My preschool is still open. That’s getting harder to say every year

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OPINION—I founded Little Sprouts Language Immersion Preschool because I believed that bilingual, play-based early education should not be a luxury.

The families I serve in Los Angeles work in hospitals, hotels, restaurants and schools. They need childcare that is affordable, bilingual and run by someone who understands their community. I built my school around that need, and I have spent years fighting to keep it going.

Right now, keeping the doors open has never felt harder.

I am not alone in that. Nearly half of all childcare providers in the Los Angeles area are immigrants. A significant portion of us are self-employed, running small businesses, meeting licensing requirements, maintaining accreditations, paying taxes, and serving families that larger institutions have largely left behind.

We are not a side note in California’s childcare system. In many communities, we are the system.

California’s childcare system is already in crisis. Five years ago, the state promised more than 200,000 new subsidized childcare slots. Roughly 129,000 have been funded. In Los Angeles County, only 18 percent of children who qualify for subsidized care are actually enrolled.

One Southern California nonprofit that connects families to childcare and subsidies has a waitlist of 25,000 children in its region alone. These are parents in my community who cannot access care because the support system that would make it possible does not exist.

The cost of running a childcare center in Los Angeles is very expensive. According to Small Business Majority, 63% of small business owners support policies that make childcare more affordable for working families. Everything from rent to health insurance to the licenses we hold gets pricier every year.

Meanwhile, state reimbursement rates for subsidized care in Los Angeles are still based on what it cost to run a program in 2018. That gap between what it actually costs to operate and what the state pays is one reason so many small providers are barely staying afloat.

As I told the Los Angeles City Council recently, we do not qualify for tax relief because the thresholds were not designed with small childcare businesses in mind.

California cannot build a strong childcare system by expanding transitional kindergarten while leaving the centers and in-home providers working families depend on chronically underfunded.

These providers offer the flexible, extended hours that hospitals, restaurants, and service workers need, but without enough funding and subsidized slots, we are being forced to close. When we close, families do not just lose childcare. They lose their ability to go to work.

Research shows the consequences extend well beyond individual families. Studies of federal immigration enforcement programs from 2008 to 2014 found that when enforcement intensified, preschool participation dropped, childcare centers closed, and working parents had to reduce their work hours as a direct result. The damage spread to employers and local economies.

That is not a prediction. It is a documented pattern of what already has happened.

California is heading in a familiar direction, and the budget decisions being made right now will either slow that down or accelerate it. The state needs to fund the childcare slots it promised and stop letting families wait years for care their children no longer need by the time a spot opens.

It needs to update reimbursement rates to reflect what it actually costs to operate a program today. It needs to protect providers from harassment and enforcement actions in the spaces where children learn. And it needs to create real financial support so that small childcare businesses can stay stable enough to do the work California’s working families depend on.

I started this school because I believe early education changes what is possible for a child. That has not changed. What I am asking for is simple: help us stay open so we can keep doing it.

Paloma Corona is a Los Angeles preschool owner and advocate for California’s small childcare businesses.