Child care bills boost momentum in San Mateo County

“It really should be by-right. When they’re located together, they shouldn’t have projects slowed down with red tape,” Karen Haas-Foletta, executive director of Footsteps Child Care, said.

Haas-Foletta also operates a center called Footsteps in Redwood City, which is co-located in a housing development for seniors. While the previous red tape directly affected developers, many who build affordable housing, it also affects child care operators, who have to delay their opening timelines, she added. 

“It isn’t so much that it’s being blocked, but it’s been slowed down, because they get stuck in a lot of regulations, and it can take many months to resolve,” she said. 

AB 753 lowers the number of education units assistant teachers need to be considered for such positions and allows them to supervise children for up to two hours without a fully certified teacher in the classroom.

“That allows us to expand our hiring possibilities,” Haas-Foletta said. “For the last six years, hiring has been the bane of my existence, it has gotten better lately, but it’s still a problem, we can consider candidates that have six units.

Newsom also signed Senate Bill 792, which expands income eligibility for CalWORKs recipients who need child care. 

The bills come at a time when the county is ramping up discussions on potential ballot measures and policy changes that would expand child care subsidies for middle-income families, streamline the child care application process and boost wages for child care workers. 

San Mateo County supervisors Lisa Gauthier and Jackie Speier have started holding feedback sessions on the best ways to invest more heavily in early childhood infrastructure. During a Board of Supervisors meeting Aug. 26, Speier floated a few ideas to fund additional programs and subsidies, including a sales tax, increasing the vehicle rental tax or using the triple-partnership model used in Michigan, where employers, parents and the government split child care costs.

Currently, the vast majority of child care subsidies are state-funded and as such, only families making up to 85% of California’s median income — about $93,000 for a family of three — typically qualify. That hurts expensive counties like San Mateo County particularly hard, where the average cost of infant child care is about $32,000 per year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

“We really do need to change the system and fix the system,” Haas-Foletta said. “We need more subsidies for low-income families, but for the ones that make just a little bit too much, there’s nothing.” 

Providers are also struggling to keep their heads above water, a problem that’s further exacerbated by the state’s relatively recent rollout of transitional kindergarten. As of the current school year, the state is funding TK in all public schools starting at 4 years old. While beneficial for parents, it’s made private child care centers operate on dangerously thin margins. With a higher proportion of infants and toddlers in their care now, providers have higher costs due to more intensive staffing and licensing requirements.

“TK is really hitting all our child care providers,” Haas-Foletta said. 

According to a 2024 report from University of California, Berkeley, one-third of early childhood educators in San Mateo County rely on one or more forms of public assistance, especially Medi-Cal and food stamps, and one-third don’t receive retirement benefits. The report also noted that San Mateo County early childhood centers have fewer assistants on site than the statewide average.