ABSTRACT
The delivery of services is intricately related to and dependent on the way they are funded. Current funding strategies, which were developed in a different era and have evolved over the years, seem to be obsolete today and cause numerous problems. The court-mandated and state-legislated programs often focus on school readiness issues and on the provision of preschool experiences for part of the day. As such, they do not address the need for all-day child care for preschool children and for before- and after-school and vacation child care for school-age children. As things now stand, only some affluent families are able to purchase good quality child care; the majority of working, middle-class families are unable to do so, and subsidies for the cost of caring for low income children are inadequate. Attempts to address the problems have resulted in calls for both lesser and greater government involvement in child care.
