ATLANTA – Three child advocacy organizations in Georgia are launching an ad campaign encouraging both adults and children to wear masks to discourage the spread of COVID-19.
A series of public service announcements set to begin airing Tuesday features children too young to be vaccinated talking about adults in their lives – including teachers and school bus drivers – who are not able to take care of them due to illness.
“The adults charged with caring for our children are still getting sick,” said Dr. Erica Fener Sitkoff, executive director of Voices for Georgia’s Children. “We know some school districts are running double bus routes because bus drivers are ill. We know central office staff in some districts are subbing in classrooms because they can’t find enough substitutes to cover sick teachers.
“Our children count on these people to get them to school, teach them at school, and get them home safely. If the adults in a child’s life are too ill to care of them, that puts children’s safety at risk.”
Voices for Georgia’s Children is being joined in the “Mask Up for Kids” campaign by the state chapter of the American Academy for Pediatrics and PARTNERS for Equity in Child and Adolescent Health.
“Wearing a mask isn’t fun,” said Dr. Veda Johnson of PARTNERS for Equity in Child and Adolescent Health. “It can be cumbersome and hot. But evidence shows it is a primary way to stop the spread of COVID-19 for children too young to be vaccinated.”
The public service announcements will run statewide on broadcast television as well as digital and social media.
Cases of COVID-19 have been coming down in Georgia in recent weeks after a summer surge. Nearly 1.25 million Georgians have been diagnosed with the virus since the coronavirus pandemic began in March of last year.
More than 82,000 Georgians have been hospitalized with COVID-19. The virus has been responsible for 27,142 confirmed or probable deaths.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
A new study from a Washington, D.C.-based think tank shows a decline in the number of child-care workers in Georgia over the last several years, a decline that was particularly devastating during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s updated National and State Child Care Data report, there were 14,350 child care workers in Georgia in 2020. That number represents a 17% decline in the number of child care workers from 2019 and a 25% decline since 2016.
In 2020, the annual mean salary for Georgia’s child care workers was $21,100. The ration of child care workers in Georgia to infants is 1 to 6; 1 to 8 for young toddlers; 1 to 15 for older toddlers; and 1 to 18 for preschoolers. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, those best practice rations should be 1 to 4; 1 to 4; 1 to 6l and 1 to 10 for those respective categories.
“COVID-19 laid bare many of the challenges in our nation’s child care system,” said Luci Manning, spokesperson for the organization. “These issues include retaining and recruiting staff, the high-cost burden on parents, and lack of a sustainable business model for child care providers—many of which are women-owned small businesses.”
According to the organization, nearly 24 million children ages 5 and under live in the U.S., with 63% living in households in which all parents work.
Other Georgia-related data compiled in the report show: There are 784,969 children ages 5 and under in the state. While 63% of children ages 5 and under live in households in which all parents work, 24% of all children in this age group live in families below the poverty line.
This story available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
President Joe Biden is pushing to extend an expansion of the federal child tax credit through 2025. (Official Biden Twitter video)
ATLANTA – The expanded federal child tax credit Congress passed this year is expected to lift nearly 700,000 Georgia children out of poverty, including about 470,000 Black children, child advocacy leaders said Thursday.
As a result, the state’s overall child poverty rate will be reduced from 13.6% to 5.9%, while the Black child poverty rate will go from 21.8% to 11.4%, Kimberly Scott, executive director of Georgia WAND (Women’s Action for New Directions), said during a news conference in Atlanta.
“This is major tax relief for nearly all working families,” Scott said. “The expanded child tax credit will serve as a lifeline for so many Georgians.”
Georgia WAND and other nonprofit groups interested in children’s wellbeing staged Thursday’s news conference to raise awareness of the expanded child tax credit.
Starting July 15, families will receive monthly checks of up to $300 per child. Over the course of a year, that amounts to $3,600 for each child under age 6 and $3,000 for each child ages 6 through 17.
The expanded child tax credit is part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan President Joe Biden steered through Congress in March. Additional legislation – the American Families Plan – that remains pending would extend the credit through 2025.
Ray Khalfani, a policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, said it’s important that the tax credit be extended beyond just this year because the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic are still being felt, particularly by minority workers hit hardest by layoffs.
“While the economy may be recovering for some, for too many the crisis remains,” he said. “Racial disparities are often linked to the last-hired, first-fired syndrome.”
Mindy Binderman, executive director of GEEARS (Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students) said she is glad to see a larger tax credit going to families with children under 6.
“We know poverty has negative consequences for child outcomes, for health, social, emotional and cognitive development,” she said. “We think the [larger credit] will be helpful.”
Khalfani said he expects a strong push to convince members of Congress to support making the expanded child tax credit permanent. He predicted the effort will get a boost from success stories that emerge from families helped by the expanded credit.
President Joe Biden touts his first 100 days in office at a rally held in Duluth on April 29, 2021. (Official Biden Twitter video)
The Biden administration is pitching Georgia on a $1.8 trillion plan aimed at helping families cover child-care costs via tax credits, boosting federal funds for college education and creating a national program for paid family leave.
Called the American Families Plan, the family-focused package awaiting consideration in Congress leans on hiking taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to fund higher child tax credits and earned-income tax credits for low-income families.
It contains dozens of proposals to extend lower health-insurance premiums to many Georgians, increase the minimum wage for child-care workers and kindergarten teachers, prop up funding for free school meals, cover two years of community college tuition and expand paid family leave.
The plan’s tax proposals would help cut taxes or provide credits for an estimated 80% of Georgia families while hiking taxes for fewer than 1% of residents who make up the state’s top earners, said Danny Kanso, a senior policy analyst with the nonprofit Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI).
“The tax measures in these recovery plans really present the greatest opportunity in a generation to cut child poverty and to rebalance the tax code in favor of working people and the middle class,” Kanso said at a news conference Thursday. “Altogether, those provisions far outweigh the revenue-raisers in these bills.”
GBPI representatives also said the plan would help thousands of Georgians maintain health coverage expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, keep shelves stocked for the roughly 57% of families relying on free and reduced-price school meals and boost educational opportunities in a state where two out of three residents lack a bachelor’s degree.
President Joe Biden touted his latest spending package at a rally last week in metro Atlanta where he pledged to avoid raising taxes on lower and middle-class families and urged supporters to back increased taxes on higher earners and companies.
“It’s about time the very wealthy and corporations start paying their fair share,” Biden said at a drive-in rally in Duluth. “It’s as simple as that.”
Republicans have largely slammed the president’s latest spending plan, noting it would add to a set of other high-dollar packages including $1.9 trillion in new COVID-19 emergency aid that Congress passed in March and a $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal Biden is also pushing.
“Make no mistake: Biden is seeking to make the public reliant on the government for every aspect of our lives,” U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson, R-West Point, wrote in an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner. “His unabashed ‘big government’ agenda would orient our economy and foreign policy around climate change, include massive tax hikes and pack the Supreme Court, to boot.”
If passed by Congress, Biden’s plan would run in tandem with tax cuts for Georgians and broader paid family leave that state lawmakers passed in the 2021 legislative session.
Gov. Brian Kemp recently signed bills to give Georgians a slight income-tax cut and let foster parents tap into a larger tax credit when adopting children. He also signed legislation allowing state employees and teachers to take up to three weeks of paid parental leave.
Low-income children in Georgia are set to soon have an easier path to collecting Medicaid benefits under legislation that passed out of the General Assembly on Wednesday.
Sponsored by state Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, the bill would create an “express lane” for families eligible for food stamps to be automatically enrolled in Georgia’s Medicaid program, rather than having to fill out separate paperwork.
Pending approval from the federal government, the automatic enrollment would allow an estimated 60,000 Medicaid-eligible children who receive food stamps to also join the joint state-federal health program, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Georgians for a Healthy Future.
The bill passed the state Senate unanimously on Wednesday after advancing out of the Georgia House of Representatives last month, also by unanimous vote. It now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
Sen. Ben Watson, R-Savannah, who carried Cooper’s bill in the Senate, said the express-lane format would help cut out cumbersome paperwork and bring more children with medical issues into the Medicaid fold.
“It reduces duplicative services, it reduces bureaucracy and actually gives services to children in need,” Watson said from the Senate floor. “It’s good from a hospital perspective … and it’s good from a government perspective as well.”
Passage of Cooper’s bill comes amid a spike in Medicaid enrollment among low-income Georgians during the COVID-19 pandemic, as enrollment in the state grew by about 338,000 between March of last year and December.
The bill also comes as Georgia’s partial Medicaid-expansion plan has been thrown into doubt after President Joe Biden’s administration moved last month to roll back work requirements for Medicaid eligibility put in place under former President Donald Trump.
Georgia’s partial-Medicaid expansion plan, set to take effect in July, requires eligible adults to work, attend school or volunteer at least 80 hours each month. Critics say the work requirement would leave in the lurch many Georgians who would otherwise qualify for benefits.
The plan would cover adults earning up to 100% of the federal poverty line, adding an estimated 50,000 more beneficiaries, according to state figures. Currently, Georgia Medicaid covers adults with incomes about 35% of the federal poverty line, as well as children in households making up to 138% of the poverty line and low-income senior, blind and disabled adults.
Democratic state lawmakers have long pushed for full Medicaid expansion in Georgia, which would cover adults up to 138% of the poverty line and could add 500,000 more recipients to the program. Republican lawmakers have blocked their attempts, arguing the cost-sharing arrangement between the state and federal governments would still be too expensive for Georgia.
