ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens needs to spend $20 million to enhance and subsidize youngster care and preschool within the metropolis.
The cash would come with $5 million from town, $5 million town’s public faculty system and $10 million from personal donors, Dickens informed WABE-FM.
On Friday, the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students introduced a $4.5 million pledge from the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation and United Way of Greater Atlanta to assist pay for the plan.
The metropolis will use federal pandemic aid cash to pay for its $5 million.
The cash pays to refurbish childcare facilities, to assist households afford childcare and to pay academics bonuses.
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Dickens mentioned many childcare services haven’t been ready to afford essential repairs.
“To get them up to par, we’re asking these childcare facilities, notably on the southside of city quite a lot of disinvested locations, come to us and we’ll offer you grants to enhance and modernize,” he mentioned.
The common month-to-month value of childcare in Georgia is about $1,000 per youngster. Courtney English, the mayor’s senior coverage advisor, mentioned that’s unaffordable for a lot of households.
“There are about 13,000 households in and across the metropolis of Atlanta which might be both cost-burdened — they’re paying effectively over 40% of their revenue in the direction of childcare companies, that’s means, means too excessive — or they don’t have entry to any form of program just because they’ll’t get there, they’ll’t afford it,” English mentioned.
Curbing prices for households is a precedence, English mentioned, as a result of entry to high quality childcare is important for kids’s growth.
In 2017, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce launched a report exhibiting an absence of entry to childcare value Atlanta companies $1.75 billion yearly and $105 million in misplaced tax income.
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