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GAO Study: Families With Limited English Proficiency Lack Access to Child Care Subsidies and Human Services

In September 2006, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that examined the participation of children from families with limited English proficiency in child care programs funded by the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Head Start. Through a series of 12 focus groups with Vietnamese-speaking parents and Spanish-speaking parents (both those who receive assistance and those who do not), the GAO found that families with limited English proficiency face unique barriers to accessing and using child care assistance. The GAO also conducted interviews with state and local officials, including Child Care Resource & Referral (CCR&R) staff to assess the measures being taken to improve access for these children.

Children from families of limited English proficiency are less likely to have accessed child care assistance or to have participated in Head Start in the year before kindergarten.

• 88 percent of these children were Hispanic. These findings did not hold for Asian children, who make up about 8 percent of children with limited English proficiency.

Families with limited English proficiency face multiple barriers to accessing child care and early education programs.

• Families with limited English proficiency experienced many of the same barriers as families earning low incomes, including difficulty finding child care during nontraditional work hours, lack of transportation, and waiting lists.
• Many families with limited English proficiency simply were not aware that programs existed. In addition to a general dearth of translated program information, some families may not have known about assistance programs because the programs in their area already had long waiting lists and were not in a position to widely advertise their services.
• Shortages of bilingual staff and the lack of translated application materials prevented many parents from applying for assistance programs. Families with limited English proficiency who were able to access assistance programs cited the availability of bilingual caseworkers as a major factor in their ability to apply for assistance successfully.
• Parents with limited English proficiency had difficulty communicating with child care providers, and officials at local CCR&Rs reported shortages of bilingual providers.
• Even though the children of immigrant parents qualify for child care assistance if they were born in the United States, immigration concerns may deter parents from accessing assistance. State and local officials reported that these families were often reluctant to provide personal information and may have feared exposing undocumented family members.

CCR&Rs and other state and local actors are taking steps to better serve these families, but more work is needed.

• The federal government does not collect information on child care assistance access by children from families with limited English proficiency, and only 13 states collect language data from parents whose children receive CCDBG subsidies. 10 of these states use this data to provide translated forms or interpreters to parents applying for subsidies and to determine the need for bilingual staff.
• Some CCR&Rs hire interpreters and translate materials to provide oral and written language assistance to families with limited English proficiency, but many agencies face challenges related to providing these services. Agency officials reported that the expense associated with translating materials and the overall shortage of qualified bilingual staff created difficulties in serving families with limited English proficiency.
• In some cases, CCR&Rs shared resources to overcome these challenges. For example, one California CCR&R with language capacity in Cantonese and Mandarin coordinated with staff at a nearby CCR&R that had language capacity in Russian to provide services to families.
• CCR&Rs also took steps to recruit bilingual child care providers. Several of the agencies visited by the GAO reported initiatives to increase the supply of providers who spoke other languages, offer training in other languages to existing providers, or help individuals speaking other languages to enter the child care field.

GAO Recommendations:

The GAO recommends that the Child Care Bureau work with states to help them find cost-effective strategies for collecting data on the language preference or English proficiency of families using CCDBG subsidies. Once the data are available, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should assist state and local agencies in providing language assistance, recruiting providers, and distributing information for families with limited English proficiency. The GAO also believes that HHS should require states to report on how they plan to facilitate access to child care assistance for these families.

Source: United States Government Accountability Office. More Information Sharing and Program Review by HHS Could Enhance Access for Families with Limited English Proficiency, August 2006.