A quarter of the classrooms at Crosstown Learning Center sit unused. It’s not for a lack of demand but a lack of funding.
The child care center in Tulsa’s Kendall Whittier neighborhood uses a mixed-income model and can serve up to 120 children. It has faced numerous financial squeezes — but without a $5 per day pandemic-era add-on payment from the state, Crosstown expects to lose $60,000 this year. It caught them off guard.
“Just year after year of these impacts happening to us,” said Kristina Ellis, Crosstown executive director. “And we look at our budget and we move things around, but we’re at a point where there’s no moving things around, no cutting expenses unless you want to cut quality.”
As of April, 131 child care centers have closed this year in Oklahoma after 472 shut their doors last year, according to the state’s Department of Human Services. The end of pandemic-era subsidy add-ons is hitting small providers and north Tulsa child care centers especially hard.
Even for larger centers like Ellis’ that are less reliant on subsidies, Oklahoma’s child care funding model has caused massive financial hurdles and strain. Come July, income eligibility changes will mean fewer families qualify for state financial assistance for child care.
In December, DHS requested $70 million in state funds “to stabilize the child care system and prevent future funding cliffs.” The ask was drastically reduced to just $7.6 million in the legislature’s April budget announcement.
“It’s really hard to find the positives right now other than the children and the families that we’re supporting,” said Ellis.
The Department of Human Services declined to comment on the state of child care funding or subsidy cuts, with department spokeswoman Nazarene Harris citing “pending litigation.” The department is involved in an ongoing lawsuit with the Licensed Child Care Association of Oklahoma over initial cuts to subsidies.
“The child care industry has been a fragile industry for the last 25 years — the pandemic exacerbated and really highlighted how fragile it was,” said Stephanie Lippert, deputy director of the Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness. “It has never come back. And it’s been teetering, and it is all coming crashing down right now.”
Lippert’s organization has tracked child care closures since 2017 using DHS data. Pandemic-era funding infusions helped raise the state’s capacity for care, but closures in recent years have brought the number of providers back below 2019 levels.
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