Meg Sinclair, who lives in Westbrook and is a registered nurse in the emergency department at Maine Medical Center, with her youngest son, Benny, in Portland on March 12. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)

Meg Sinclair’s youngest son is only 9 months old, but he’s been on a waitlist for child care for well over a year.

She has no idea when a spot might finally open up — or if she will be able to afford to pay for it when it does.

“It’s incredibly inaccessible and incredibly expensive,” said Sinclair, who lives in Westbrook and is a registered nurse in the emergency department at Maine Medical Center in Portland.

Sinclair is among the Maine parents, lawmakers and labor leaders pushing to add millions in funding to help working families pay for care and to support incentives to increase pay for child care workers. They say the extra funding is crucial to address a child care crisis that keeps thousands of Maine parents out of the workforce.

Senate President Mattie Daughtry, D-Brunswick, introduced LD 1955, which would allocate an additional $15 million for the Child Care Affordability Program. Daughtry said the cost of child care is one of the biggest hurdles for families. She said she’s seen friends pay over $26,000 a year.

“Many families are paying as much for child care as they do for their mortgages or rent,” Daughtry said.

Maine’s child care industry has long been under pressure and the recent bills are not the first attempts to address it. The state has invested significant funds in the industry in recent years by expanding eligibility for care care subsidies and offering salary supplements to help providers pay their employees higher wages.

At the same time, rising costs have left more families struggling to pay for care and hundreds of working families are waiting for assistance from the state.

Daughtry has been leading the push for support on a package of bills to address those issues. It includes bills to increase reimbursement rates for infant and toddler care, help providers offer care during non-traditional work hours, and create a grant program to allow schools and providers to partner on meals for students.

At the center of the package is the proposal to boost funding for the Child Care Affordability Program, which pays for a portion of child care costs for families making 125% or less of the state’s median income, and to clear its waitlist.

The bill, which has drawn opposition from some Republicans, passed the House 72-68 on a roll call vote and the Senate without a roll call. It’s now on the appropriations table while lawmakers decide which bills will get funded in the supplemental budget.

Daughtry said she’s hopeful it will get funding.

“The best investment we can make is in children,” she said.

WAITING FOR ASSISTANCE

There are currently 888 providers approved for the Child Care Affordability Program, which gives assistance to 3,307 children from 2,067 families, according to the state’s Office of Child and Family Services.

Only about 7% of eligible children statewide participate in the program, according to program data.

The waitlist for the program is currently 860 children from 595 families, down from about 1,000 children at its peak. DHHS spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said the department is moving children off the waitlist each week.

The program is funded largely through the $34.4 million the state receives from the federal Child Care and Development Fund. DHHS pays child care programs biweekly for children receiving CCAP awards.

There are an estimated 18,000 Mainers not in the workforce because they either can’t afford or can’t access child care, according to Sen. Henry Ingwersen, D-Arundel, who sponsored a bill this session to create regional child care resource and referral hubs statewide to help families find programs and to support training for early childhood educators.

Kevin Ready, a postal truck driver from Lewiston, said his wife left her job as a social worker after their now-8-year-old was born and has stayed out of the workforce because child care was financially out of reach. When Ready heard about the Child Care Affordability Program, he thought that might help, but the program requires both parents to be working.

By the time the Ready family “got their ducks in a row” to qualify, there was a waitlist, he said.

“Child care is crazy unaffordable for working people,” Ready said. “In my case, my wife could have been in the workforce for the past seven or eight years. We could have been doing a lot better and paying our bills on time.”

The efforts to support the industry and make child care more affordable have garnered support from program directors and early childhood educators across the state.

Raphael Kabata and his wife own Riverside Academy LLC in Lewiston. Before they opened the center in 2024, they had a waitlist of 28 children. When funding for the Child Care Affordability Program became unavailable, “many of those families disappeared because they simply couldn’t afford child care without assistance,” he said in testimony in support of LD 1955.

“This financial strain didn’t just affect our families — it nearly forced us to close our doors,” Kabata said. “To avoid shutting down, we took on even more debt just to keep operating. But this is not sustainable.”

PUSH FOR FUNDING

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, opposed LD 1955 and said it didn’t address the structural problems she sees and hears about from constituents. She said the state doesn’t have enough child care, but bureaucracy makes it hard to maintain and open a facility.

“We need to make sure we minimize those barriers so parents can access child care,” she said in an interview. “When more is available, prices will go down.”

Libby said the state needs to “think outside the box” by doing things like encouraging employer-sponsored child care and making it easier for smaller neighborhood family centers to open.

“We need to get the government out of the way so we can have more child care at a lower cost in our state,” she said.

Charlotte Jacobs, program director for Seedlings to Sunflowers in Gorham, on March 10. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)

Charlotte Jacobs, program director for Seedlings to Sunflowers in Gorham, said she’s seen pressure increase on both providers and families during her 15 years in the industry. She said the cost of care has risen “astronomically” and that the child care center had to raise tuition.

“The cost of care is driving families out,” she said. “As a provider, it’s impossible to not raise tuition with the rising cost of rent, overhead and providing wages.”

In 2021, Maine began providing monthly $200 stipends for workers, then later bumped those up to between $240 and $540. Providers said those payments allowed them to hire and retain skilled staff, keep tuition down and serve low-income families.

Jacobs said the proposal in LD 1414 to increase salary supplements for infant and toddler care would provide an extra boost that would help the program retain staff.

“One of the greatest challenges we face as child care providers is finding a way to pay our staff livable wages without increasing tuition and placing an even heavier burden on families,” she said.

Arthur Phillips, campaigns director with the Maine AFL-CIO, which supports LD 1955, said that after pandemic shutdowns disrupted the industry, they started hearing more often from members about how hard it was to find child care and how unaffordable it had become.

“People have struggled with the cost of child care for a long time, but the sense of how acute of an issue it really is came through during the pandemic,” Phillips said.

Sinclair, the mother from Westbrook, said when a spot opens up for her younger son to attend child care, it will cost her about $400 a week to send both kids for two days.

She sees other nurses at Maine Med struggling with the same challenges.

“I cannot think of one mother that I work with who has a child under 5 who works full-time when they previously did,” she said. “Everyone goes part-time or per diem.”

Sinclair said she has been lucky that her parents can help with child care, but has been advocating for more funding to help other families.

“My blood has been boiling,” she said, “thinking of all these people who want to grow their family or have kids and can’t afford it.”