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- The federal Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program helped Wisconsin technical colleges provide subsidized child care to student parents.
- But the U.S. Department of Education awarded just 40 grants this year — a significant drop compared to previous years.
- No Wisconsin schools received grant funding in the latest round.
- College officials say students are already cutting their course loads or looking for other ways to pay increased child care costs.
For years, the bills Devvin Thomas Sr. received each semester for his son’s child care at Madison College have been a fraction of what families typically pay: $400 one semester. $10 for another. Sometimes, no bill at all.
The reduced-cost child care has allowed Thomas to study for his small business entrepreneurship degree and work toward his dream of owning a cafe and soup kitchen.
But this month, that changed. The federal government declined to award grants that have long helped Wisconsin technical college students like Thomas pay for child care while they study for their degrees. Now, student parents across Wisconsin are enrolling in fewer classes, rethinking their semester plans and scrambling to pay the bills.
For Thomas, the change means a $1,700 bill — a “shock to the system.”
“We’re doing what we can to keep him there. … Outside of paying the mortgage, we just put his tuition and stuff first,” Thomas said. “Even if that means paying the electric bill late or not at all this month.”
At Madison College, some families have pulled their children from campus child care or reduced their course loads to accommodate cheaper care options. Officials at Madison, Milwaukee and Western technical colleges are searching for other funding sources to help parents remain in school.
“If there’s nobody to take care of their children, they will not be able to be in class,” Madison College President Jennifer Berne said.
The loss comes as child care remains a major expense for Wisconsin families.
The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families estimates the average cost to put an infant in a child care center is over $17,400 per year — nearly a quarter of the median Wisconsinite’s household income.
For years, the federal Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program, or CCAMPIS, helped ease that burden for hundreds of Wisconsin families. CCAMPIS grants covered 75% to 95% of participating parents’ child care bills, according to college officials. The funding also helped colleges expand child care services and train more workers for child care jobs.
Now, no colleges in Wisconsin will receive that funding — adding another obstacle for parents trying to advance their education and careers, college officials say. Berne worries it will take student parents longer to finish their studies — or that it will prevent them from doing so.
“This is just a small part of the broader child care crisis nationally,” said Liz Wallace, director of grants at Western Technical College in La Crosse.
A ‘shocking’ change
The CCAMPIS program has been around since 1999.
It’s a competitive grant usually given in four-year cycles. Colleges must make a case for how they’ll use the funds to establish or support campus-based child care programs, particularly for low-income students.
Colleges have come to rely on the funding when planning their child care services, said Stephanie Baker, a higher education senior policy manager at left-leaning think tank New America. Many schools launch programs dependent largely on the funds.
But the program has had a rocky few years. The Biden administration did not hold a grant competition in 2024, and the Trump administration did not hold one in 2025 and proposed eliminating the program entirely.
“That wasn’t predictable for colleges, and that’s been difficult if you’re trying to plan for how to build out your child care services to serve parenting students and compete for those funds,” Baker said.
The U.S. Department of Education opened a competition for four-year grants this year, planning to award 148 schools. While the number of anticipated awards was down by about 50 to 180 grants compared to recent years, the actual number of awards — 40 — was far lower, according to federal documents. Madison, Milwaukee and Western technical colleges were among the nearly 250 schools that applied and didn’t make the cut. No Wisconsin schools received funds.
“It was shocking to see just over a quarter of the awards they anticipated making. It’s really a betrayal of parenting students in college who, again bipartisan members of Congress want to support,” Baker said. “They keep increasing funds because they want to reach more parents in college and help them access child care that keeps them in school.”
It was disappointing news for officials at Madison College, a school that first received CCAMPIS funds in 2005. When they received a letter last week about the rejection, it said the college earned a perfect score for its use of grant money in previous years, but offered no explanation for the rejection.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., slammed the move in a letter to the Department of Education and cited how the loss of funding will hurt students at Madison College.
What’s lost
Thomas wanted to go back to college to show his two sons that it’s never too late.
“I’ve always wanted to cook. I’ve been cooking since I was 5 years old,” he said. “(I wanted) to show my kids that you can do whatever you want to do, regardless of your situation.”
“You are never too big or too old to follow your dreams.”
For low-income student parents, the grants have helped make it possible to balance child care costs with the demands of earning a degree. At Madison College, roughly 120 students have used CCAMPIS support to complete their degrees since 2018.
This semester, families of 34 children at Madison College were set to receive assistance through the program. At Western Technical College, roughly 100 students use grant funding for on-campus child care each year.
Now, colleges worry about how they’ll help those families without the federal money.
Madison College has offered on-campus child care since 1989 and has made three expansions to accommodate more student and employee parents. It opened a new $10 million facility this year. It also used the money to stock a “baby basic needs closet,” where students could take free diapers, formula, wipes and lactation supplies. The on-campus location allows some mothers to drop in between classes to breastfeed their children, campus child care administrator Donna Jost said.
For community and technical colleges, these services — while difficult to provide and fund — are especially important. Their students are more likely to be parenting children than university students. Many colleges don’t track exactly how many of their students are parents, but Kari Reyburn, Western’s director of student life, equity and engagement, estimated that parents could account for as much as half of the student population at some technical colleges.
Student parents are particularly vulnerable to dropping out, Reyburn said. They perform well in their courses. But their responsibilities outside of school make it difficult to keep the momentum to finish their studies.
“This is the type of student we serve as a community and technical college,” Reyburn said. “I just really feel like this is the lever. If you can figure out how to serve this group, remove these barriers and get them to completion, it means everything for our communities and their individual economic vitality.”
‘Plug has been pulled’
The funding loss could also affect colleges’ ability to expand child care services and strengthen the workforce that provides it.
Child care workers are hard to find because the job pays little and often doesn’t come with health care benefits.
Western had plans to use the grant money for staff retention bonuses and to hire more students through apprenticeships and internships.
“The plug has been pulled. Our students … are able to come to us and say, ‘Hey, I’m coming to Western because this is a resource you’re providing,’ and all of a sudden we have to go, ‘Sorry, we don’t have it,’ and we’re scrambling to find a solution in the interim,” Wallace said. “That’s the exponential challenge. They broke this continuity of service for a number of institutions across the nation.”
At Madison College, officials worry that losing the funding will make it harder to fill seats at the new child care center on the Goodman South campus. They hoped it would serve more low-income families in the area. Without the funding, they may have to rely more heavily on families who can afford to pay full price.
Madison College also had big hopes of piloting “sometimes child care” — a drop-in service for parents to leave their children for short periods while they take a test or talk to an adviser.
“Without this funding, it’s going to be very difficult for us to move forward on that new programming,” Berne said.
Milwaukee Area Technical College also operates a drop-in day care, where students can drop their children off for up to three hours while they complete school tasks. The kids play, do crafts or enjoy tummy time while their parents talk with tutors or attend school events. MATC hoped to use the CCAMPIS funds to subsidize this service and expand child care tuition assistance.
“Without continued funding, student-parents face increased financial challenges and reduced access to the child care resources that help them remain enrolled, complete their programs, and achieve their educational and career goals,” MATC Public Relations Director Darryll Fortune said in a statement.
Help wanted
In the meantime, the colleges are scrambling to help students pay their child care bills through private donations and other funding sources.
The Madison College Foundation gifted $30,000 to help the families cover 25% of costs this semester. It doesn’t compare to the roughly $300,000 in federal dollars they’ve gotten annually for the last four years, but it helps. College officials are also talking with legislators to explain the “difficult position we’re in,” Berne said.
“If you want parents to better themselves to where they can make more money, to where they can buy more things, you have to give them the tools to be able to do so, not take those tools away,” Thomas said.
If people with children can’t finish their schooling because of child care costs, “we’ll never have a community that is equitable, where everybody has access to the kinds of jobs (they want), and we won’t have a community that has people to fulfill the jobs that we need,” Berne said.
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.
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