The Mississippi Department of Human Services is offering the Childcare Strong Grant program, which can help childhood care businesses recover from the pandemic. Funding is provided in part through the American Rescue Plan Act, and general department funds were added to maximize the pool of funding. Bob Anderson, Executive Director of DHS, says the deadline for the program is in September, and the agency will have one year to review all spending.
“We have a monitoring team that will be making an on-site visit to several of these childcare providers. We will be sampling about 10% of the providers who got these childcare strong grants,” says Anderson. “Just to make sure that we haven’t missed anything. Just as much as the providers want to make sure they don’t misspend the money, we have to be able to assure the Office of Childcare, the federal authorities, that all these funds have been expended properly.”
Advocates say this deadline is restrictive for businesses, and all other states have deadlines to receive these grants that extend into 2023.
Many childcare providers have also expressed concern about unanswered technical questions, says LaTasha Headley, owner of Loving Hands Educational Resources. She says the information available on the DHS website is not sufficiently detailed, and the zoom calls that have been conducted for training are not enough.
“I am afraid that at the end of this, they will not have time to correct what they’ve already done,” says Headley. “And so we want to be proactive and get ahead of this where they can actually spend correctly on the front-end, so that way once they’re monitoring this, they will be able to do it without any issues.”
The DHS reports more than eleven hundred businesses have been awarded Childcare Strong Grants in Mississippi.
