Category: Legislation

February: A Month of Advocacy for Early Childhood Policies

Legislative District 12 constituents and CAA meeting with Senator Epstein (D).

February is the shortest month, but for Children’s Action Alliance (CAA), it was a long and important month of advocating for Arizonans. CAA had presence at both the Arizona State Capitol and on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. promoting solutions that are needed and matter to young children and families in Arizona. Through our conversations with state and federal lawmakers, the consistent messaging was that we needed more public investment in child care and early learning so our youngest Arizonans can thrive.

 

Early Childhood Day

Legislative District 4 constituents and early childhood leaders, including KinderCare, First Things First, and CAA, meeting with Senator Werner(R).

On February 17th, CAA joined the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance (AZECA), along with partners, to meet with state legislators to promote legislation that decreased the child care costs for families, increased access to child care, and addressed the shortage of early childhood educators. Specifically, CAA discussed important solutions that helped families through:

  • HB 2643 Appropriation, Child Care
    • The bill appropriates a crucial $120 million from the state General Fund to the Department of Economic Security (DES) for child care assistance.
    • DES implemented a waiting list for most families applying to the Child Care Assistance Program on August 1, 2024, due to increased demand and limited funding. As of 02/28/2025, there are 1,587 families and 2,607 children on the waiting list.
    • As the appropriation bill never received a hearing in its chamber of origin, Governor Hobbs included a $112.4 million on-going appropriation from the state General Fund for the Child Care Assistance Program in her Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) Executive Budget. This means that this will still be a priority discussion item during budget negotiations to help alleviate some of the waiting list.
  • HB 2778 Luxury Tax; Nicotine; Vapor; Products
    • The bill imposes a luxury tax on nicotine and vapor products in the same manner as other tobacco products. This is important as the bill directs tax revenue from nicotine and vapor products to be deposited for the Early Childhood Development and Health Board, also known as First Things First (60%), and the state General Fund (40%), which increases state revenue for important programs.
    • First Things First is Arizona’s only public funding source dedicated exclusively to early childhood. On November 7, 2006, Arizonans made a historic decision on behalf of our state’s young children by passing Proposition 203, a citizen’s initiative to fund quality early childhood development and health programs for children, birth to age 5, before kindergarten. Voters backed that commitment with an 80-cent per pack increase on tobacco products. Given the shift away from tobacco product purchases in recent years, First Things First revenue has declined. The bill is an extension of the voter initiative given the innovation of these newer products in recent years.
    • With the decline in revenue, First Things First has had to limit the number of programs, offerings, and financial assistance for early childhood programs, like their Quality First Scholarships, that help low-income families afford quality early care and education for their young children
    • Unfortunately, this bill also did not get a hearing in its chamber of origin- leaving early childhood advocates frustrated at the lack of support from our state lawmakers on common sense solutions that are already adapted in over 30 states.

As the legislative session is far from being over, CAA will continue to advocate for these state level policies that increase funding for child care and early learning programs.

NAEYC Public Policy Forum

Senator Gallego with early childhood leaders

CAA’s Director of Early Learning and Education, Kyrstyn Paulat, attended the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) 2025 Public Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. February 23rd-25th. NAEYC represents more than 50,000 early childhood educators that are committed to promoting high-quality early childhood education for young children. CAA was a member of the Arizona core team that included also NAEYC’s Arizona affiliates, Arizona Association for the Education of Young Children (AZAEYC), along with their southern chapter (SAZAEYC), as well as First Things First, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University. On February 25th, Arizona’s core team attended visits with seven out of the nine Congressional Offices, and both U.S. Senate Offices. Specifically, the Arizona team emphasized that Congress should:

  • Protect and prioritize new investments in key federal child care and early learning programs that support educators, families and young children, including the Child Care and Development Block Grant, Head Start, and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), in both the FY25 and FY26 appropriations bills;
  • Oppose cuts to these programs, and other programs families with young children and early educators rely on, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP);
  • Prioritize tax approaches that support families with young children to afford child care, like the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and making the tax credit fully refundable.
AZAEYC’s Albert Murrieta, SAZAEYC’s Diana Hill, and CAA’s Kyrstyn Paulat meeting with Representative Ciscomani (R).

Our meetings further reinforced the importance of federal funding to our state and how cuts to these programs would be harmful to our children, families, and communities. Although the House passed the budget resolution last week, there are many House Republicans, like Representative Ciscomani, that are opposed to large cuts to important programs, like Medicaid, and know the devasting effects these would have on their communities. The budget plan does not directly impose specific cuts, but it does lay out guidelines on how to offset the tax reforms, such as directing the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, to cut at least $880 billion over 10 years.

The passing of the budget resolution was the first step in a very long process of budget reconciliation. The Arizona team communicated in all meetings how vital these federal programs and funding are to our state as Arizona depends more on federal funds than most states. Federal funds make up 44% of Arizona’s revenues, above the national average of 32%. Specifically, our team stated that 74% of that federal funding is Medicaid and in early childhood, Medicaid covers more than half of Arizona’s births, and roughly 36% of children. In rural Arizona, even more children rely on Medicaid, as more than 50% of the population of children are insured through the public health insurance.

Looking Forward

The state and federal government must expand its support for the early care and education sector, because investing in our children means investing in the future of our society. As we are getting prepared for a long uphill battle, please know your stories and experiences are so important in shaping these policy decisions.

Please contact your elected officials to urge them to prioritize early childhood policies, because an investment in early learning and child care is essential for the well-being of Arizona’s children, their education and health, and our future.

URGENT: CONTACT SEN. WERNER ON SB1305 (KINSHIP CARE)

Children’s Action Alliance asks you to immediately email or call Chairwoman Carine Werner and ask her to include SB1305 on next week’s Senate Health and Human Services (HHS) Committee agenda.   

Background on Bill 

SB1305:  Temporary assistance; child-only case sponsored by Sen. Shope 

  • Updates TANF eligibility rules to provide cash assistance for children living with non-parent relatives who are responsible for the child's basic needs.  
  • Impact: Provides more support for children in kinship care.  

Details for Contact:

Email address: cwerner@azleg.gov   

Phone: 602.926.3673  

Subject: URGENT: Please add SB1305 to the HHS agenda!  

Email Template

Chairwoman Werner, 

I am respectfully requesting that SB1305 be added to your Senate HHS Committee agenda. This bill is an important tool to allow children that live with kinship caregivers, such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles to receive the vital financial support needed to meet the child’s basic needs. 

Kinship caregivers provide a stable and loving home for children who might otherwise enter the foster care system. However, many kinship caregivers struggle to meet the financial needs of the children, which may be an impediment to their health, education, and wellbeing. 

SB1305 will provide crucial financial support to keep children out of the foster care system and help them to thrive with their kinship caregivers. Please add SB1305 to your HHS agenda. 

Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Sincerely,

(Your name)

(your organization, if any)

(your contact info)

Lived Experiences Leadership Academy (LELA) Day at the Capitol: Empowering Voices for Change

Last week, the Lived Experiences Leadership Academy (LELA), organized by the Children's Action Alliance, held a Day at the Capitol. Individuals with firsthand experience in child welfare and Medicaid shared their stories with legislators to influence policies supporting children and families. 

Their testimonies emphasized the importance of every voice in the legislative process and the power of collective action. Key moments during the week included the meeting between LELA participants and House Chief of Staff Michael Hunter, meeting with legislators Rep. Blackman, Rep. Volk., Rep. Connolly, and LELA and Fostering Advocates Arizona (FAAZ) member Jake Holley testifying before the Senate Health and Human Services Committee on SB1303, supporting the Extended Foster Care program.

The bill passed out of committee, moving closer to building services permanently into law for youth through extended foster care.

Act Now: Support or Oppose Key Bills in Committee for Kids

Your voice matters! The Arizona Legislature will discuss some important bills tomorrow, and Children’s Action Alliance encourages you to leave a comment for legislators. Please use the Request to Speak (RTS) system to weigh in on the bills listed below. 

The bills will be heard in the Arizona Senate Health and Human Services Committee tomorrow:

Date: February 5, 2025

Time: 9:00 AM Location: Senate Hearing Room 2 

► SB1246: Child Neglect; Exception; Financial Resources

  • Summary: Redefines “neglect” to exclude certain circumstances that are solely due to poverty.
  • Impact: Ensures that the definition of neglect in Arizona is clear that poverty does not equal neglect. 
  • CAA Position: SUPPORT

► SB1303: Extended Foster Care Service Model

  • Summary: Establishes in law a support and mentoring program for youth in extended foster care, focusing on education, career, housing, and more.
  • Impact: Provides essential support for youth transitioning into adulthood after foster care. 
  • CAA Position: SUPPORT

Click on the bill links to read the legislation and learn the details. If you would like to make legislators aware of your position, use the RTS system

If you don't have an RTS account, please fill out the form, and we can activate an account for you and walk you through the process for future opportunities to make your voice heard. 

Thank you for standing with Arizona's children and families!

The 2025 Legislative Session

As we kick off 2025 and a new legislative session, it’s the perfect time to think about the kind of Arizona we all want – one where children and their families can keep a roof over their head, can stay well or get well through health insurance, have enough to eat, are safe, and have access to a strong education starting with affordable child care and early learning. What we know is the ability of families to meet these needs for children isn’t just essential to them, it’s essential to the future of Arizona. We can build that Arizona.

Today is opening day at the Arizona State Legislature as well as the State of the State address by Governor Hobbs. Many legislative bills are already filed, and both executive and legislative budget proposals will soon be unveiled. For 37 years, Children’s Action Alliance has been a staunch advocate and watchdog for children at the State Capitol. We enter 2025 with this same commitment. We will keep you informed of our policy priorities and of policy and budget proposals that hurt or help children and families. We hope your commitment is to make your voice heard alongside us.

Together, we can bring change that supports the safety and success of children in Arizona.

Click here to view a snapshot of our 2025 Legislative Agenda.

Our 2025 Legislative Priorities

Children’s Action Alliance (CAA) is committed to making Arizona a state where all children and families thrive.

Our 2025 Legislative Agenda focuses on:

  • Health Care: Protect access to AHCCCS and KidsCare and preventative health services
  • Child Care: Growing access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning
  • Family Supports: Economic supports to prevent family crisis
  • Foster Care: Less children in congregate care and more support for youth transitioning out of foster care and for kinship caregivers who step in to provide care for children when they need it most

Click here to learn more about CAA's priorities to create an Arizona where all children and families thrive.

Arizona’s Group Home Problem – An Opportunity Missed

Click here to watch Fostering Advocates Arizona board member, Jacob Holley, share his lived experience in group homes.

Arizona has a deep group home problem, and it is time that serious steps are taken to address it: the Department of Child Safety's (DCS's) massive over-reliance on harmful and costly group home placements. Our legislative session ended without solutions.

In Arizona, the Department of Child Safety (DCS) has an excessive reliance on group home placements, which can be harmful and expensive.  The state has the nation’s third highest rate of “congregate care” placements for foster children of all ages and places more young foster children, those under age 12, in congregate care than any other state. Congregate care includes group homes, shelters, and institutions. Experts agree that congregate care placements are harmful to the healthy development of children—especially young children—and that congregate care should only be used when there is no less restrictive setting to meet a child’s short-term need for therapeutic services.

The understanding of the harms of group care is so universal that Congress passed the Families First Family Prevention Services Act, which greatly reduces the availability of federal funds for congregate care placements. Under the Act, which went into effect in 2021, states are only reimbursed for congregate care placements for the first 14 days unless the placement is a designated Qualified Residential Treatment Program that a court has determined the child requires to meet a short-term therapeutic need. The same year that Families First went into effect, DCS settled a lawsuit that, among other things, called out Arizona’s overuse of congregate care. The settlement agreement in B.K. v. Faust, which is overseen by the court, requires DCS to take steps to reduce its use of congregate care to 10.5%, the national average, when the settlement was reached in 2021.  

Despite these two powerful incentives to reduce group care, Arizona’s rate of congregate care placements has not budged. In fact, it has gone up and with the loss of federal reimbursement dollars, the high cost of group care is straining the state’s general fund and the agency’s budget to the tune of a $22.6M shortfall, leaving few financial resources to support families and prevent the need for foster care in the first place.  

For years, DCS’s plan to reduce the use of congregate care has centered around increasing the number of foster children placed with relatives and, to a lesser extent, also increasing the number of community foster homes. A “kin-first” culture is hugely important to supporting children and to reducing the use of congregate care, and, with advocacy by Children’s Action Alliance and many others, big advancements have been made in Arizona to better support kinship caregivers. However, Arizona now places children with relatives at one of the highest rates in the nation, and that strategy on its own has not and is unlikely to stem the use of group placements.  

Additional strategies to reduce group care are available and used with success by other jurisdictions. One of those strategies is instituting DCS Director Approval for group placements. SB 1458, a CAA priority bill in partnership with Fostering Advocates Arizona, would have required DCS to get Director sign-off on the placement of any child under the age of 12 in a congregate care setting. (Remember, Arizona is an outlier, placing young children in congregate care at a rate of 11% while the national average is 3%.) Director approval, which helped the City of Philadelphia go from 1,000 children in group homes to just 255, is a strategy included in the Ending the Need for Group Placements Initiative led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Casey Family Programs. The initiative has identified seven levers that have helped states reduce the use of congregate care. DCS is currently pulling just two of those levers. SB 1458 would have added a third, but the bill died on the House Floor in the face of opposition from the agency.  

It is time for Arizona to get serious about reducing group care. Doubling down on strategies that on their own have done nothing to reduce Arizona’s use of congregate care is certainly not enough for nearly 1,300 foster children currently in these placements, including approximately 350 children under the age of 12. DCS should be partnering with experts and jurisdictions that have successfully reduced congregate care populations and should be pulling every lever available. Arizona’s foster children deserve nothing less.  

Just six years ago, our country grieved alongside parents and children who were forcibly separated at the border, with a full two-thirds of Americans across political parties opposed to the barbaric actions. HCR2060 opens the door to repeating this shameful chapter.” -January Contreras, Children’s Action Alliance.

Children’s Action Alliance puts brain and heart power to work every day to realize the vision of an Arizona where all children and families thrive. HCR2060, an immigration bill expected to be heard this week in the Arizona Legislature, is incompatible with this vision.

Our CEO, January Contreras, recently shared some of the reasons that HCR2060 is bad for Arizona’s children. We share this editorial with you as supporters who also value the potential of every child in our state. Children’s Action Alliance remains in opposition to HCR2060, and we urge members of the legislature to vote against it.

Guest Opinion as Printed in the Arizona Daily Star on May 17, 2024

HCR2060 is not the answer

While many look to the Arizona State Legislature to tackle state priorities such as transportation, public safety, affordable housing, and education, members are also currently working to take on the federal responsibility of immigration enforcement in ways that are likely unlawful, certainly unfunded, and deeply harmful for our state.

House Concurrent Resolution 2060 (HCR2060) is a resolution that attempts to create state law and deploy local authorities for immigration enforcement. Parts of the resolution duplicate what is already in law when it comes to public benefits, but it charts new territory in criminal enforcement of unlawful presence without safeguards that exist in federal immigration policy such as barring enforcement on school campuses and in churches. HCR2060 can still be defeated by the legislature, but if passed, it will open the door to chaos that makes Arizona less safe than today.

I speak as a former prosecutor and former attorney for victims of crime. Without question, it is my experience that victims of abuse, human trafficking, and other crimes will not call local law enforcement for help when they fear that call will lead to deportation. This is backed up by cities that saw declines in reports of domestic violence and sexual assault crimes in Latino communities when anti-immigrant rhetoric and targeting was at its most extreme. The crimes were happening, victims were just too afraid to call 9-1-1. HCR2060 will decrease public safety and allow perpetrators of violence to escape being held accountable for their crimes.

I speak as a former Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Just six years ago, our country grieved alongside parents and children who were forcibly separated at the border, with a full two-thirds of Americans across political parties opposed to the barbaric actions. Today, my former HHS colleagues still serve on a Reunification Task Force dedicated to leaving no stone unturned to reunite families. The “zero tolerance” policy that unleashed this trauma continues to claim more than 1,000 children who have been deprived of the parents they were separated from. HCR2060 opens the door to repeating this shameful chapter.

Most importantly, I write this as a mother and an advocate for children. As I sat in church this week sharing in a blessing for moms, I could not help but pray for the parents and children whose lives will be torn apart if elected officials once again sanction actions that terrorize immigrant families. HCR2060 will do just that.

We must look to the right authorities for solutions to problems. Here, federal officials must reform and enforce federal immigration laws in ways that do not leave humanity and public safety behind. HCR2060 is not the answer.

January Contreras is the CEO of Children’s Action Alliance, advocating statewide for the health, safety, education, and economic well-being of children in Arizona.

Click here to access the opinion piece at the Arizona Daily Star.

Nearly 103,000 Arizona kids lost AHCCCS, but KidsCare expansion brings hope.

Since the end of the public health emergency a year ago, 103,000 fewer Arizona children are enrolled in AHCCCS coverage with the return to regular renewal requirements, according to a new report from Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. AHCCCS and its companion KidsCare provide child-specific health insurance for nearly 900,000 children, including routine preventive care, developmental screenings and treatment, vaccinations, behavioral health, and vision and dental services.

While some of these children may have gained other coverage, through a parent’s employer or the Health Insurance Marketplace, more Arizona children likely have become uninsured in the past year.

But there is good news. On April 1, the income limit for KidsCare increased by nearly $10,000 a year for a family of four, meaning 10,000 additional Arizona children will become eligible. Also, at the beginning of this year, new federal requirements took effect providing 12 full months of continuous coverage for children in AHCCCS and KidsCare, meaning fewer administrative requirements for families to maintain their healthcare coverage.

Children’s Action Alliance continues working with our community partners and AHCCCS to increase children’s access to coverage. If you or someone you know needs health insurance, visit Cover AZ’s website to find a local community-based organization to help.

Click here for the full report.