Child care in crisis: State cuts take center stage at Morristown meeting
- voteauradunn
- Sep 1
- 3 min read
by Kristen Neymarc Morristown Green Contributor
Area nonprofits are scrambling to deal with abrupt changes to a state child care program that they say could prevent families from obtaining vital services.
The Murphy Administration ended all new applications to New Jersey’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) for the coming school year. It took effect on Aug. 1, 2025, catching families and providers off guard during the summer holidays.
“This is more than a child care issue. It is a workforce issue. If families can’t access care programs, they can’t go to work,” Winifred Smith-Jenkins, director of early learning policy and advocacy for Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), told a community meeting last week at the Morristown Neighborhood House.
Organized by the ACNJ and the New Jersey Association for the Education of Young Children, and hosted by Cornerstone Family Programs, the gathering brought together parents, advocates, child care providers, and local officials to discuss the fallout from the state’s funding decision.
CCAP provides income-based subsidies to working families to offset the high costs of early care and education, before- and after-school programs, and summer care. It serves approximately 70,000 New Jersey children.
Although CCAP received an $80 million increase in the state budget, it still falls $30 million short of what is required to fully fund the program, according to speakers at the Aug. 28, 2025, meeting. With child care in NJ costing up to $13,000 a year per child, it simply is out of reach for many working families without subsidies.
The changes don’t stop at just ending new enrollments. Families already in the program are seeing their co-payments increase to around 6 percent of their income, up from a sliding scale of 0 to 5 percent.
“I had a parent in tears last week because she could not afford the increases. She is doing everything right as a working mother of two, but the support she had been counting on was suddenly pulled away,” recounted Rosemary Adamo, director of the F.M Kirby Children’s Center of the Madison Area YMCA.
State Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-25th Dist.) serves on the Children, Families and Food Security Committee. “I see every day how essential child care is to working parents and I will work across the aisle to make sure this program is stabilized,” she said. “I see all too often how pet projects get funded while critical programs like child care fight for scraps.”
Community leaders stressed that the battle is not about scarcity, but about choices. As Smith-Jenkins reminded the audience, “New Jersey’s approved Fiscal Year 2026 budget projects a $6.7 billion surplus. We know the resources exist. It is about priorities. What does New Jersey want for its families? For its future economic growth?”
ACNJ and 21 other advocacy and provider organizations sent a letter on Aug. 19 to Gov. Phil Murphy and state lawmakers urging a special Legislative session to address the underfunding of CCAP.
ACNJ is planning at least 10 more town hall meetings across the state. It also has launched a petition to capture the scope of unmet need — a step considered especially urgent because the state no longer is maintaining a CCAP waitlist.
In the past, waitlist data served as powerful evidence of demand. Proving unmet need is far more difficult without those numbers, said ACNJ Senior Policy Analyst Diane Dellanno. The petition is designed to help fill that gap.
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