Blog post from NIEER: As teachers and students alike head back to classrooms, the hopes and dreams of another school year lie on the horizon. Parents are sending their children off to preschool for the big “first day of school,” especially in New York City, where 50,000 children have enrolled in the city’s expanded pre-K program,...
There is finally some good news with respect to Wisconsin’s Medicaid budget. The Department of Health Services (DHS) reported today that the previously anticipated Medicaid shortfall has been almost completely eliminated. The department’s previous quarterly report estimated that the state needed to find $93 million of General Fund...
This coming Wednesday, October 1, marks the start of a new federal fiscal year and with it a significant drop in the federal share of funding that helps support Wisconsin’s Medicaid program. The federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP), based on a federal formula that reduces the federal share in states where median income is...
The 2015-17 budget proposal recently submitted by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) illustrates very clearly why balancing the state budget is extremely difficult when the state is going into the next biennium with a large “structural deficit.” In terms of the funding needed for the Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus programs,...
I was in Green Bay this past summer for the annual meeting of the Community Partnership for Children, coordinated through the Brown County United Way, and focused on school readiness. Here was the shocker for me: last year 86% of families with newborn babies in Brown County received a Welcome Baby home visit. That’s 2,918 visits. They...
It’s that time of the year again where those of us at WCCF who love numbers get pretty excited. Today the Census Bureau began the release of its 2013 American Community Survey (ACS) health insurance coverage data. The figures released today show insurance status for the nation and by state. On Thursday more figures will be released that...
The number of regulated child care programs has dropped substantially in the last six years from 10,705 to 5,858, a 45% drop. The greatest decline by far was for family child care programs, both licensed and certified. The number of group child care centers stayed fairly stable. 71% drop for certified family child care providers: The...
from NIEER's Preschool Matters Today by Shannon Riley-Ayers, NIEER/CEELO Assistant Research Professor I remember the anticipation each fall as school was about to begin. So much was going on in my mind. Who was going to be in my class? What kind of year was it going to be? What were we going to learn? I was excited. I was nervous. These...
BadgerCare Insures More than 8,800 Workers and Dependents in Eight Fast Food Chains Fast food workers were back in the news early this month because they staged a brief strike in many communities to make the case for higher wages. Their efforts to educate the public prompted me to do a little research of my own by tapping an unusual...
As the United States continues to become a more diverse nation, much work remains to be done to ensure that all children, regardless of their race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. A policy report recently published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that children of color face immense barriers to success in key...
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