Tri-Share, a state pilot to reduce child care costs, opens to businesses statewide

Screenshot of the Tri-Share child care program website with pictures of children in the background

By Liz Bell

St. Joseph of the Pines, a retirement home in Moore County, surveyed its staff in 2023 to ask about their child care arrangements. They found many employees were using informal care — a spouse, a relative, a friend, or a neighbor — because of a lack of affordable options.

“Child care is a problem,” said Scott Brewton, vice president of the organization. “It’s not unique to Moore County. It’s a problem everywhere: not enough child care facilities, the cost of child care, finding people to work in child care.”

Brewton decided, with a nudge from his local chamber of commerce, to participate in Tri-Share, a pilot program that was funded by the General Assembly in the 2023 state budget, launched in 2024, and is now open to employers statewide. It splits the cost of child care three ways: among employers, their eligible employees, and the state.

The program will not solve supply issues of child care, and participation has been slow to grow and dominated by child care programs themselves. But program leaders say the model has potential with more time and wider eligibility.

Employers like Brewton, who will open slots for 10 employees in the coming weeks, see the program as an advantage for the company and the community.

“This gives them a second chance to look at good day care facilities and say, maybe now with this program, I can afford this,” Brewton said. “And does that allow a second person in the household to go get a job? How does that help a company? How does that help a family? How does that help the economy?”

The state allocated $900,000 to start the pilot in 2023 in three regions covering 15 counties. Based on a model created in Michigan and replicated in several other states, it draws from multiple revenue streams to lower the cost of child care for parents who make too much to qualify for other child care assistance but still struggle to afford care. The program signals that both the state and business community have a responsibility to contribute in covering the high cost of care, instead of that cost falling solely on parents.

“It’s just a whole lot of people who could use some help,” said Stuart Mills, executive director of Partners for Children and Families of Moore County, one of the pilot’s three local facilitator hubs. “It’s extremely expensive to put your kid in child care. It’s as much as sending your kids to a state university. And it’s extremely important.”

Now the program is opening its doors to businesses and eligible families in all 100 counties. Since it launched last summer, 18 employers have signed on, serving 20 employees and nine children. The program has the capacity to serve about 300 children with its current funding, said Mary Scott, director of strategic partnerships at the North Carolina Partnership for Children. The organization is recommending that legislators either make the program permanent or expand it this session.

“Tri-Share is not the answer to the crisis, but it’s a solution, it’s an answer, it’s an opportunity,” Scott said.

Paying for a third of child care means parents’ expense will go from about $1,000 per month to about $300, though costs vary.

“If you take off two-thirds of that amount of money, the parents are probably going to have enough to pay car payments, utility bills, maybe their mortgage,” said Ann Benfield, executive director of Cabarrus Partnership for Children. The organization has started its own program, similar to the state pilot but outside it.

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Lessons from the ground

Some tweaks to the program, such as providing more funding for administrative costs and increasing the income eligibility threshold, could make the program more effective, program leaders said.

Participation should grow in the next few months, Scott said, as employers who have signed on start payments for employees and more businesses learn about the opportunity.

“Pilots do take some time to gain traction,” Scott said. “I think that’s why the Tri-Share recruitment week is so important. I think so many people have heard about it and they’re interested. It’s just really spending some more time educating folks and letting them know more about it and how they can sign on.”

North Carolina Partnership for Children has planned that recruitment week, March 17-21, to host information sessions in person and online to reach new businesses.

Last year, the state Division of Child Development and Early Education and N.C. Partnership for Children selected three local regions, each with a local Smart Start partnership as a hub, to set up the program. Businesses statewide will participate through the facilitator hub closest to them.

Cleveland County Partnership for Children and Families, Martin-Pitt Partnership for Children, and Partners for Children and Families of Moore County were tasked with recruiting employers and child care programs in their designated regions to participate.

The local facilitators said implementing the model is a heavy administrative task. The pilot legislation allows facilitators to use 9 percent of the funding, or $27,000, to cover administrative costs.

The job of raising awareness, walking employers through the sign-on process, and working with child care providers is being split among multiple people or added to one person’s multiple responsibilities.

“It’s very time-consuming and taxing,” said Shannon White, executive director of Cleveland County’s Smart Start partnership. “We were willing to put our foot out there and say we’ll go first and assume the administrative burden on top of all of the other things that we do, because we really believe this would benefit our area.”

With the term “pilot” attached to its name, some employers have been hesitant to sign up, Scott said, without a guarantee that they will continue to be able to offer their employees the assistance.

And once employees have heard about the program and are on board, it takes about 30 to 60 days to work through their internal human resources protocols.

Scott and local facilitator personnel said increasing the eligibility threshold, from 300 percent to about 400 percent of the federal poverty line, would make a wider range of families eligible. Some businesses have known their employees would benefit but haven’t been able to participate because of the income limit.

The current threshold, at 300 percent, equates to $63,450 per year for a family of two, $79,950 for a family of three, and $96,450 for a family of four.

Directly helping child care

Though all types and sizes of businesses are eligible, the majority of employees participating are child care providers themselves, Scott said.

That means the child care program is both the employer and the provider offering the care. Kiersten Mahaffy, strategic partnerships coordinator of Martin-Pitt Partnership for Children, said child care programs’ participation not only helps lower the cost for parents, but also strengthens the system itself.

“If the provider and employer can be one, the money is going straight back into child care,” Mahaffy said. “So not only are we helping the parents, but we’re also helping our educators, which in turn helps child care providers. So overall, it just helps child care in general.”

That’s the case for Jasmine Baker, an assistant teacher at the Greenville location of Sunshine Schools NC, a program with five child care centers in eastern North Carolina. Baker was not sure she’d be able to afford child care for her daughter in order to teach.

“I want that education background for my kids,” Baker said. “Even though I wanted it, the amount that I would have had to pay, it wasn’t in the budget.”

That’s when Melanie Booth, executive director of the program, pulled Baker aside and mentioned Tri-Share.

Baker said she remembers doing the math in her head. With the 50 percent discount the program already offers for teachers, plus Tri-Share, her weekly payments were going from $104 to $34.

“That makes it a lot more doable,” she said. “Like we can just not eat out one night that month.”

Now Baker is planning to join the staff full-time and is participating in an apprenticeship program to earn her associate degree in early childhood education.

“I can now actually afford to send my daughter to day care, and I can afford to go to school, and it’s glorious,” she said.

Baker just left for maternity leave to have a son, her second child. Without the discounted care, she said, she would not be returning to the workforce.

“It’s giving me the ability to come back,” she said. “When I come back from maternity leave, I have the peace of mind of knowing that he’s right down the hall … I don’t have to spend my entire paycheck sending my kids to day care. If it wasn’t a thing, I’m not sure exactly how we would be getting by.”

Because of Tri-Share, teachers like Baker are staying in the classroom, Booth said.

“This was just such an amazing opportunity, not just as an employer, but as a sponsor too, so that we can help others in the community (and) their employers,” she said. “If they would invest back into their employees, just by that third, they’re going to retain their own workforce and have workers that are coming to work each day because they know their children are someplace safe.”

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.