The Alaska Child Care Task Force has begun drafting recommendations for submission to the Governor and Legislature.
Governor Mike Dunleavy announced in April the creation of a task force to address the availability and affordability of child care in Alaska. Members met in person for the first time in Anchorage on Wednesday.
Task force member Stephanie Berglund, CEO of the child care advocacy nonprofit Alaska, said she found the all-day in-person meeting helpful and informative after weeks of Zoom meetings. said.
“We were able to really dig deep and have open-ended conversations,” Berglund said. “And it was different than anything we’ve experienced before.”
The task force began meeting in June to learn about a variety of issues related to the child care crisis, including the cost and availability of child care, issues with licensed providers, and the impact the state’s child care crunch is having on businesses.
While the initial task force meeting was more of a fact-finding exercise, future meetings will focus on making recommendations on three key topics: license providers, background checks, and child care workforce decline. .
So far, the group’s recommendations include removing qualification barriers to becoming a child care worker, such as education and age requirements. Others include giving tribes and local governments their own authority to regulate who gets licenses.
Leah Van Kirk, state health policy advisor, said the goal is to encourage the opening of more child care centers while maintaining the level of safety and care.
“We want to provide quality care,” Van Kirk said. “But we also want to encourage that process to be as efficient as possible so that it doesn’t take that long for someone to complete it.”
He said the state is already working to streamline the background check process through a web portal and allowing the use of digital fingerprints rather than mailing fingerprints for verification.
Berglund said in the thread that the final list of recommendations will allow the governor and the Legislature to take swift action to address child care in a state with high prices, long waiting lists, and, in some areas, no child care options at all. He said he was looking forward to it. .
“I hope that there will be recommendations that are specific enough that we can take immediate action on policies and necessary investments to support child care,” she said.
The next in-person meeting of the Child Care Task Force will be held on November 7th. The task force is expected to submit its final recommendations to the governor in December ahead of the upcoming legislative session.
