To the South Carolina General Assembly, Governor, and Department of Social Services:

South Carolina's licensed child care centers are in crisis, and the state's own decisions are the cause.

On December 1, 2025, DSS paused new applications to the Working Families Child Care Scholarship Program. That program helped more than 50,000 children of working parents afford care. Families whose scholarships expire now have no way to reapply. Parents are pulling children out of care, and many are leaving the workforce. Centers are losing enrollment by the day, closing classrooms, and cutting staff.

At the same time, free public 3K classrooms are expanding with no plan to partner with private providers. These classrooms pull three-year-olds out of the very centers whose survival depends on them. Three-year-old classrooms are what make infant and toddler care financially possible. When centers lose their threes, they don't just shrink. They close. And when they close, the infant and toddler care that public schools do not offer disappears from the community entirely.

Right now, the state budget is sitting in a conference committee. The $20 million that DSS requested to reopen the scholarship program was left out of the House budget, and the final decision is being made this month. Our legislators can still fix this before the budget is signed.

We, the undersigned child care providers, parents, employers, and citizens of South Carolina, call on our state leaders to:

RESTORE recurring state funding for the Working Families Child Care Scholarship Program in the final FY 2026-27 budget and REOPEN applications on a public timeline.
REQUIRE a mixed-delivery model for public 3K expansion, so licensed private centers can host state-funded 3K classrooms, exactly the way First Steps 4K already works.
PROTECT the state's licensed child care capacity, because every classroom that closes now will take years to rebuild, and each one takes a working parent out of South Carolina's workforce with it.