State House candidates in Bucks County discuss child care worker retention, paid family leave and key issues

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State House candidates in Bucks County participated in a conversation on child care Wednesday night at the Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce.

Republican Representatives Joe Hogan and K.C. Tomlinson, along with Democratic candidate Anna Payne, answered questions on key issues such as child care worker retention and funding for early education programs at the candidate forum hosted by Child Care Voters, a project of the Children First Action Fund.

Hogan and Payne are facing off in the race to represent the 142nd district. Tomlinson represents the 18th district. Among the invited candidates who did not attend were her Democratic challenger Anand Patel, Democratic incumbent for 144th district Brian Munroe and his Republican challenger Dan McPhillips.

The participants agreed on nearly all of the topics discussed, and the conversation, moderated by Bill Ferrara, executive director of the Lower Bucks Chamber of Commerce, was amicable.

Valerie Hamilton, founder and executive director of Children of God Educational Services in Bristol, said it was “extremely positive” to hear the candidates focus on how to best support child care providers.

“We focused on the children and the families with the expansion of the child tax credit on a state level,” she said. “Now they’re worried about us providers, and that makes me feel really good and very promising as a business owner, small business owner, woman of color here in Bucks County.”

Here are a few of the key issues candidates addressed:

State funding for early childhood education

All three candidates support increases in state funding for early childhood education.

“We have to talk about investment in our future, and this is how we start,” Payne said. “We start by investing in our children at young ages. We know statistically that 90% of their brain is developed between the ages of one and five, right? So we have five years that we can really make an impact in that child’s life. Despite this, too many people are missing out because we aren’t investing enough.”

Hogan agreed with Payne, and noted that the issue has personal relevance for him — he and his wife are expecting their first child “any day now.”

“I don’t think there’s a drawback with additional funding for these programs, but what we have to do, and I see a lot of providers in the room and some of the facilities that I visited over the last two years or stopped by, we have to make it easier for you, for you guys, to stay in business,” he said. “We have to make it easier for you to recruit, retain, and that’s not a dollars and cents issue in Harrisburg. That’s a regulatory issue … We have to make it easier for you to run your business.”

Tomlinson said she has “consistently advocated” for early childhood education funding.

“I’ve supported record funding in both the Wolf and Shapiro administration,” she said. “In 2022 alone, we invested over 325 million in programs like pre-K and Head Start. Obviously, there’s still plenty to do, and I will always support those efforts.”

Child care worker retention

All candidates agreed that the state Legislature needs to address the state’s severe child care staffing shortage and help child care businesses recruit and retain employees.

“We absolutely must increase pay for workers in the child care system,” Tomlinson said. “Without a doubt, I would support legislation and funding to address this crisis, because it not only supports our workers, but it supports our economy.”

Another barrier is the “endless requirements we put on child care workers,” Tomlinson said.

“We make them jump through all these hoops, and then the pay doesn’t even cover the bills, let alone the debt that they’ve acquired, jumping through those hoops,” she said. “So we need to find a better balance there that ensures that we have quality educators, quality child care and quality pay.”

Hogan agreed.

“We’ve expanded the child care tax credit for families. We’ve created a new tax credit for businesses, so that’s going to help with the affordability issue,” he said, but noted that state regulations are also part of the problem.

“We can find a balance with additional funding from the state to support it, but we also have to make it easier for these organizations to operate,” Hogan added.

Payne said she also supports higher wages for child care workers.

“We’re entrusting folks with our most precious commodity, our children, right, our future here in Pennsylvania, and we need to make sure that we are adequately paying them and funding them,” she said.

Availability of child care

Families in Pennsylvania are struggling to find child care — and that is impacting the workforce.

Hogan blamed the regulatory process for the shortage of providers and less availability of child care.

He recounted the experience of one provider, who was found in violation on a Monday for a new directive issued the Friday prior.

“We all want the best programs possible. We want safe environments,” Hogan said. “We want highly qualified educators and professionals in these spaces, but Harrisburg should be working with the providers. They should be making it easier to address this issue and not just overly penalizing.”

Tomlinson agreed, noting that “it’s not just a family issue. It’s an economic issue.”

She said she’s seen in her own family her sister and brother-in-law’s challenges in finding child care.

Tomlinson said she and Hogan spoke with local child care providers recently and listened to their frustrations in spending “a lot of time and manpower trying to meet all these requirements, meet all these regulations, when what they really want to be doing is caring for those kids, educating those kids.”

Paid family and medical leave

All three candidates supported passing paid family and medical leave legislation.

Tomlinson introduced a bill for paid family and medical leave in 2023. It has not yet gotten a vote on the House floor, but Tomlinson said she plans to “continue to advocate for this issue and fight for this bill, regardless of whose name is on it.”

“The goal of this is to make sure that if you don’t have paid family leave, if you don’t have maternity leave, you have that option,” she said, “while also making sure that that burden isn’t all on small businesses.”

Hogan and Payne both connected with the policy at a personal level.

“I grew up in a middle-class family. I had a mother that could be a stay-at-home mom for us, but that wasn’t the case for everybody else, and certainly not the case for my wife and I,” he said. “Now we don’t have the same type of support that prior generations did, and we hear that from a lot of our friends as well that are going through this process and the amount of money that they’re spending on these programs right now.”

For Payne, who was born with cystic fibrosis, a chronic disease, the issue is also personal.

“I know what it’s like personally to have to take off of work to take care of yourself and not get paid,” she said. “I know what it’s like to wonder how those bills are going to get paid, and you have no choice but to not go to work or go back to work too early, because you need to pay your bills, and then you end up getting sick again, and the cycle starts all over. So this is something I am extremely passionate about, because I understand it personally.”

Mental health support for children

All three candidates supported increasing mental health services for children throughout the state.

“In this last budget, we invested over $100 million towards mental health in our schools,” Tomlinson said. “And I want to take a second to applaud the schools in my district. They have taken this issue very seriously and made it a top priority.”

Tomlinson said the need for mental health services has grown because of the pandemic.

Payne agreed that putting more mental health services in schools is essential.

“We need to make sure that we’re funding it at the school level, so we have guidance counselors and social workers that can address these needs,” she said, noting that telemedicine is also key to improving access to mental health services.

Hogan agreed with Tomlinson and Payne, and said that apart from the pandemic, social media is another possible source of mental health issues among children.

“T minus 10 days until I’m a parent, but I’ve talked to enough to think that maybe social media is having an impact on this as well,” he said. “And how do we as a culture and a society have those conversations and looking at the use of social media in schools and what that would look like.”

Hogan said that, to that end, there is funding in the budget for school districts that want to pilot programs requiring students to place cellphones in lock boxes while in school.