[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 59 (Tuesday, May 12, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H3077-H3078]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ON CHILD CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shimkus). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Snyder) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. SNYDER. I could not help but think, when the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Hunter) was speaking, I have Little Rock Air Force base 
in my district and one of the places I like to visit on the base is the 
child care center there. It is a top flight, very high-quality child 
care at the center, but it is one of those issues that most Americans 
do not think about, that so many of our military dependents now have 
children and they have to be cared for or their parents will decide to 
get out of the Air Force.
  What I wanted to discuss briefly with my colleague, the gentleman 
from Maine (Mr. Allen) is this issue of quality child care. I am from 
Arkansas. We have a lot of working families there that have two folks 
working or single-parent families and the parent needs to work. How do 
you find quality child care during the day or the evening when your 
kids are home alone?
  I am also a family doctor. We have seen a lot of research come out in 
the last couple years about how important brain development is in the 
early years of a child's life and that again points to the need for 
quality child care.
  A lot of my district, Mr. Speaker, is rural. As I have traveled 
around the district, a lot of the parents do not have the option in the 
rural areas for quality child care that some of the other areas of my 
district and of the country do. Based on that basis of information and 
experience, the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) and myself worked on a 
bill that would provide a source of funding that would give school 
districts in America the option of beginning a quality child care 
program for their parents if they should choose to in their school 
districts.
  I yield to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) to discuss the topic 
further.
  Mr. ALLEN. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
  Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Snyder) and I have been 
working on this legislation for some time. It is called the Education 
Child Care Partnership Act. This has been something we and our staffs 
have really put some time and energy into. It is a bill that, if 
passed, would really expand working families' options for quality care 
for their young children.
  In Maine, when I ran for this office, I called for a new national 
initiative on child care, and I did that because as I traveled around 
my district in Maine, what I heard from young parents consistently, day 
in and day out, was that they were finding that child care was, number 
one, not readily available and, number two, often more expensive than 
they could afford. Every day all across this country many parents 
simply have to go to work and now trust the most precious, the most 
important people in their lives, their children, to someone else.
  We have in this country 13 million kids under the age of 6 in child 
care during the day. And too much of that child care is of mediocre 
quality but still not affordable to most working families. The 
Education Child Care

[[Page H3078]]

Partnership Act, which the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Snyder) and I 
have been working on, would provide families with an affordable, 
accessible, and quality option for child care for our youngest 
children.
  The bill really focuses on children between the ages of zero and six. 
It earmarks funds within the child care and development block grant for 
States to fund local education agencies which choose to provide full-
day, year-round, school-based child care for children age zero to six. 
What we are looking for is a seamless system of childhood, early 
childhood education, because what we have found is that sometimes we 
have a child care system over here with some child care centers and 
lots of in-home care, and then over here we have an education 
institution which really does not begin until the ages of 5 or 6.
  What we need to do is create, for those States that want it, complete 
flexibility, complete choice, the option of funding some child care in 
a school-based setting for a wide variety of reasons. It can be cheaper 
because the facilities are already provided. It can be quality, because 
the playground is already there and more resources can go into the care 
givers.
  So that is why we did this work, that is why we put this bill 
together.
  I thank the gentleman from Arkansas for all his work on this bill.
  Mr. SNYDER. Mr. Speaker, I want to describe a situation in one town 
when I first started thinking about this idea, in Pangburn, Arkansas in 
White County. White County is where Harding University is, if you are 
familiar with that college. About 12 years ago the superintendent of 
the school board there decided that they had a need for child care. 
They had an industry there. There was no profit or nonprofit groups 
that had come in with child care and so they took an old building on 
the campus and converted it into quality child care that begins at 6 
weeks. It is now a model for what can be done in a State if a school 
district chooses to.

  I wanted to say a couple things. First of all, one of the things I 
like about this plan is it is completely local control. It is an 
elected school board that can decide to participate or not to 
participate in applying for these grants. Also the way we have crafted 
the bill, it does provide some money there that the money could be used 
to help build the facility, a quality child care facility.

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