Even minimum wage workers can’t qualify for assistance anymore under Rauner’s new rules

Friday, September 25, 2015

Contact: Graeme.Zielinski@seiuhcil.org;

CHICAGO – On July 1^st, Bruce Rauner unilaterally implemented new “emergency” eligibility requirements to the highly-successful Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) – without public input or legislative debate. Since then, a statewide effort driven by providers, parents, children’s advocates and even First Lady Diana Rauner, has sought to highlight this policy for what it is: Extreme and dangerous. 

We knew that thousands of Illinois parents had been forced to quit their jobs or remain unemployed because they no longer qualified for child care assistance. Rauner’s new rules are so extreme that a single parent earning the minimum wage now makes too much to qualify.  We’ve now learned that some low-income parents are so desperate to find child care assistance to keep their jobs since Rauner’s cuts that they’ve turned to a new source to care for their kids: Craigslist.

According to NBC News 25, many central Illinois families have nowhere else to turn:

For many families in central Illinois the only place to find affordable childcare is on websites like Craigslist. But many wonder, is it safe? “You never know who it is on the internet. They could say they’re one person and be completely different,” said Laura Everett of Peoria.

This news is just the latest evidence that Bruce Rauner’s extreme cuts to the CCAP program – which have absolutely nothing to do with the current budget impasse in Springfield – are causing huge economic harm to working parents throughout Illinois, and now possibly endangering the safety of our children by forcing them to seek care from unqualified or unlicensed providers.

“The alarming revelation that Bruce Rauner’s cuts are forcing some Illinois parents to seek affordable child care from strangers on the internet – just to continue putting food on the table – should truly shake people to their very core,” said SEIU Healthcare Illinois Vice President James Muhammad. “The inhumane and dangerous nature of Bruce Rauner’s cuts gets magnified every day, and it’s long past time for Rauner to stop holding millions of Illinoisans hostage to his extreme personal political agenda.

“Craigslist is not the place to raise a child. Deliberate inaction and dangerous rules changes that harm children is not the way to govern a state.”

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