Championing Quality Child Care with Franklin County RISE
Franklin County, OHOf its $256 million in ARPA fiscal recovery funds, Franklin County, Ohio invested $40.3 million into RISE—a new child care initiative that helps to make child care and early education more accessible to all throughout the county. Implemented in partnership with two local nonprofit organizations, Future Ready Five and Action for Children, RISE focuses on addressing the child care challenges of families who make too much to qualify for publicly-funded child care, but too little to afford private child care. For the County, the investment is about alleviating financial stress for families and investing in their future. “We know that significant investment in early care and education the return on investment for every dollar that's spent early on there’s an $8 return on investment later on. And that alone is worth it,” Erica Crawley, Franklin County Commissioner explains.
Why this investment?
Between August 2020 and August 2022, Franklin County saw 220 child care centers close. With wages averaging under $11 per hour, few are drawn to child care as a sustainable career path yet the cost of care—$11,302 per year in Ohio—remains too high for most working-class families.
Child care had already emerged as a crucial issue for the County and a focus of its Rise Together anti-poverty effort launched in 2019. ARPA funding provided Franklin County a unique opportunity to invest in solving its child care challenge. The County’s Recovery and Resiliency Committee recommended a number of strategies to strengthen child care jobs while ensuring access to care for families, additionally enabling women to return to the workforce.
What is this investment?
The Franklin County RISE program works to strengthen child care and early learning through support for families, childcare businesses, and educators, including:
Scholarships for families. RISE provides child care scholarships to parents who face the “benefits cliff,” meaning they make too much to qualify for publicly-funded child care, but too little to be able to afford paying out of pocket. In the first year of this project, more than 500 RISE scholarships were awarded to families with incomes between 146 and 300 percent of the federal poverty line, providing them with up to $10,000 a year to cover childcare expenses.
Incentives for childcare businesses. RISE also provides incentives for child care providers to increase their availability and quality. New early learning providers that offer publicly-funded child care are eligible for $2,500 (family-based care) and $5,000 (licensed child care centers). Providers that increase their ratings on Ohio’s Step Up To Quality rating system can receive $10,500 (family-based care) and $21,000 (child care centers) incentives. Providers that offer nontraditional hours can receive $5,000 (family-based care) or $10,000 (child care centers).
Direct support for educators. RISE supports early learning educators by providing emergency rental assistance. Current eviction rates in Franklin County exceed pre-pandemic levels, and most of these evictions are of Black women with children. Franklin County has dedicated $500,000 each year to be set aside for an emergency rental assistance fund to support early childcare educators who are among the lowest-paid professionals, and who are often women of color. In year one, 95 applicants received emergency rental assistance. This investment's focus on supporting educators by providing rent and utility assistance is a unique and innovative use of ARPA funding.
Centering equity in the program
In year two of the RISE program, the focus has shifted from the immediate goal of stabilizing child care towards ensuring a more targeted equity approach and increasing kindergarten readiness. In Franklin County, six in ten children are not kindergarten-ready, including 72 percent of Black children and 82 percent of Latinx children. The program is hiring a consultant and program coordinators to address kindergarten readiness for Black and Brown children, specifically. To ensure child care subsidies are directed to the highest-need neighborhoods, RISE plans to prioritize scholarships in 10 “opportunity zip codes” that are either childcare deserts or where the child care available is unaffordable.
The program also has a partnership with Nationwide Children’s Hospital focused in the Linden area of Franklin County, where the demographic is largely under and unemployed residents and people of color. Through the partnership, children participating in RISE receive free wellness exams, hearing and vision assessments, and screenings for developmental delays. RISE has also partnered with Bridgeway Academy and the Columbus Early Learning Centers to assess developmental delays in childcare settings and provide swift interventions and address disparities. According to a 2018 CDC study, Black children are identified as being on the spectrum around 3.5 years later than white children.
Reflecting on the evolution of RISE, Commissioner Crawley says that in order to efficiently stabilize child care at the beginning of the program, the County prioritized making the application process as straightforward as possible—only collecting basic personal and income information. As the project has progressed, the County is now interested in collecting more detailed demographic data to track and measure progress toward equitable outcomes.
Outcomes to date
In its first year, the RISE program has served 1,282 children, with over $7 million awarded in scholarships, and filled 102 early childhood educator positions with correlating sign-on bonuses. Franklin County RISE scholarships have also allowed mothers to re-enter the workforce. Megan Klang, a resident of Franklin County, recounts how the RISE program helped ease her anxiety about finding child care for her daughter. “I knew that I needed someplace safe for her to go so that I could continue working, but tuition is so expensive,” Klang said. “Receiving the Franklin County RISE scholarship was a game-changer and a huge relief financially.”
Toward transformative change
Franklin County has already allocated an additional $18 million in ARPA funding to support the RISE program for 2025 and 2026. Investing in child care, education, and providing support for the “workforce behind the workforce,” has allowed Franklin County to grow its economy, as more parents are entering the workforce, providing for their families, and spending money that ultimately goes back into the community. This sales tax revenue will eventually allow Franklin County to continue investing in RISE through its general revenue fund after ARPA funds are spent. If the County for whatever reason objects to this allocation of general revenue funding, a ballot initiative is being considered to continue the investment and support of RISE. Over the life of this project, there has been an increased need for childcare assistance. Because of this, the RISE program has gone from a $23.5 million investment to a $40.3 million investment.