Kentucky Found An Incentive To Keep Early Educators On The Job

It’s not even 6:00 a.m. and Savannah Wiseman and her son Milo are on their way out the door. Wiseman is a preschool teacher at Aunt Kathy’s Child Care & Preschool in Highland Heights, Kentucky, a job she has had for 15 years and one she says she loves. She arrives at 6:15 a.m., which is 45 minutes before the program opens, and uses the time to get Milo dressed, changed and fed.

“I like the extra time with him,” she said. Then she drops him off in his classroom. Later that morning, when Wiseman stops by for a visit, Milo is all smiles as he pulls toys out of a wicker basket, his brown hair flopping over his forehead.

Milo has been coming to work with Wiseman since he was 8 weeks old. He started in the infant classroom, and now he’s in a classroom for 1-year-olds. Wiseman said having Milo in a nearby classroom with teachers she knows and trusts has been a great relief.

“I knew I wouldn’t stop working after I got pregnant and I couldn’t imagine not working, but I also couldn’t imagine putting him in a different space than where I was,” said Wiseman. “It helps to not have to be paying for it.”

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Milo’s child care tuition is covered by Kentucky’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), which was expanded in 2022 to allow employees working in a licensed child care program, like Wiseman, the benefit of free child care. Under the program, anyone who works for 20 hours a week or as a licensed child care provider in the state of Kentucky is automatically eligible for full child care assistance, regardless of their total household income. The program was designed to help recruit and retain child care workers amid major challenges facing the industry as temporary child care relief funds from the American Rescue Plan were coming to an end.

“The purpose of this program was to increase staffing in child care programs when wage inflation was causing child care providers to leave for lucrative positions in retail and hospitality industries,” said Sarah Vanover, policy and research director at Kentucky Youth Advocates. Vanover was previously the director of Kentucky’s Division of Child Care and was the force behind expanding CCAP’s traditional income-based subsidies to include early childhood educators. Vanover points out that in the U.S., child care workers make less than 98% of workers in other professionsand that low wages make recruitment and retention of staff a constant struggle.

Kathy Donelan, the owner of Aunt Kathy’s Child Care & Preschool, knows all too well that would-be hires can easily go to a nearby Amazon warehouse, or even the gas station across the street, and make money “doing less work” there than working in child care. “It takes a real special person to come here,” Donelan said.

Before CCAP covered the child care tuition for her educators, Donelan had always extended the offer for each of her educators to enroll their own children in the program, but the teachers who utilized this benefit would earn a reduced wage. In 2022, when the CCAP assistance kicked in for her teachers, Donelan was able to change her policy so that her employees could get free child care and get their regular salary.

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Stephanie Milleck, the director of Aunt Kathy’s, said she saw her salary go up when the CCAP began covering the cost of her daughter’s child care. Both of her kids are now in elementary school, but she is still able to take advantage of the CCAP benefit during the summer when they participate in a summer camp program at Aunt Kathy’s.

Milleck works with Donelan on hiring for new positions and says the free child care makes the job attractive to candidates with young kids and helps with retention. “If it’s a mom of a new baby, we know we will have them for at least five years,” Milleck said.

New data provided by Beth Fisher from Kentucky’s Division of Child Care shows that as of 2025, 5,510 families have utilized the program that provides free child care for child care providers, and that has included 9,657 children. Another 4,000 child care providers applied for the program, and were found to be income-eligible for child care subsidies for low-wage workers, and Vanover explained they were routed to that program instead.

For Megan Senn, a preschool teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, this program has been “life changing.” Senn, who has a master’s degree in early childhood education, said she loved teaching but couldn’t make ends meet on the low wages she received when she was a Head Start teacher a decade ago. At the time, she was making less than $30,000 a year working full time, and had to rely on food stamps.

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In 2016, she moved into a series of management roles at Head Start and later the YMCA, where she oversaw six child care centers, at a significantly higher salary. She was making over $70,000 a year, but Senn said she missed working directly with kids in the classroom.

It was CCAP that allowed Senn to go back to teaching. She found an early childhood teaching position that would pay her close to $50,000. She estimated that the cost of child care would be between $20,000 to 25,000 a year for her twins.

“If you take that off the table, I could take a pay cut and go back to the classroom,” she said. Senn began working at Virginia Chance, an independent school in the Louisville area. When her twins turned 2 years old, CCAP paid the full cost for them to attend preschool there.

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Being a teacher and being able to afford to send her own children to the same school she teaches in, has been game-changing,  said Senn. “They get a beautiful education and I don’t have to think about tuition costs and worry if I am bringing in enough money.”

The program is showing results because the math makes sense. Vanover explains that best practice is to have one adult per ten preschool-aged children. “If the state pays the child care expense for one of those ten children in order to attract the child care provider, that still opens spots for nine children who will have parents and caregivers working in the community and providing income tax,” Vanover said.

Other states have seen the success of Kentucky’s program in retaining child care providers and shoring up their early childhood workforce and are trying to follow suit. In August, Rhode Island launched a pilot program based on Kentucky’s model and Vanover said she’s been invited to speak to the Ohio Legislature about setting up a similar program, and has received interest from Utah as well.

While the program has garnered attention for its impact, there are still some areas for improvement. Although the it’s benefitted a majority of licensed child care centers in the state, not all early educators are eligible.

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Providers who care for their own children in a family child care program that they own are excluded. Vanover explained that the federal laws governing child care payments through Child Care and Development Block Grants prohibit a parent from receiving payment to care for their own child, and Kentucky has modeled their program based on those same rules.

But many home providers go into child care because they want to care for their own kids, in addition to those in the community, said Natalie Renew, director of Home Grown, a national collaborative supporting home-based child care providers. “If (owners of) home-based providers could participate in this policy, it would support supply building and encourage start up,” Renew said. As it stands, the policy is “prejudiced against home-based providers because staff in centers can work in the same place as their children, but those (who run) home-based care cannot.”

“It’s challenging,” said Vanover, in addressing the ways owners of home-based programs are excluded from the program. She said the legislature is considering modifying the program so that home-based providers may be able to access the benefit in certain instances, for example, if their child attends a licensed after-care program at another location.

Some providers have also critiqued the enrollment process. Donelan said four out of her 24 employees are enrolled in CCAP, adding that a fifth staff member has been trying to access the benefit for over a year, but has been unable to do so due to bureaucratic hurdles.

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One challenge is that although the program doesn’t require income eligibility, applicants must provide extensive paperwork requiring up-to-date paystubs and income verification for all adults living in their home — and any delay in processing the applications requires that new paystubs are submitted. Donelan said she’s had to intervene with CCAP on behalf of teachers during delays.

Another issue is that providers who have the summer off must withdraw from the program at the end of May and reapply in July. Senn’s school closes during the summer, and she said the reapplication  process takes about two weeks and involves multiple follow up phone calls adding that it can take up to two and a half hours to get through to someone.

But this July could be the last time Senn needs to reapply since her 4-year-old twins will move into kindergarten.“I am truly thankful and it could bring me to tears how this (program) has just helped me. We have quality teachers that want to be in the classroom but choose not to be because it doesn’t bring enough to the table for their family,” she said.

“It’s heartbreaking because we need it so badly. Every state should have something like this.”

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