Almost 14,000 Colorado kids are on the waitlist for subsidized child care with program on the brink of collapse

After two of Chelsea Breese’s kids lost their father in November, her daughter, then age 7, began asking her the same question many mornings: “Is my dad alive?”

Her 5-year-old son still hasn’t stopped sleeping in her bed and has struggled with setbacks in potty training.

Grieving their dad so early in life is the family’s latest battle in a long fight for stability, shaking both children to their core, their mom said. Before he died, the kids had already lost part of her. 

Facing domestic violence and addiction that led to legal trouble, Breese landed in jail, lost her apartment and, after she was released, became homeless, she said. Her two older kids stayed with their dad while she was behind bars and afterward as she shuffled back and forth between her mom’s couch and a friend’s spare bed with her third child, a newborn at the time.

Now, after more than a year living at Warren Village in Denver, an organization helping her family with housing, child care and other support, Breese has slowly collected the shattered pieces of her kids’ childhood to fasten them into something new: a steadier future with a greater sense of certainty and, one day, a home of their own.

Building a foundation for her family’s life would not be possible without reliable child care — something Breese has been able to afford only through government help under a program known as the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program.

“I really don’t feel like I would be able to build stability without it because if you can’t leave your kids somewhere safe, then how are you supposed to work on anything else?” said Breese, now sober. “It’s a parent’s job to create stability and create that platform and if you can’t even put your kids somewhere, you can’t do that.”

Breese, 34, is perhaps one of the lucky parents. She still has access to subsidies while a growing list of other Colorado families wait and hope for the program to open up to their children.

The number of eligible kids without a subsidized child care spot climbed to 13,869 as of last week, up from more than 5,700 children a year ago, according to data from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood. That’s because of ongoing program enrollment freezes that, in some Colorado counties, started more than two years ago and have left the state’s most vulnerable families in a crunch to find care with nowhere near enough income to cover the crucial expense on their own.

Child care costs have far outpaced wages in Colorado and there are far fewer spots than kids who need them, putting desperately needed care out of reach for even middle- and some upper-income families. While other states have directed more and more funding to child care payment assistance, Colorado still spends far less, and most providers, especially those who care for infants, operate at or near a loss.

As the interruptions to CCAP have dragged on, so have frustrations among child care centers and families. And with state lawmakers planning to cut social safety net programs this year, not invest more in them, struggling families will likely have to wait longer for relief. 

“We have an incredibly broken child care system in this state,” said state Rep. Lorena Garcia, D-Adams County. “It’s insulting that we can’t save families money because our state is in such a dire, structured deficit that only gets worse.”

“A lifeline” for families and child care providers

Come summer, Colorado families with low incomes were supposed to get some much needed help in paying for child care.

CCAP, a state program that funnels mostly federal funding to counties to distribute to providers, is one of the only ways these families can get any government support paying for child care before their kids are old enough for preschool.

A 2024 state law that caps a CCAP-eligible family’s child care payment at 7% of their household income was set to take effect Aug. 1. To qualify, families must meet income limits ranging from around $49,000 to $80,000 for a family of three, depending on the county. Counties pay the child care providers for the rest of the cost at a reduced rate.

The 2024 law was a response to a Biden administration-era federal rule that changed how states can use federal funding for child care payment assistance by mandating that states cap the amount families pay. It also said counties must pay providers a weekly rate based on child enrollment, not attendance.

But the federal rule didn’t come with any money for states to implement the changes. The corresponding state law did. But now, instead of investing more in child care payment assistance, state lawmakers are considering delaying the affordability provisions in the 2024 law until 2028 to save about $11 million, citing the $1.5 billion budget deficit.

At the same time, more than 25 Colorado counties aren’t enrolling new families in CCAP because there isn’t enough money, causing providers to close classrooms and even consider shutting down entirely.

Delaying the state funding means the poorest Colorado families could be left on waitlists or have to pay more than they can afford for child care for at least another two years. 

As the state is considering pulling funding, President Donald Trump is trying to freeze federal child care funding for Colorado and four other Democratic-led states. So far, a federal judge has blocked that effort as a lawsuit brought by the states plays out, but if it’s ultimately successful, it could end CCAP altogether.

“We acknowledge as a state how important it is for families to be able to thrive, that it’s important for the workforce to be able to work, for businesses to be able to prosper, yet we do nothing to back up that acknowledgement,” said Garcia, who sponsored the 2024 law and is sponsoring the bill to delay the affordability provisions. “Why are we not investing more as a state on this?”

State Sen. Scott Bright, R-Greeley, who owns 20 child care centers, all of which accept families who rely on the subsidy program, said enrollment at his centers is at about 55% of capacity. At one of his centers in Greeley, only five of 12 classrooms are open.

“You’ll start seeing providers close their doors because they’ve gotten so low that they can’t turn lights on or the heat,” he said.

Bright is working on a bill that would reinvest interest funds from certain state enterprise programs, including the Family and Medical Leave Insurance program, known as FAMLI, to child care subsidies for families with low incomes.

The interest could amount to enough for counties to open up enrollment in CCAP again, he said, depending on which state programs participate and how the money is reinvested.

“It’s a lifeline,” he said.

CCAP funding is one of the main sources of revenue for two early learning centers at Warren Village, the Denver nonprofit that provides housing to single parents like Breese to give them a foothold while they work toward financial security. The subsidy program accounts for at least 60% of the revenue the organization relies on to operate its centers, according to Ethan Hemming, president and CEO of the organization.

The ongoing funding freezes cost Warren Village $281,000 in revenue from April 2025 to January, Hemming said.

“It is only going to get worse if it’s not solved,” he said. “So these numbers for the next fiscal year are going to compound on top of that and it’s just a matter of time before our operations become not viable.”

Warren Village is doing what it can to protect the families it houses and those it has housed in the past from losing care. Since last April, the nonprofit has been using its own budget to pick up the cost for children enrolled in its centers whose families cannot access CCAP.

Hemming said the organization will “subsidize the subsidy” for families for another year. Beyond that, he can’t say whether the nonprofit will be able to keep dipping into its reserves to cover the increasing cost of kids blocked from CCAP.

“We appreciate what the state has done to try to solve this and yet, how did we get here?” Hemming said. “How did we possibly get to the place where we are freezing little kids out of care? How are we possibly here? In a state with the abundance of resources, intellect and compassion, how are we here?”

The enrollment freezes are also wearing on state officials like Sarah Dawson, division director of CCAP for the state’s early childhood department.

Dawson said she has heard reports of older children staying home from school to watch their young siblings so their parents can work, what she calls one of the “really drastic and unfortunate unintended consequences” of the broad lack of affordable care.

She worries about all the ways families unable to take advantage of CCAP funding could suffer. The program’s benefits span generations, Dawson said, jumpstarting kids’ development and giving parents the chance to earn an income.

“When that affordable child care is not there,” she said, pausing, “just really concerned about how parents are supposed to accomplish those two desires for them and their children.”

“Temporary aid that’s going to benefit a long-term goal”

Breese’s life has bounded forward in the past year in ways that reassure her the stability she so desperately wants for her kids is within reach. She moved her family into Warren Village in February 2025 after hitting a dead end, out of a job, money, support and any other options.

Even though her two older children are still reeling from losing their dad, she’s watched them slowly become kids again, growing with the support of their teachers at Warren Village.

Before her kids started attending programs for early learners and school-age children at Warren Village, Breese shuttled them to three locations for child care in a run-down car without air conditioning. 

She had patched together child care she could afford  — the Boys & Girls Clubs in Aurora for her daughter, a CCAP program at Mercy Housing in downtown Denver for her older son and KinderCare in Arvada for her younger son. She would make all three stops before then heading to work as a veterinary technician in Wheat Ridge.

Moving into Warren Village calmed their mornings and helped them figure out a more consistent family schedule, Breese said.

“My kids have gone through a lot,” she said. “They’ve been through trauma. They’ve been through death. And ever since we’ve been able to come together and be stable, they’ve come out of their shell. It’s like the light has come back into their eyes.”

None of that would have been possible without a financial lift from CCAP, she added. Breese, who said she was accepted into the program a few months before the start of enrollment freezes, earns about $3,400 each month. Paying out of pocket for child care for all three of her children would stack up to between $1,800 and $2,200 every month — more than half her income. With CCAP, she pays a monthly fee of $218 for all her kids.

Without CCAP, she said she would likely have to quit her job, snagging the progress she’s made as she pays off debt, stays sober and prepares to return to school to pursue a bachelor’s degree — with her eye toward finding a house for her family within the next five years.

“For me and my family, this support is not going to be needed for forever,” Breese said. “It’s needed for now and for the next three to four years, maybe, while I go to school and I get us on our feet and I buy a house because that’s the goal. It’s temporary aid that’s going to benefit a long-term goal and so if we don’t have that help and support, it’s going to be the same cycle and we’re going to need help for even longer term and what that looks like, I don’t know.”

Other parents, including Gwendolyn Lopardo, a mom of three boys in Wellington in Larimer County, are still trapped in a waiting game for financial assistance that has lasted more than a year. Lopardo said she and her partner first applied for CCAP funding in August 2024, six months after the enrollment freeze began in Larimer County — the first county to stop accepting new children for the program.

They’ve been on that waitlist ever since — through chronic financial stress that peaked after her partner was laid off in October.

The only way the family is making child care work right now is through financial assistance from the nonprofit Larimer Child Care Fund, which doles out scholarships, and extra help from the director of her kids’ child care center where she also previously worked.

For now, the center is forgiving the tuition not covered by the scholarship for the very low-income family. Lopardo, 27, works as a part-time substitute teacher for Poudre School District, and is wrapping up an undergraduate program in social work before starting a master’s degree program in the fall.

Her family covers their $2,000 in rent and basic necessities with Lopardo’s pay and her partner’s unemployment benefits. They also use a credit card to get by, and receive government aid, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Lopardo said she feels a mix of guilt and gratitude for the helping hand from the director of the child care center. She realizes that help probably has an expiration date — and her youngest son will need child care for at least four more years.

“I am trying very hard to better my children’s lives and with that, for me and my situation, is to get an education and to find a full-time job that pays well so that I can afford my rent and child care,” Lopardo said.

Breese, meanwhile, doesn’t want her kids paying the price for the state’s fragile child care assistance program or for her past mistakes. 

“At one point, I was very irresponsible,” she said. “At one point, I made a lot of bad decisions that got me here. I didn’t take suggestions and I didn’t listen to family. I did things I shouldn’t have done and so for that I take responsibility, but there’s also something to be said about people redeeming themselves. We mess up. Adults mess up. They don’t make good choices. But regardless, that doesn’t make a child any less of a child, of an innocent human being, and they need support.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.