“It’s going to be tough for parents who do not have the scholarships,” said Kimberly Thurman, who runs Kim’s Little Blessings Daycare in Bennettsville.
Most of the kids at her center are using the scholarships, Thurman said. But those students won’t stay there forever, and if applications are still paused when slots open up, she doesn’t know if many families in rural Marlboro County will be able to afford to fill them without help. Without that revenue, it will be even harder to pay the center’s employees, she said.
South Carolina’s youngest children likely would bear the brunt of that shortfall.
Low student-teacher ratio requirements make it more expensive to serve infants and toddlers, and it’s already hard enough to hire staff to care for them, said Ericka Jones, who runs the Leaders Of Tomorrow Child Development Center in Columbia.
“It won’t be good for us at all,” Jones said of a prolonged pause.
The problems could impact more than just the families that use the scholarships, said Georgia Mjartan, president and CEO of the Central Carolina Community Foundation and former leader of S.C. First Steps. If child care centers can’t fill classrooms with students funded by the scholarships, they won’t have enough revenue to keep running, even for the students whose parents pay for the care themselves.
More than 1,900 centers across the state accept the scholarships, and 47,542 children received them in 2024.
Batchelor, the DSS spokesman, said the length of the pause would be determined by how much federal funding South Carolina gets for the program, which is supported by a block grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
That funding was delayed by the government shutdown, and the state’s forthcoming grant could be smaller than this year’s amount, making the pause necessary to “maintain the financial stability” of the program. Batchelor did not respond to questions about the size of the expected funding gap.
