More than 25 years ago, 4C for Children opened a regional office in Northern Kentucky and began actively helping find quality child care options for the region’s children and families as well as supporting child care providers by offering coaching and continuing education opportunities.
Some Background
4C for Children’s responsibility for the critical education of Northern Kentucky’s youngest minds for the majority of these years was supported by state funding. In recent years, the state chose to centralize these efforts, shifting the funding to the University of Kentucky (UK) to deliver early childhood education support services to the state’s families and child care providers. 4C for Children then became a subcontractor for this region through UK.
Over the past five years, UK has gradually discontinued the use of subcontractors like 4C for Children. This has ultimately resulted in a complete loss of state funding for our services.
For several years, our Board of Trustees utilized funds from 4C’s operating reserves to subsidize our work in Northern Kentucky while we continued to advocate for change in Frankfort. We felt that 4C for Children was best suited to meet the needs of our Northern Kentucky community. Unfortunately, these efforts have been unsuccessful.
Difficult Decisions
As a result of this progressive loss of state funding, the 4C for Children Board of Trustees announced on Friday, Jan. 25 that our Northern Kentucky regional office will close and our services to the region will end.
Our timeline has yet to be finalized and will be determined based upon the completion of existing programmatic commitments. Our Northern Kentucky staff will have the opportunity to accept positions within the agency for our work in Ohio.
Advocacy Continues
We remain committed, together with our donors, community partners, advocates and volunteers, to fulfilling our agency’s mission to ensure quality early education and care for all children by continuing to deliver the highest level of services and training to Ohio parents and child care providers.
We also remain committed to continuing to advocate on behalf of Kentucky’s children and families for changes in how the state contracts for and delivers support for our child care providers as well as referral services for our families.