OAKLAND, Calif. – Last week a six-month-old court case that began last year after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cut a child care program for working families was settled and funding restored.
The state of California agreed that the CalWORKS Stage 3 program will continue to offer child care services for parents who have successfully transitioned off welfare but whose wages are still too low to cover child care.
The settlement affects the families of more than 56,000 California children who had been told they would lose their child care last October, as Lake County News has reported.
The suit was brought by the Public Interest Law Project, the Child Care Law Center, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, Public Counsel Law Center and Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.
The settlement agreement, signed by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Wynne Carvill, provides an opportunity for parents who lost Stage 3 child care to come back onto the program now.
“This settlement gives California working families everything they sought in court,” said Patti Prunhuber, an attorney at the Public Interest Law Project, the lead counsel for Parent Voices Oakland, the group that filed the case. “We are grateful that the havoc unleashed by Gov. Schwarzenegger’s veto can finally be corrected with fairness and consistency.”
The plaintiffs in the case issued a statement in which they said the state's guarantee in the settlement that the child care assistance would be maintained was all the more significant considering that the 2011-12 state budget has not yet been passed, and so no one knows at what level funds for CalWORKs Stage 3 child care will be restored.
The groups said that the budgets proposed by both Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature earlier this year included funding for the program.
On Oct. 29, 2010, the Alameda County Superior Court issued an emergency injunction temporarily halting the veto.
The plaintiffs said the uncertainty already caused by written state notices telling parents that their funding would soon end destabilized the child care system. “Thousands of families were left confused as to whether they would still have affordable care for their children,” said Melissa Rodgers, an attorney with the Child Care Law Center, a co-counsel in the case.
She added, “We know for a fact that many families who lost their Stage 3 child care have never come back. We want them to know that they have the right to come back to Stage 3 now.”
The Department of Education and child care agencies are now required to conduct meaningful outreach efforts to find and restore child care services to former Stage 3 families who fell out of the system, according to the settlement.
Families who have already moved to other child care programs will be able to choose whether or not to come back to Stage 3. If families are already receiving such alternate funding, then that assistance cannot be cut off.
“We have achieved success in saving thousands of jobs for working parents and child care providers, but most importantly, we have assured that our number one priority, child care for children, has been upheld,” said Corean Todd, a member of Parent Voices Oakland.
“We hope that our efforts help parents nationwide to understand how important, integral, and powerful their voices are to the planning and implementation of change,” Todd said. “This court case not only helped our Parent Voices Oakland chapter but all parents on a state wide level. Child care keeps children learning and parents earning!”
Follow Lake County News on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LakeCoNews, on Tumblr at www.lakeconews.tumblr.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lake-County-News/143156775604?ref=mf and on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/LakeCoNews.