Most of the kids at her center are using scholarships, Thurman said. But those students won’t be there forever, and even if applications are halted when slots open up, she doesn’t know whether many families in rural Marlboro County will be able to fill them without help. Without that revenue, he said, it would be even more difficult to pay the center’s staff.
South Carolina’s youngest children will likely bear the brunt of that decline.
Low student-teacher ratio requirements make it more expensive to serve infants and toddlers, and it is already difficult enough to hire staff to care for them, said Erica Jones, who runs the Leaders of Tomorrow Child Development Center in Columbia.
“It wouldn’t do us any good at all,” Jones said of a longer stay.
The problems may affect far more than the families who use the scholarships, said Georgia Mazarton, president and CEO of the Central Carolina Community Foundation and a former leader of SC First Steps. If child care centers can’t fill classrooms with scholarship-funded students, they won’t have enough revenue to keep going, even for students whose parents pay for care themselves.
More than 1,900 centers across the state accept the scholarship, and 47,542 children received it in 2024.
Batchelor, the DSS spokesman, said the length of the pause will be determined by how much federal funding South Carolina receives for the program, which is supported by a block grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
That funding was delayed due to the government shutdown, and the state’s upcoming grant may be smaller than this year’s amount, making the pause necessary to “maintain the financial stability” of the program. Batchelor did not respond to questions about the size of the expected funding gap.
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