At NLV child care facility, Cortez Masto stresses importance of access

U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto made her way through a child care facility Friday morning, greeting a girl who was building a castle with soft blocks. A boy in another classroom blindly put his small hand into a cloth-covered box for a shape-identifying exercise. Other kids played in an outdoor sand pit.

The Nevada Democrat was taking a listening tour at the Early Childhood Education Lab at the College of Southern Nevada’s North Las Vegas campus, where she promoted Senate proposals she’s thrown her support behind.

The Stronger Start for Working Families Act would allow families to start qualifying for Child Tax Credit benefits after earning their first dollar rather than having to reach a minimum $2,500 threshold, while the Child Care for Working Families Act would expand child care access and increase wages for the caretakers.

“The challenge we have in this state — and I think across the country — is not just affordability for families, but it also is the ability to make sure that we’re paying our child care workers good wages,” Cortez Masto told the Review-Journal.

She said the issue should be a priority in Washington, D.C.

Instead, Cortez Masto said, the federal government is funding a war in Iran, which she classified as unauthorized, and boosted the Department of Homeland Security’s coffers for deportation efforts to the tune of $170 billion through 2029.

“That money should come towards helping us make lives of working families and businesses and students a little bit easier, and lower those costs for them,” she said.

Visits like Friday’s allows Cortez Masto to relate what she learns back to Washington to convene with lawmakers on how they could work to fund facilities with similar models to CSN’s, she said.

“That bipartisan work is essential to passing legislation,” Cortez Masto said.

On average, child care can regularly cost between $300 to $600 a week, said Mary Regan, director of CSN’s early childhood education department.

The CSN facility cares for the children — between the ages of 3 months to 5 years — of faculty and students at a discount, she said. Outsiders pay slightly below market rates, although there are subsidies available for some.

Prices, however, might go up in the next year, Regan added.

CSN staff told Cortez Masto about efforts to relocate and reopen the child care facility at its Charleston campus, which closed to make way for the upcoming Campus For Hope, a $200 million social services facility for people experiencing homelessness, telling the senator that her office would receive a grant proposal.

“We have to build the foundation for children to keep learning and for parents to be able to go and do the things they need to do to at their jobs or their schools,” Regan said in an interview. “And if they don’t have somewhere safe and trustworthy, they can’t move forward.”