LaunchPad Works With Snow On Bill
News Release
WARSAW — A bill which LaunchPad, the Kosciusko County Child Care & Early Learning Coalition, worked with Indiana District 18 State Rep. Craig Snow to author and bring forth was signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb.
The new law will remove barriers keeping school districts from expanding child care and early learning. The former House Bill 1318 passed the House and Senate unanimously with support from both sides of the aisle.
It removes the restrictions for public and private schools that want to provide more than one type of child care in their buildings. For instance, if a preschool was operating in an elementary school, the school would not be able to operate school-aged care in the same building.
The law also removes a restriction that employees of a school district could only use their school-based child care if that program was operating in the same building in which they worked.
LaunchPad Director Sherry Searles said, “I am thrilled with the passage of this bill. We are convinced that it will increase the level and quality of child care in Kosciusko County and the state of Indiana as a whole.”
Snow added, “Child care is a heavily regulated institution and most of those regulations keep our children safe and we want those to remain in place. However, some regulations just don’t make sense and limiting the number of programs that a school can choose to undertake or limiting school district employees from taking their children to a district-run child care in a different building just didn’t make sense.”
With Kosciusko County being a child care desert, LaunchPad is working to remove any barriers that prohibit growth in a safe and sustainable manner.