Nearly 1,900 North Dakota families are on a waitlist for state childcare assistance.
A bill draft to be considered for North Dakota’s upcoming special legislative session would add $9 million in state funding to get some of the neediest families off of the growing waitlist.
“This is about low-income families who want to work,” said Senate Minority Leader Kathy Hogan, D-Fargo, the primary sponsor of the bill draft to be presented to legislative leaders on Monday.
Lawmakers learned in December that the Child Care Assistance Program had a projected $35.5 million shortfall, prompting the Department of Health and Human Services to implement a waitlist and reduce the amount of assistance for working families.
State officials said at the time they underestimated the demand for childcare subsidies, which had been touted as a way to reduce the state’s worker shortage. The average annual cost of childcare in North Dakota exceeds the annual tuition and fees at a North Dakota public university, according to data presented to lawmakers last year.
As of Aug. 9, the state had 1,892 families on a waitlist for childcare assistance, according to Rebecca Askins, interim director of the North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services’ Economic Assistance Section.
In June, the state provided childcare assistance for 6,263 children, a decrease of more than 1,300 children compared to June 2025, according to figures provided by Askins.
Krissy Wold, who owns Legacy Childcare in Fargo, said the state hasn’t done enough to communicate with the public about the waitlist.
“When the waitlist came to be, we had no fair warning,” she said.
She said she knows of several families who expected to qualify for assistance and were blindsided by the news they were waitlisted.
Legacy Childcare recently opened two new rooms for infants, Wold said.
Several families with newborns signed up for the space, but could no longer afford daycare when they were unexpectedly waitlisted for assistance, Wold said.
One of the new rooms is now at half capacity and the other is still empty, Wold said. She said she expects to fill both rooms this fall.
Wold said she’s working hard to rebuild her business in spite of the waitlist’s impact.
“There’s a lot of financial loss that you can’t even count,” she said.
The waitlist is also affecting Legacy Childcare’s ability to qualify for other funding sources that keep it afloat, Wold said.
For example, she said Legacy Childcare receives funding from the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program, which helps it serve healthy food. The subsidy is tied in part to the percentage of enrolled families receiving child care assistance, she said.
If Legacy Childcare’s percentage of families in the program dips any lower due to a lack of available funding, the daycare may lose its food program benefits, too, said Wold.
The program changes have also impacted daycares’ ability to recruit staff, she said.
Childcare workers in North Dakota are eligible for childcare assistance under the Child Care Workforce Benefit program, which was implemented in summer 2024.
The benefit has helped daycares attract high-quality teachers, Wold said. But now some of those teachers are ending up on the waitlist, she said.
Though Legacy Childcare is fully staffed for the time being, Wold said she previously lost two strong teachers because they were waitlisted.
Daycares and families are still struggling to understand the changes to the program, said Wold.
“The unknowing is awful,” she said.
Lisa Lehmann, who owns Growing Graces Childcare & Learning Center in Hankinson, said she’s sent several emails to state leaders this year urging more transparency about the waitlist.
“I know there’s been daycares in the state that have closed down because of it,” she said.
Legislative leaders will decide Monday whether to consider childcare assistance during a special legislative session, which starts Sept. 2 and is expected to last three days, primarily focused on regulating kratom.
Lehmann said she’s interested in testifying on the effects of the program change during the special session. She has urged legislators to fully fund childcare assistance and eliminate the waitlist.
“North Dakota’s childcare system is not ‘strained,’” she wrote in one email sent to state leaders in May. “It is not ‘challenged.’ It is breaking. And when childcare breaks, the workforce breaks with it.”
The bill draft by Hogan, which has bipartisan support, would not fully fund childcare assistance, but would add more state funding this budget cycle to get low-income families off the waitlist.
“It’s a Band-Aid for the poorest of the poor families,” Hogan said.
Co-sponsor Rep. Alisa Mitskog, D-Wahpeton, said lawmakers made significant investments in childcare because they recognized it as essential to the state’s workforce and economy.
“But now we are at risk of going backwards,” Mitskog said. “We need a sustainable solution that keeps parents in the workforce and supports childcare providers.”
North Dakota Monitor editor Amy Dalrymple contributed to this report.
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