The scarcity and high cost of child care for working families in Pensacola are no secret, but Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves is using the mayor’s office’s “pulpit” to bring people together to find a way to improve the child care situation in the city.
Reeves said he would be hosting a “childcare summit” on May 28 to bring people involved in the childcare space at the local and state levels together to discuss possible ideas.
“I feel like, especially two and a half years now into this job, half of our job is whether this administration comes up with an idea, sees it through, and executes it. The other half of his job is to build a coalition and to be able to use the pulpit, so to speak, to be able to put people in the same room that had a positive impact,” Reeves said. “So that’s my focus. We’ve got a lot of smart people doing a lot of great things for children in this community. I don’t have all the answers of the right thing to do, but that’s why we’re bringing people in.”
The announcement comes as the city considers what to do with a potential $1.5 million the Escambia County Children’s Trust owes to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.
When the Children’s Trust first began collecting taxes in 2022, no officials caught that the property tax generated inside both the county and city CRA’s was legally required to go to the city and county rather than the Trust until 2024. The Trust can apply for a waiver to the requirement and enter into an interlocal agreement with the local governments on how those funds can be spent.
After the discovery, there’s been back and forth negotiations between the different government agencies on how to handle the issues. Reeves said initially the money could go to economically disadvantages schools, but on April 29 he said he was now looking at childcare as a potential opportunity to work with the Children’s Trust as a part of a broader push to increase child care access.
“I have not met anybody in the city yet that tells me that we solved the child care crisis,” Reeves said.
A 2023 Florida Chamber of Commerce report found that the lack of enough child care has a $5.38 billion impact to the state economy each year.
Reeves pointed to that report finding that 15% of parents had left a job in the last six months because of issues with child care.
“How many architects, engineers, construction workers do we have at home right now because they can’t get childcare?” Reeves said. “So we talk about wanting to build our workforce, and a lot of our workforce is sitting at home.”
Theresa Cserep, Pensacola’s education and youth programs officer, told the News Journal that organizations like the Early Learning Coalition, Escambia Children’s Trust, Escambia County Public Schools, ReadyKids!, Head Start, and ARC Gateway, among many other groups, were invited to the summit.
Cserep said the May 28 meeting will be the first phase in diagnosing the community’s child care gaps. The second phase will occur later to develop two or three actionable strategies that can be executed with a memorandum of understanding.
“We know that there’s some great people that are already working on this,” Cserep said. “So we don’t want to try to recreate the wheel, or to have these conversations that have already been taking place with really smart people that are doing this. And we want to be able to gain some valuable insights from individuals that have been working on this already.”
The city is also bringing Miami-Dade County Children’s Trust CEO James Haj to the summit, Cserep said.
Haj has led that county’s children’s trust since 2016 and has advocated for improving early childhood care in that community. The Miami trust partnered with other organizations to create a scholarship program, which helps cover the cost for working families whose income is too high to qualify for other programs but who still cannot afford child care.
The Miami Herald reported last year the program is in huge demand as it paid for child care for 1,435 children while another 1,749 children were on the wait list.
Reeves said he wants Pensacola to become a benchmark for the rest of the state in creating access to quality child care, but to get there, everyone involved has to get in the room together and discuss how to move forward.
“I guarantee you, a daycare provider is going to come in and tell us something we don’t know, right? Because they’re in there every single day,” Reeves said. “So that’s why we’re doing this.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves to host a child care summit to find ways to expand access
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
