Translation:

Good morning. My name is Maria del Carmen Macias and I have been a family child care provider in Chicago’s northwest side neighborhood for over seven years.

I care for 16 children, from 12 month old to 12 year of age, every day while their parents work or go to school.

The parents I care for work in dental clinics, supermarkets, factories, restaurants, nursing homes, and school administration.

I’ve cared for many of these children since they were babies, now they are almost nine years old.

I’m here today to denounce Governor Rauner’s attacks on the Child Care Assistance Program and on working families like mine and the families whose children I care for every day.

When Governor Rauner vetoed the budget and refused to work with the General Assembly, he threw our State into an artificial crisis. Why did he do this? Because Governor Rauner puts his own extreme, political agenda ahead of what’s right for children and families.

First, Governor Rauner announced cuts to the Child Care Assistance Program—which serves more than 100,000 families in Illinois. On July 1st, Governor Rauner put a freeze on new applications, denying 5,000 parents access to affordable child care in the first month alone.

Now, Governor Rauner expects home child care providers like me to work without pay—he’s withholding payments to more than 28,000 home child care providers and almost 13,00 child care centers until there’s a budget deal.

Governor Rauner may be able to work without pay—after all, he made $28,000 per hour last year. But providers like me, who make as little as $6 per hour, don’t have that luxury.

When providers don’t get paid, some of us will have to shut our doors. We have families of our own to support, and many of us don’t have savings to get us through more than a month or two. Most child care providers work 60-70 hours every week—so there’s no time to get a second job.

When providers close our doors, we will have to turn away more working parents and children who need quality care. Eventually, if Governor Rauner has his way, there will be nowhere left for families to go.

We cannot let Governor Rauner destroy the Child Care Assistance Program by freezing intake and stopping payments for child care providers.

Child care providers have a tradition where we ask others, especially legislators, to Walk A Day in our shoes. That’s our way of showing the hard and important work that we do every day for children and their families.

I challenge Gov. Rauner to walk a day in my shoes. I think I could teach him a few things about honesty and respect—two lessons that I teach the children in my care a lesson that it’s clear Governor Rauner missed. When he tells us that Illinois is broke, he’s lying—the truth is that Governor Rauner would rather tear apart the Child Care Assistance Program and wage attacks on working families rather than ask his rich friends, like Ken Griffin and Sam Zell, to pay their fair share in taxes.

I am so proud of the legislators standing up with us today against the governor’s destruction of the Child Care Assistance Program—and I call on other lawmakers to stand with me and other child care providers and working parents to stop Governor Rauner from denying one more working parent the child care they need to continue to work, and from denying one more child care provider payments she needs to keep her doors open to serve the families who count on her every day.