Testimony to the House Democratic Policy Committee
Presented by Dan O’Brien, Policy Manager,
Education and Family Stability, Children First
October 28, 2024

On behalf of Children First, thank you for inviting us to offer testimony in front of the committee today. I commend you for prioritizing to focus on issues facing Pennsylvania families.

Working families want just a few simple things in life. They want their children to be safe, go to a good school and know that their own hard work will pay off so they can buy a house in a good community and never have to worry about choosing between their own family’s well-being and the financial stability of their household.

Well, I have some good news and some bad news on this front. First, let’s start with the obvious bad news. The cost of ensuring kids and aging family members are cared for is making it harder for Pennsylvania working families to stay above water. Often, Pennsylvanians are losing significant income when they have to cut back hours or leave the workforce all together due to the lack of affordable child care or access to paid family and medical leave.

The good news is that the folks sitting in front of me today can help lead the way to give Pennsylvania’s working families a fighting chance to not only “get by” but a chance for their kids and our communities across the Commonwealth to have every opportunity to prosper.

The General Assembly, along with Governor Shapiro, has already proven it can get things done for working families in a bipartisan manner when the House passed the expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit last year with a 141-62 vote. That effort led by my state representative, Rep. Tina Davis, along with state Rep. Melissa Shusterman, gained the support of over two-thirds of the House and eventually led to it being implemented when the state code bills and budget were agreed upon.

The expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit was a monumental step in the right direction to put actual dollars back into the hands of working families, which not only leads to more financial stability but benefits our local and state economies overall.

When that bill was being considered before the House Finance Committee, I testified that “addressing the demand/affordability side of child care is critical, however without simultaneously addressing the supply side, the staffing crisis in child care centers, this good-willed effort to provide critical well-earned support for working families could potentially fall short. Early learning centers continue to close classrooms due to the flight of early learning educators leaving the field caused mainly by low wages, lack of benefits, etc.”

Unfortunately, over a year later, this is still the case. As members of Start Strong PA, we and our partners have proposed that the General Assembly can tackle this issue by investing new and recurring state funding to establish a child care teacher recruitment and retention grant program. Investing in Pennsylvania’s nearly 54,000 early learning educators, many of them parents themselves, is investing in their paychecks and would play a vital role in keeping more dollars in the bank accounts of working parents by making child care more accessible and affordable. Without state investments in the ECE workforce, providers will continue to lose educators, close classrooms and need to raise tuition to stay afloat while working parents will foot the already growing bill.

I urge you to also consider another critical measure that would put much needed income back into the pockets of families like 13 other states, including the majority of our neighbors (New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware), have already done. Passing a statewide paid family and medical leave program in Pennsylvania would allow working families to not have to decide between the financial stability of their home and taking care of their families during critical times, such as following the birth of a child or helping a loved one or themselves battling cancer.

There’s good news on this front. Luckily, for the 4 million workers in Pennsylvania who don’t have access to paid family and medical leave, there is bipartisan legislation, the Family Care Act (HB181/SB580), that has passed through committee in both the House and Senate with strong bipartisan support and can be voted upon at any time by either chamber. The Family Care Act would provide much-needed income that Pennsylvania working families currently miss out on at a critical time due to the lack of paid leave.

For example, under the Family Care Act, the average worker in state Rep. Pashinski’s or Chairman Bizzarro’s districts would pay roughly only $3-4 a week but could receive between $9,000-11,000 of income during their leave. A recent study by the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center shows that if the Family Care Act was implemented, Pennsylvania’s workers would receive two to four times more in paid family and medical leave benefits than they would pay throughout their entire time in the workforce. Even the lucky ones who may only take leave once would receive more in paid family and medical leave benefits than what they paid throughout their careers.

Without a statewide program, those same workers are now losing money in their paychecks or going into debt after losing or leaving their jobs altogether simply because they need to take care of themselves or a loved one in a critical time of need.

As we have seen with the creation or expansion of other statewide paid family and medical leave programs, child tax credits, and refundable earned income tax credits, policies that directly put money back into the pockets of parents and working families create financial stability, decrease debt and a reliance on other state programs, and boost local and state economies.

These policies have strong bipartisan support. We urge you as House leaders to tap into that bipartisan support to bring more direct benefits for working families in Wilkes-Barre, Erie, Johnstown and across the rest of Pennsylvania. Thank you again for allowing me to provide testimony on these critical issues impacting families in Pennsylvania.