.
- Create a winning narrative.
- Be flexible and learn from failure.
What are ballot measures?
In the United States, while laws typically are written and passed by a legislative body, they can also be introduced or amended by adding them to the ballot, enabling constituents to support or reject them during elections. Legislatively referred ballot measures require cooperation between citizens and state legislators, who may be bound by their state constitutions to obtain voter approval in order to introduce bond measures, change tax policies, or amend their state constitutions. Other ballot measures can be directly initiated by citizens without involvement from state legislators: twenty-four states and Washington D.C. allow citizens to put issues on the ballot by collecting signatures, the required number of which varies from state to state and reflects a percentage of votes from the preceding election. These citizen-led ballot measures, called ballot initiatives, are an important tactic that advocates including parents, providers, and organizers can use to advance child care policy at the state level.
Since 2016, citizens in twenty states have used ballot measures to pass at least thirty-eight new voter-approved child care funds.
The number of ballot measures introduced annually has increased since the late 1970s, indicating that advocates increasingly recognize them as a way to introduce and pass legislation that is popular with constituents. Child care is tremendously popular with voters across political parties, with nearly 90 percent of voters agreeing that “child care should be affordable for all families, regardless of their income.” Accordingly, there has also been an increase in the number of child care and early education ballot initiatives over the past decade. Since 2016, citizens in twenty states have used ballot measures to pass at least thirty-eight new voter-approved child care funds. (See the Appendix for a list of ballot measures.) As the next section details, these public funds are helping states and localities address critical affordability and supply challenges in their child care sectors.
Why pass child care policy at the state or local level?
Nationwide, families are struggling to find affordable child care amidst rising prices. Providers face difficulty retaining qualified early educators and are forced to close classrooms or shut their programs down entirely. These trends have persisted for years, but were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: data from Child Care Aware shows that the average price of child care rose 5 percent from 2019 to 2020, exceeding the overall inflation rate by 3.8 percent. Congress attempted to support families and stabilize the child care sector with a $40 billion investment through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). However, both the child care stabilization and supplemental funds from ARPA have expired without a clear path in place to renew federal investment in child care. Now, some of the best pathways for passing policies to lower child care prices and build supply exist at the state and local level.
Policy change can also move more quickly at the state and local levels than at the federal level. As Julie Kashen and Katie Hamm wrote in their 2019 report, “Child Care for All: A Blueprint for States,” it can take a considerable amount of time to generate support for federal legislation and to move it through the process from introduction to presidential signature. This process may also be slowed as a result of individual sorting: individuals choose to reside in states whose tax and social policies reflect their economic and ideological beliefs. Reduced intrastate conflict makes it easier to pass policy at the state level, but sorting can increase ideological polarization across states and lead to federal gridlock. This underscores an increased opportunity and need for state and local level policymaking.
State and local investments in child care, including those implemented as a result of ballot initiatives, have demonstrated considerable success in increasing child care resources and capacity. When pandemic-era emergency child care stabilization funds expired, states were left without the invaluable source of funding they had used to expand eligibility for child care subsidy programs and to support providers in paying for overhead expenses such as wages for early educators. The federal stabilization funds had proved tremendously effective, saving 1 million jobs and 9.6 million child care slots across more than 225,000 child care programs. Child care advocates at the federal level sought to extend these stabilization funds, working with Democratic Congressmembers to introduce the Child Care Stabilization Act, which would have allocated an additional $16 billion annually for child care between 2024 and 2028. However, it has not gained the bipartisan support needed to pass.
Several states and Washington, D.C. have taken matters into their own hands, leveraging decades of local child care organizing and advocacy to fight for increased public investment in their child care sectors. The states that increased child care funding were better able to prevent tuition increases, to maintain the wage increases that providers implemented using federal child care stabilization funding, and to retain qualified early educators than states that used the influx of pandemic era federal funds as an opportunity to cut taxes.
However, ballot measures do not provide a foolproof solution to addressing child care challenges. Though polling shows widespread support for affordable child care, ballot measures may still unexpectedly fail. In 2023, Ridgway joined at least ten other Colorado communities when it approved a measure to use lodging taxes to pay for child care, while in the same election cycle, Pueblo, Colorado rejected a similar lodging tax increase. Culture change is a slow process that can inhibit policy change and some campaigns dedicate years to creating a public expectation that the government help make child care affordable. Advocates in New Mexico are quick to note that they spent a decade organizing for increased child care funding before voters ultimately approved a ballot initiative to create a permanent land grant fund.
Ballot measures are only a viable tactic for some campaigns: not all states allow citizens to make statutory or constitutional changes through ballot initiatives and, as more advocates rely on ballot initiatives to fight for politically contentious rights such as abortion access, some states are attempting to get rid of or circumvent their ballot measure processes. Even when ballot measures are an option, the child care funds they generate may be strained by systemic issues in the child care sector, which former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has described as a “textbook example of a broken market.”
Ballot measures are an effective supplement to broader efforts to increase public investment in child care. Many states and localities have used them with great success to subsidize prices and create more child care slots. Advocates and policymakers seeking to expand access to affordable, high-quality child care for their families and communities should consider their overall strategy to decide whether a ballot measure is the right approach for them.
What makes a child care ballot measure effective?
In November 2022, New Mexicans made history when they voted to amend their state constitution and establish a land grant permanent fund that will guarantee annual funding for child care and early learning, including funding to stabilize and grow the sector, support more families, and increase pay for early educators. Earlier that year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation had ranked states on children’s overall well-being and New Mexico had come dead last. Now it is being hailed as a model for other states seeking to overcome the child care affordability and supply crises plaguing the sector by increasing investment in early childhood education. New Mexico transformed from one of the states with the least supportive policies for children and families to one of the states with the most robust child care and early education policy in the country. It owed its success to long-term community organizing and advocacy efforts that leveraged broad public support for child care into a winning ballot measure.
Every successful ballot measure reflects years of community organizing, advocacy, and often, lessons learned from failed attempts at passing legislation to fund child care and early childhood education. Momentum is building as more and more advocates and policymakers introduce and campaign for ballot measures to expand public investment for child care. This commentary offers below six strategies and considerations, drawing from the successes of the child care ballot measures that have passed since 2016, to help advocates develop legislation that will generate public support and expand access to affordable child care. In each example, a state or locality attempted to create a voter-approved fund, a dedicated source of public revenue to provide child care and early education for families. Many of these examples are sourced from the Children’s Funding Project, which has partnered with local communities nationwide on ballot measure campaigns to create public funds for child care and other children’s services.
1. Create a public child care fund.
With every child care ballot measure, states and localities have the opportunity to establish dedicated sources of public funding that can be used to lower prices for families, expand programs and services, and increase early educator compensation. These funds give communities agency to invest in the child care options that best fit their needs. Ensuring that families have the child care options they need requires funding. A combination of public, family, and employer funds can strengthen the options available, but must be used together to create more choices that are not tied to a specific employer. While some states are moving toward employer-based options via employer tax credits or a cost-sharing model known as tri-share, public child care funds offer a more flexible and robust alternative means to boost child care supply. Travis County, Texas’ recent ballot measure, which goes into effect this year, expands afterschool and nontraditional hour care and enables businesses to contribute to their employee’s child care by matching public funds. Rather than simply trusting businesses in unrelated sectors to responsibly implement good child care plans, states and localities that create public child care funds place child education and health experts, parents, providers, and community members in charge of developing and implementing child care plans, as was the case in Whatcom County, Washington. Ballot measures and the public funds that they establish enable states and localities to fund solutions to their specific child care problems.
2. Center the community.
The problem a ballot measure seeks to address, the solution it proposes, and the source of its funding should reflect the specific needs and assets of the community it seeks to serve. For example, one of the ways New Orleans, Louisiana addressed early educator turnover—a key driver of child care supply shortages—was by offering coaching and professional development opportunities. It is crucial for community members to be involved in identifying and coming up with solutions to their local problems. In Leon County, Florida, local advocates for children pressured the county commission to introduce a ballot measure that would create a public fund that would, among other things, improve the quality of child care programs. Some commissioners insisted advocates first provide a needs assessment. In 2018, advocates released a report naming Leon County’s low child care accreditation rates, compared to Florida’s average, as an area for improvement and calling for the establishment of a public fund.
Some states and localities establish committees that include parents, providers, health experts, and funders to determine what the community’s children need and to identify public sources of funding for child care and early childhood education. Some of these advisory committees, like the one in San Miguel County, Colorado, provide additional transparency and accountability by monitoring funds, ensuring they are spent on plans to build child care supply. Other states and localities commission needs assessments.
Choosing the right revenue stream is also critical to success, and funding opportunities may also be specific to a community: Colorado has found success taxing tourists to pay for local child care because its mountains and ski slopes ensure a robust tourist industry whereas in Oregon, which has the fastest growing rate of millionaires in the country, Multnomah County implemented a high-income-earners’ tax to fund its Preschool for All program. Each ballot measure should be catered to its state or locality.
3. Find solutions to multifaceted challenges.
Though each community’s problems are unique, the challenges plaguing the child care sector are ubiquitous. Child care is a three-legged stool that wobbles if any of the legs that support it—affordable options, adequate supply, and access to high-quality programs—falter. The best child care ballot measures stabilize multiple legs by subsidizing prices, stabilizing or growing the supply of child care, and increasing early educator wages. For example, Multnomah County, Oregon’s Preschool for All program, passed by ballot measure in 2020, made care free for eligible families and increased preschool teacher pay by as much as $20 per hour to be comparable to kindergarten teacher pay. The program intends to increase the number of child care slots it offers from between 500 and 1,000 in 2022 to 7,000 by 2026. When the program began, it also facilitated outreach to low-income, Black and brown, and English as a second language–speaking families that historically lacked access to preschool.
4. Utilize broad coalitions.
In a ballot measure campaign, every vote counts. Whatcom, Washington’s 2022 campaign to create the Healthy Children’s Fund, which addressed families’ need for child care, affordable housing, and mental health services, won by a mere twenty votes. This underscores how important it is to receive buy-in from a broad range of supporters. Whatcom’s campaign—which already included parents, providers, and funders—connected with the local chamber of commerce, small business owners, and realtor groups among many others to request public support and campaign donations. In San Antonio, Texas, the 2020 Pre-K 4 campaign used research demonstrating the program’s success to gain support for reauthorization from both Democratic and Republican policymakers. This gave the campaign bipartisan appeal and helped it pass. The most effective ballot measure campaigns manage to rally these diverse stakeholders behind one cause in order to build public support.
5. Create a winning narrative.
It is important to develop a compelling narrative and maintain message discipline. Successful communications strategies focus on public education, highlighting how the ballot measure will benefit the community, and utilize positive messages. In Kent County, Michigan, the First Steps Kent ballot measure campaign hired a political strategy team to better understand parents’ concerns regarding tax increases for early education and proactively address them through public education and messaging. They also included the perspectives of parents and local businesses throughout the campaign. In Leon County, Florida, the Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce opposed creating a Children’s Services Council (CSC) that would fund early childhood education. Leon’s Our Kids First campaign did not engage with the chamber’s attacks and instead focused on the substantive benefits the CSC would provide for the community. This strategy ultimately proved successful and the ballot passed in 2020.
6. Be flexible and learn from failure.
Ballot measure campaigns are often iterative processes that involve back and forth between campaigners, policymakers, and voters. Whatcom County campaigners received pushback from policy experts on an early draft of the measure they hoped to introduce to the ballot. Campaigners were told the language was too prescriptive and would restrict the government from responding to policy or funding changes. Campaigners changed the language to reflect this feedback and the city council passed their ordinance, introducing a ballot initiative to create a public fund for child care.
Voters may oppose ballot measures to fund child care for any number of reasons. This is sometimes a rejection of the legislation itself and should be seen as a setback rather than a repudiation of efforts to expand access to affordable child care. For example, voters in New Orleans, Louisiana rejected a 2020 campaign to renew a property tax that would have reallocated funding from the local library to expand an early childhood literacy program. Campaigners found voters would rather increase property taxes to pay for the program than cut the library’s budget and reintroduced a new tax rate in 2022 that passed.
Ballot measures will continue to be an important tool for child care progress.
Over the past decade, advocates and policymakers have used ballot measures in states and localities across the United States to raise millions of dollars to expand access to affordable child care. The success of these measures reflect voters’ support for bringing down child care prices for families and building more child care options in their communities. Moving forward, more advocates and policymakers should consider ballot measures as a tool, combined with other efforts to increase public funding for child care, to generate resources and capacity to stabilize their child care sectors.
Appendix: Child Care Ballot Measures.
Tags: child care, ballot measures, child care policy
How to Invest in Child Care through State and Local Ballot Measures
Over the past decade, child care prices have risen steadily while child care providers have operated with low profit margins at best and, in most cases, struggled to keep their programs afloat. This worsening situation has led families with young children and early educators alike to call for public investments to lower the price of care, build child care supply, and invest in the early educator workforce. Temporary federal investments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated what public investments could achieve—but those investments are over, restarting the search for solutions. Child care advocates in a growing number of states and localities are using ballot measures to increase public funding for child care, enabling governments to solve for the broken market by subsidizing the cost of care for families and expanding and stabilizing the supply of child care options. These campaigns can take a long time, so those interested in using this tool to improve child care and early learning in their communities should start now.
Ballot measures are an important form of direct democracy, offering citizens the opportunity to approve or reject legislatively referred laws or to introduce new laws that reflect their specific values and needs. The latter is particularly important when federal policy does not align with voters’ values or needs. For example, progressive states have used ballot initiatives to legalize abortion, same-sex marriage, and marijuana use when these policies were criminalized at the federal level. Ballot measures also offer important opportunities for collaboration, as state or local policymakers often require voter approval to introduce bonds, levies, or tax changes.
Child care ballot measures create public funds that help meet the gap between existing small pots of federal and state funding and the true cost of care. These state and local sources of funding will be especially important as the Trump administration’s attacks on Head Start, the U.S. Department of Education, and the federal workforce that supports child care programs decrease child care and early education opportunities.
This commentary draws on lessons from successful campaigns over the past decade and recommends strategies for developing successful child care ballot measures. Here are the top six suggestions for parents, providers, and policymakers considering ballot measures as a means to improve child care options in their communities:
What are ballot measures?
In the United States, while laws typically are written and passed by a legislative body, they can also be introduced or amended by adding them to the ballot, enabling constituents to support or reject them during elections. Legislatively referred ballot measures require cooperation between citizens and state legislators, who may be bound by their state constitutions to obtain voter approval in order to introduce bond measures, change tax policies, or amend their state constitutions. Other ballot measures can be directly initiated by citizens without involvement from state legislators: twenty-four states and Washington D.C. allow citizens to put issues on the ballot by collecting signatures, the required number of which varies from state to state and reflects a percentage of votes from the preceding election. These citizen-led ballot measures, called ballot initiatives, are an important tactic that advocates including parents, providers, and organizers can use to advance child care policy at the state level.
The number of ballot measures introduced annually has increased since the late 1970s, indicating that advocates increasingly recognize them as a way to introduce and pass legislation that is popular with constituents. Child care is tremendously popular with voters across political parties, with nearly 90 percent of voters agreeing that “child care should be affordable for all families, regardless of their income.” Accordingly, there has also been an increase in the number of child care and early education ballot initiatives over the past decade. Since 2016, citizens in twenty states have used ballot measures to pass at least thirty-eight new voter-approved child care funds.1 (See the Appendix for a list of ballot measures.) As the next section details, these public funds are helping states and localities address critical affordability and supply challenges in their child care sectors.
Why pass child care policy at the state or local level?
Nationwide, families are struggling to find affordable child care amidst rising prices. Providers face difficulty retaining qualified early educators and are forced to close classrooms or shut their programs down entirely. These trends have persisted for years, but were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: data from Child Care Aware shows that the average price of child care rose 5 percent from 2019 to 2020, exceeding the overall inflation rate by 3.8 percent. Congress attempted to support families and stabilize the child care sector with a $40 billion investment through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). However, both the child care stabilization and supplemental funds from ARPA have expired without a clear path in place to renew federal investment in child care. Now, some of the best pathways for passing policies to lower child care prices and build supply exist at the state and local level.
Policy change can also move more quickly at the state and local levels than at the federal level. As Julie Kashen and Katie Hamm wrote in their 2019 report, “Child Care for All: A Blueprint for States,” it can take a considerable amount of time to generate support for federal legislation and to move it through the process from introduction to presidential signature. This process may also be slowed as a result of individual sorting: individuals choose to reside in states whose tax and social policies reflect their economic and ideological beliefs. Reduced intrastate conflict makes it easier to pass policy at the state level, but sorting can increase ideological polarization across states and lead to federal gridlock. This underscores an increased opportunity and need for state and local level policymaking.
State and local investments in child care, including those implemented as a result of ballot initiatives, have demonstrated considerable success in increasing child care resources and capacity. When pandemic-era emergency child care stabilization funds expired, states were left without the invaluable source of funding they had used to expand eligibility for child care subsidy programs and to support providers in paying for overhead expenses such as wages for early educators. The federal stabilization funds had proved tremendously effective, saving 1 million jobs and 9.6 million child care slots across more than 225,000 child care programs. Child care advocates at the federal level sought to extend these stabilization funds, working with Democratic Congressmembers to introduce the Child Care Stabilization Act, which would have allocated an additional $16 billion annually for child care between 2024 and 2028. However, it has not gained the bipartisan support needed to pass.
Several states and Washington, D.C. have taken matters into their own hands, leveraging decades of local child care organizing and advocacy to fight for increased public investment in their child care sectors. The states that increased child care funding were better able to prevent tuition increases, to maintain the wage increases that providers implemented using federal child care stabilization funding, and to retain qualified early educators than states that used the influx of pandemic era federal funds as an opportunity to cut taxes.
However, ballot measures do not provide a foolproof solution to addressing child care challenges. Though polling shows widespread support for affordable child care, ballot measures may still unexpectedly fail. In 2023, Ridgway joined at least ten other Colorado communities when it approved a measure to use lodging taxes to pay for child care, while in the same election cycle, Pueblo, Colorado rejected a similar lodging tax increase. Culture change is a slow process that can inhibit policy change and some campaigns dedicate years to creating a public expectation that the government help make child care affordable. Advocates in New Mexico are quick to note that they spent a decade organizing for increased child care funding before voters ultimately approved a ballot initiative to create a permanent land grant fund.
Ballot measures are only a viable tactic for some campaigns: not all states allow citizens to make statutory or constitutional changes through ballot initiatives and, as more advocates rely on ballot initiatives to fight for politically contentious rights such as abortion access, some states are attempting to get rid of or circumvent their ballot measure processes. Even when ballot measures are an option, the child care funds they generate may be strained by systemic issues in the child care sector, which former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has described as a “textbook example of a broken market.”
Ballot measures are an effective supplement to broader efforts to increase public investment in child care. Many states and localities have used them with great success to subsidize prices and create more child care slots. Advocates and policymakers seeking to expand access to affordable, high-quality child care for their families and communities should consider their overall strategy to decide whether a ballot measure is the right approach for them.
What makes a child care ballot measure effective?
In November 2022, New Mexicans made history when they voted to amend their state constitution and establish a land grant permanent fund that will guarantee annual funding for child care and early learning, including funding to stabilize and grow the sector, support more families, and increase pay for early educators. Earlier that year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation had ranked states on children’s overall well-being and New Mexico had come dead last. Now it is being hailed as a model for other states seeking to overcome the child care affordability and supply crises plaguing the sector by increasing investment in early childhood education. New Mexico transformed from one of the states with the least supportive policies for children and families to one of the states with the most robust child care and early education policy in the country. It owed its success to long-term community organizing and advocacy efforts that leveraged broad public support for child care into a winning ballot measure.
Every successful ballot measure reflects years of community organizing, advocacy, and often, lessons learned from failed attempts at passing legislation to fund child care and early childhood education. Momentum is building as more and more advocates and policymakers introduce and campaign for ballot measures to expand public investment for child care. This commentary offers below six strategies and considerations, drawing from the successes of the child care ballot measures that have passed since 2016, to help advocates develop legislation that will generate public support and expand access to affordable child care. In each example, a state or locality attempted to create a voter-approved fund, a dedicated source of public revenue to provide child care and early education for families. Many of these examples are sourced from the Children’s Funding Project, which has partnered with local communities nationwide on ballot measure campaigns to create public funds for child care and other children’s services.
1. Create a public child care fund.
With every child care ballot measure, states and localities have the opportunity to establish dedicated sources of public funding that can be used to lower prices for families, expand programs and services, and increase early educator compensation. These funds give communities agency to invest in the child care options that best fit their needs. Ensuring that families have the child care options they need requires funding. A combination of public, family, and employer funds can strengthen the options available, but must be used together to create more choices that are not tied to a specific employer. While some states are moving toward employer-based options via employer tax credits or a cost-sharing model known as tri-share, public child care funds offer a more flexible and robust alternative means to boost child care supply. Travis County, Texas’ recent ballot measure, which goes into effect this year, expands afterschool and nontraditional hour care and enables businesses to contribute to their employee’s child care by matching public funds. Rather than simply trusting businesses in unrelated sectors to responsibly implement good child care plans, states and localities that create public child care funds place child education and health experts, parents, providers, and community members in charge of developing and implementing child care plans, as was the case in Whatcom County, Washington. Ballot measures and the public funds that they establish enable states and localities to fund solutions to their specific child care problems.
2. Center the community.
The problem a ballot measure seeks to address, the solution it proposes, and the source of its funding should reflect the specific needs and assets of the community it seeks to serve. For example, one of the ways New Orleans, Louisiana addressed early educator turnover—a key driver of child care supply shortages—was by offering coaching and professional development opportunities. It is crucial for community members to be involved in identifying and coming up with solutions to their local problems. In Leon County, Florida, local advocates for children pressured the county commission to introduce a ballot measure that would create a public fund that would, among other things, improve the quality of child care programs. Some commissioners insisted advocates first provide a needs assessment. In 2018, advocates released a report naming Leon County’s low child care accreditation rates, compared to Florida’s average, as an area for improvement and calling for the establishment of a public fund.
Some states and localities establish committees that include parents, providers, health experts, and funders to determine what the community’s children need and to identify public sources of funding for child care and early childhood education. Some of these advisory committees, like the one in San Miguel County, Colorado, provide additional transparency and accountability by monitoring funds, ensuring they are spent on plans to build child care supply. Other states and localities commission needs assessments.
Choosing the right revenue stream is also critical to success, and funding opportunities may also be specific to a community: Colorado has found success taxing tourists to pay for local child care because its mountains and ski slopes ensure a robust tourist industry whereas in Oregon, which has the fastest growing rate of millionaires in the country, Multnomah County implemented a high-income-earners’ tax to fund its Preschool for All program. Each ballot measure should be catered to its state or locality.
3. Find solutions to multifaceted challenges.
Though each community’s problems are unique, the challenges plaguing the child care sector are ubiquitous. Child care is a three-legged stool that wobbles if any of the legs that support it—affordable options, adequate supply, and access to high-quality programs—falter. The best child care ballot measures stabilize multiple legs by subsidizing prices, stabilizing or growing the supply of child care, and increasing early educator wages. For example, Multnomah County, Oregon’s Preschool for All program, passed by ballot measure in 2020, made care free for eligible families and increased preschool teacher pay by as much as $20 per hour to be comparable to kindergarten teacher pay. The program intends to increase the number of child care slots it offers from between 500 and 1,000 in 2022 to 7,000 by 2026. When the program began, it also facilitated outreach to low-income, Black and brown, and English as a second language–speaking families that historically lacked access to preschool.
4. Utilize broad coalitions.
In a ballot measure campaign, every vote counts. Whatcom, Washington’s 2022 campaign to create the Healthy Children’s Fund, which addressed families’ need for child care, affordable housing, and mental health services, won by a mere twenty votes. This underscores how important it is to receive buy-in from a broad range of supporters. Whatcom’s campaign—which already included parents, providers, and funders—connected with the local chamber of commerce, small business owners, and realtor groups among many others to request public support and campaign donations. In San Antonio, Texas, the 2020 Pre-K 4 campaign used research demonstrating the program’s success to gain support for reauthorization from both Democratic and Republican policymakers. This gave the campaign bipartisan appeal and helped it pass. The most effective ballot measure campaigns manage to rally these diverse stakeholders behind one cause in order to build public support.
5. Create a winning narrative.
It is important to develop a compelling narrative and maintain message discipline. Successful communications strategies focus on public education, highlighting how the ballot measure will benefit the community, and utilize positive messages. In Kent County, Michigan, the First Steps Kent ballot measure campaign hired a political strategy team to better understand parents’ concerns regarding tax increases for early education and proactively address them through public education and messaging. They also included the perspectives of parents and local businesses throughout the campaign. In Leon County, Florida, the Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce opposed creating a Children’s Services Council (CSC) that would fund early childhood education. Leon’s Our Kids First campaign did not engage with the chamber’s attacks and instead focused on the substantive benefits the CSC would provide for the community. This strategy ultimately proved successful and the ballot passed in 2020.
6. Be flexible and learn from failure.
Ballot measure campaigns are often iterative processes that involve back and forth between campaigners, policymakers, and voters. Whatcom County campaigners received pushback from policy experts on an early draft of the measure they hoped to introduce to the ballot. Campaigners were told the language was too prescriptive and would restrict the government from responding to policy or funding changes. Campaigners changed the language to reflect this feedback and the city council passed their ordinance, introducing a ballot initiative to create a public fund for child care.
Voters may oppose ballot measures to fund child care for any number of reasons. This is sometimes a rejection of the legislation itself and should be seen as a setback rather than a repudiation of efforts to expand access to affordable child care. For example, voters in New Orleans, Louisiana rejected a 2020 campaign to renew a property tax that would have reallocated funding from the local library to expand an early childhood literacy program. Campaigners found voters would rather increase property taxes to pay for the program than cut the library’s budget and reintroduced a new tax rate in 2022 that passed.
Ballot measures will continue to be an important tool for child care progress.
Over the past decade, advocates and policymakers have used ballot measures in states and localities across the United States to raise millions of dollars to expand access to affordable child care. The success of these measures reflect voters’ support for bringing down child care prices for families and building more child care options in their communities. Moving forward, more advocates and policymakers should consider ballot measures as a tool, combined with other efforts to increase public funding for child care, to generate resources and capacity to stabilize their child care sectors.
Appendix: Child Care Ballot Measures.
Notes
Tags: child care, ballot measures, child care policy