It’s likely Melissa Tunze would not be $15,000 in debt if she lived just 5 miles south of her Loveland apartment.
That would put her in Weld County and, unlike Larimer County where she lives, Tunze could get state aid for her son’s day-care expenses while she attends nursing school in Wyoming.
But Larimer County is one of 10 statewide that do not provide child-care assistance to low- income college or vocational students, people studying in order to avoid or get off welfare.
Advocates for women say those counties are making a mistake by spending all their child-care dollars on the working poor rather than supporting parents who seek to better themselves through education.
But Larimer, home to Colorado State University, and others among the 10 counties say they simply don’t have enough money to support both working women and those seeking higher ed, though six of them had money left over from child-care budgets last year.
Instead of quitting school and taking a minimum-wage job – which would qualify Tunze for child-care assistance in her county – the 22-year-old single mother has relied on student loans to cover the $500 monthly child-care bill. Her schooling is paid through grants and scholarships.
“My loans are pretty much eaten up by child- care expenses,” said Tunze, who drives an hour each way to attend classes at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne.
Officials in four of the 10 counties – Gunnison, Hinsdale, Eagle and Rio Blanco – rescinded their policy of excluding college students from child-care aid shortly after a reporter inquired about it.
“It doesn’t make sense since education is the foundation for catapulting someone out of poverty, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” said Renee Brown, director of Health and Human Services in Gunnison County, which also serves Hinsdale County and until recently denied full-time students child- care aid in both counties.
Colorado counties last year doled out $75.8 million in aid for the care of 37,000 kids through the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program. Two-thirds of the program is funded by federal dollars, and payments for a child in some counties can be as high as $55 a day.
Payments are made directly to the caregiver, not the parent, and facilities are licensed by the state.
Denver and Jefferson counties are among some that limit assistance to one year, which, according to one student who got the aid, “is worse. You get help for a year, and then you’re on your own.”
“It’s a constant fight to get the help,” said Anna Davis, a 36-year-old mother of six and graduate of Metropolitan State College of Denver who’s gotten the aid since 2001. “If I didn’t have it, I’d be working at some minimum-wage job, and I couldn’t make it.”
Now a master’s degree candidate in public administration, Davis, of Littleton, still gets day-care help for four of her children because of her job. She also receives Medicaid and federal food stamps.
Jefferson County pays up to $30 a day for child care for working families.
“Without it I’d absolutely have to quit school,” she said of the aid that covers a lot of the $2,000 monthly expense. “There’d be no future for myself or my kids.”
Counties get a set amount of day-care money from the state based on need and child population, then each decides who can get it. Some counties supplement the amount with their own tax dollars or with federal welfare money they get.
If a county doesn’t overspend the allotment, it pools the leftovers with similar counties to be redistributed to counties that did overspend.
Six of the counties that don’t help students had child-care money left over last year, records show, and those dollars eventually went to cover overspending by counties that do.
“It really doesn’t sound like great policy,” said Bonnie Ruckman, Human Services director in Rio Blanco County. “We simply were running out of money and didn’t have the funds. We had to make cuts, but that was a few years ago. It just got away from us.”
Some counties defend the practice largely because they lack funds to provide for everyone.
“It would be a major fiscal impact if (students) were all allowed to get aid,” said Ginny Riley, director of Larimer County’s Department of Human Services. With a large university population, the focus has to be on working families, she said.
“It’s difficult to choose between students or working families,” Riley said.
Advocates for working families say child- care assistance is critical for low-income families not on welfare who are determined to avoid it by getting an education.
“This is so silly because we know educational advancement is a proven indicator of economic success,” said Linda Meric, executive director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women.
“We should be promoting education and training to enable low-income parents to succeed,” she said.
Staff writer David Migoya can be reached at 303-954-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com.
