Last week, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a package of bipartisan legislation focused on lowering childcare costs for parents, strengthening early childhood education, and empowering small businesses to better recruit and retain talented employees.
Alongside parents, business leaders, General Assembly leaders, and Lt. Governor Ghazala Hashmi at the VCU Health Child Development Center Northside, Spanberger signed House Bill 18 and Senate Bill 3 to create the Employee Child Care Assistance program. The new law establishes a program to offer matching state funding to employers that cover childcare expenses on behalf of their employees, with priority going to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
“Affordable childcare and early childhood education are not niche issues. They are not luxuries. These are challenges impacting families in every region of Virginia,” said Spanberger. “Today, we’re taking a first step to ease the burden on parents and families across our Commonwealth by creating the Employee Child Care Assistance Program — a new tool that incentivizes employers to help their employees pay for childcare, with the state matching those contributions.”
She noted that “childcare is also a matter of economic competitiveness. When a family can’t afford childcare, often times a parent drops out of the workforce altogether. That’s not just a family budget problem, that’s a Virginia economy problem. We are competing against 49 other states for the best talent in America — and for the businesses that follow that talent. If childcare costs are driving parents out of the workforce, we are losing that competition before it even starts.”
Spanberger also signed House Bill 1208 and Senate Bill 134 to make sure Virginia is accurately calculating and reporting annually the costs to meet parental needs for early childhood care and education in the Commonwealth. The Governor also signed House Bill 211 to direct Virginia to produce a comprehensive report on the state of Head Start and Early Head Start to strengthen these critical programs into the future.
