GEEARing Up for the 2025 Legislative Session: Four of Our Policy Priorities
By GEEARS for Saporta Report
As we prepare for Georgia’s 2025 Legislative Session, GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students is working on the policy agenda we’ll use in our advocacy. A trend is clear: Life these days is extremely expensive, and families of all income levels are struggling to afford even basic necessities. For the parents of young children—who depend upon unique and specific services so they can get to work or school—the financial burden can be untenably heavy.
Therefore, Georgia needs policies that will support its families. This is the value that will inform our advocacy during the next session. Specifically, we’ll be discussing these four priorities with legislators and their staffs:
Increased Support for Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS)
As we recently wrote, Georgia’s struggling child care industry is significantly underfunded. Too many families who rely on this care to get to work and support their families can’t afford it—if they even have access to a high-quality program with openings. At the same time, too many child care providers are struggling to keep their doors open, and many early educators receive near-poverty wages.
Both of these issues could be rectified with a meaningful investment in the Child Care and Parent Services (CAPS) program, which currently provides a lucky few qualifying families (only an estimated 15% of those who are income-eligible) with child care subsidies.
GEEARS was encouraged by the $9.3 million that Georgia legislators added to the CAPS budget last session, but the needs are great and several Southern states’ investments in their child care systems dwarf this amount. In the last two years, Alabama has invested $30 million in child care. Florida: $69 million. Louisiana: $51 million.
Therefore, in 2025, GEEARS will continue to advocate for a far greater budget allocation for CAPS. This will help families, early educators, child care providers, and the state economy that depends upon their participation in the workforce. It will also reflect the will of Georgians, 65% of whom support using state funding to help low-to-moderate income working families afford child care.
Multi-Year Continuous Medicaid Eligibility for Young Children
Currently, parents of babies and toddlers who use Medicaid to access healthcare must undergo an annual eligibility review to maintain their children’s coverage. Filing this virtual paperwork can be confounding. Any number of tiny errors, from a mistake on a form to the inability to access the internet to a missed phone call, can tangle a family in red tape, causing their child to become uninsured. Just in June of 2023—one month—more than 63,000 children lost Medicaid due to difficulties with the eligibility redetermination process.
This is especially devastating to little ones in their first years of life, when doctor’s appointments are frequent and missed care can derail a child’s healthy development. The first three years are a critical time to spot developmental or health issues. Missing this opportunity to diagnose and intervene early could alter a child’s trajectory and make their future care more complex and costly.
So, it makes both humanitarian and economic sense to give all children continuous Medicaid coverage through age three, especially in Georgia, where 53% of rural children and 40% of children in metro areas rely on it.
Funding to Support the Babies Can’t Wait Workforce
Children ages birth through three with disabilities or developmental delays are referred to Georgia’s early intervention program, Babies Can’t Wait (BCW), for services and support. The BCW workforce plays a pivotal role in ensuring timely services for these youngest Georgians. However, some BCW providers—namely Service Coordinators and Special Instructors—have not received pay increases in decades, posing a significant threat to workforce retention.
Last year, Georgia’s legislature took an important step towards supporting this crucial workforce by raising rates for BCW therapists, but Service Coordinators, who manage care for families, and Special Instructors, who provide education and strategies for at-home care and daily routines, were not included in these increases. So, this session, GEEARS will urge legislators to raise rates for Service Coordinators and Special Instructors to ensure these hardworking professionals continue to provide critical services to some of the state’s most vulnerable young children.
A Refundable State Child Tax Credit
Since 2001, the federal government has issued child tax credits of varying amounts to families. Many states have followed suit, creating their own child tax credits to help offset the ever-growing expense of raising a young child. At least twelve states have made their credits refundable, meaning that even people with low incomes who don’t owe tax will receive the credit—money in their bank accounts that can help with the costs of everyday needs and even lift some families out of poverty.
Luckily, the Georgia Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Childcare, which was created this year to study child care challenges, included a state child tax credit (and additional CAPS funding!) in their recommendations released earlier this month. GEEARS will urge our legislators to adopt this recommendation and ensure refundability of the credit for this simple and powerful reason—Georgia’s families, particularly in these difficult economic times, need more support to give their children the stability they deserve.
Indeed, that’s the impetus for all four of these priorities. Our state’s parents are working incredibly hard and yet, across the socioeconomic spectrum, they’re struggling to afford their families’ needs. These policies can make it a little easier, and we believe most Georgians, and their elected officials, support them. We look forward to productive discussions about tangible ways to support families with young children when our legislators assemble beneath the Gold Dome on January 13th.