FUNDING CHILD-CARE AND PUBLIC-EDUCATION

Ensuring the availability of high-quality, affordable child care to al l families who need it is a goal of national importance. The authors s uggest that a comprehensive financing and service delivery system for child care is needed to achieve this goal, and the system should ideal ly be grounded in an existing institution, already present in every co mmunity-the public school. The linkage of child care with the public e ducation system would eliminate the false distinction between child ca re and education, and would create a universally accessible system of child care services for children. The School of the 21st Century is an example of such a system. initially conceptualized by Zigler, it has now been implemented in 400 schools across 13 states, with the leaders hip and direction of Finn-Stevenson. This article describes how school districts that have implemented the program employ a mixture of paren t fees and local, state, federal, and private dollars to fund it, and then proposes an ideal financing model for the program. In the ideal m odel, the same mix of funding sources would be retained, but a per-pup il expenditure of about $9,000 per year is advocated to deliver child care and other social services to three- and four-year-olds. Funds for initial start-up could be derived from reallocation of existing dolla rs, especially state prekindergarten programs, but eventually new fund s would be needed to support ongoing operations.