When Lompoc native Sara Martinez received deployment orders to go to Vandenberg Space Force Base, getting on a child care waiting list was her priority.
Martinez—who requested that her name be changed—deployed back to her hometown with her husband and daughter in February 2018 after being based in Denver’s Buckley Space Force Base for four years.
“At Buckley, the second I found out I was pregnant, I got on the waitlist and it was 10 months before I could get a spot; if I hadn’t applied right away, I would’ve had to wait a long time,” she recalled.
At Vandenberg, it took Martinez six months to get a spot at the Vandenberg Child Development Center, and she still ran into issues with scheduling, as the center is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Martinez said.
“Because we are 24/7 operations, there is no way around working those shift hours, but there isn’t 24/7 care available. … If it’s military couples, we have to stagger our shifts so that someone can always be home when there aren’t day care hours available,” she said.
Things may begin to change for Martinez and on-base military families across the country through the Childcare Expansion for Militaries Act: a bipartisan bill to improve and increase child care services for military families as well as ensure that children of military families have access to mental health resources.
Sponsored by Congressman Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) and Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio), this act provides $15 million in funds for new facilities construction and a needs-assessment for child care centers and mental health resources, Congressman Carbajal told the Sun.
“We can’t expect our military men and women—our service members—to voluntarily serve our country, sacrifice for our country, and not take care of their family needs,” Carbajal said.
The Childcare Expansion for Militaries Act will analyze how to redistribute current military construction funds and other military operations in order to provide better child care services and resources, Carbajal said.
“The optimal [option] would be to have a child care facility and military resources to achieve that,” the congressman said.
Carbajal hopes to include the bill in the broader National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a series of federal laws specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense—in order to ensure child care is included in defense appropriations.
“It would be irresponsible to not support our military families; we can’t acknowledge their sacrifice with the knowledge that their sacrifice needs our help to support the needs of their children,” he said.
“When you consider the challenges on hand for children with the absence of a parent being deployed, the instability provides real challenging issues for children,” Carbajal continued. “We need to make sure we are assessing the resources that are available [and] needed on base and in surrounding communities.”
The fact this bill has bipartisan authors should speak volumes to the nationwide need for adequate child care services, said Jim Bialick, director of government relations for Zero to Three, a national nonprofit that promotes programs to ensure healthy early development in babies.
“Very rarely do you see a Democrat from California and a Republican from Texas get together,” he said.
Bialick said that including their child care expansion proposal in the National Defense Authorization Act will increase its chances of passing in December—the NDAA has passed every year for the past 61 years—but he has lingering concerns.
“There’s never any pushback on this, but there’s pushback on everything this year. The House provided more than what the White House was asking for in defense, and there’s been pushbacks on the magnitude of defense spending,” he said.
“With everything going on in Congress, things are very partisan right now. What shouldn’t be partisan is the health and wellness of our kids and their social emotional development,” Bialick continued.
Military bases are a good place to start when looking at child care funding and reform because it’s easier to take changes to a national level, he said.
“Every state has its own regulations in child care, and it’s pretty difficult to do something top down. … Each state does things differently because they have developed organically, and organic development does have some gaps,” Bialick said.
By going to specific, on-base child care, there’s no navigation or analysis of different child care systems; everything is set up the same across the country, he said.
“Almost every base has some kind of waitlist and that’s due to a lot of people, a lot of turnover, and intentional regulations for child-to-caregiver ratio,” Bialick said.
“You don’t want one person caring for 20 infants, that would be nightmarish for them, but also to ensure young kids are getting the engagement they need. That also means you need a lot of people,” he continued.
Child care and caregiver shortages and high costs have been impacting not only military bases, but other sectors across the state.
In California, the average annual costs of infant child care is $16,945—about $1,412 per month—and 111.3 percent more per year than in-state tuition for four-year public college, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That makes California one of 33 states and Washington, D.C., where infant care is more expensive than in-state, four-year public college tuition.
The fact that child care and in-state college tuition can be spoken in the same breath should be alarming for people, Bialick said.
According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for California-based military service members is $49,041, or about $4,000 per month, making the average child care costs about a quarter of their paychecks.
“It’s always [a] government employee scale based on seniority [and] based on where you are located, but you can always say it’s not enough,” Bialick said. “[Even] for high earning families, child care is disprortionately expensive as a cost; the cost of child care is a significant addition to a family budget.”
Service member Martinez was fortunate to have family in Lompoc to look after her daughter when she had to work outside the care center’s normal hours, but she empathizes with those who don’t have such support.
“For my daughter it wasn’t a huge deal, but for anyone else’s kids it’s difficult,” she said. “You’re spending the night at a stranger’s house, it happens. We are a tight-knit community, but the kids [I assume] feel a little awkward about it,” she said.
Vandenberg’s Facebook groups have posts asking fellow service members to watch their kids when parents have to go on shift, leaving them with uncertified providers and “perfect strangers” at odd hours, she said.
“[The child center] curriculum and care is great, all the providers are super helpful and very nice; it’s just there isn’t enough of them,” she added
The Vandenberg Child Development Center currently has a six-month wait, and the Center did not respond to the Sun’s request for an interview.
Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor can be reached at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 18-25, 2021.
