Ruth Schmidt:
Family child care — so, family child care programs are really critical in rural areas of our state. Child care, family child care programs are also oftentimes highly sought after as sort of a local program that would meet both cultural relevance and language needs of families. And what we see is that, as a state, over the last 10 years, we've lost over 50% of our family child care programs. And so that means it's harder for families to find culturally-relevant care, linguistically-appropriate care sometimes. It's certainly hard for rural families to find care at all. And if I were to think about like, do I hold out hope for seeing a significant change in this, if our state steps up to the plate and makes an investment in child care, I think we can turn the ship around. But I get really scared. It's been bad for a long time. It's been bad for this field for a long time. The impacts on families and our economy and businesses right now are such, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it. If you think about just the industry of health care, for instance, over 74% of our health care workforce is women, and if we have programs closing, classrooms closing, workforce shortages, our health care centers can't hire people. They can't hire nursing staff. We talk about the aging of our population in Wisconsin. We talk about the future crisis of nursing care that's going to be available in our state as our state continues to age and the demand for this goes up. If we don't fix child care, we can't fix nursing. The interconnectedness between child care and the broad workforce issues of our state is absolutely, completely intertwined, and we have to understand it that way.