The Early Childhood Investment Corporation (ECIC) and the Think Babies Michigan coalition are gathering information from candidates seeking public office in Michigan about their perspectives on early childhood policy. Our goal is education, not endorsement. ECIC does not endorse, oppose, or rate candidates for public office.
We are collecting responses so that families, early childhood service providers, and community members across Michigan can better understand how candidates think about the needs of children from birth through age five and the families and professionals who care for them. Responses from candidates are published as received, without editing or commentary. Candidates have agreed that their responses may be reproduced and attributed to them in ECIC and Think Babies Michigan communications, including newsletters, social media, websites, and materials shared with coalition partners.
The following responses are from Stephen Schlaack, Democratic candidate for Michigan House of Representatives District 71.
What do you see as the most pressing early childhood challenge facing the district or communities you seek to represent?
The biggest issue I see is that families cannot find child care they can actually afford, especially for infants and toddlers. In a rural district like mine, availability is part of affordability. It does not matter what assistance someone qualifies for if the nearest provider with an opening is 30 minutes away or has a year-long waitlist.
It also affects everything around it. Parents cannot reliably work without reliable child care, employers lose workers, and providers cannot add slots if they cannot hire and keep staff. We have to look at those problems together instead of pretending they are separate issues.
Michigan families in many parts of the state live in areas with far fewer licensed child care slots than there are children who need them, and the shortage is most severe for infants and toddlers. What is your view of this issue, and what approaches would you consider if elected?
I think we need to treat child care more like basic community infrastructure.
We should help good existing providers stay open and expand, make it easier for responsible new providers to get started, and support both centers and home-based child care. That means looking honestly at startup costs, facilities, staffing, reimbursement rates, and regulations that may create work without actually improving safety or quality.
I also like programs such as Tri-Share, where families, employers, and the state share the cost. But helping someone pay for child care does not solve much if there is no available child care to buy. In rural communities especially, we have to work on capacity at the same time.
So the answer has to deal with the math. I would look at startup and expansion grants aimed specifically at infant and toddler slots, help with licensing and facility costs, which are a real barrier for home based providers, and support for family child care networks so a single provider is not doing payroll, licensing, food program paperwork, and caring for four babies all by herself.
I would also want the state to stop treating rural and small city Michigan as an afterthought. Bay County is not Detroit and it is not Traverse City. Programs designed for one do not automatically work in the other.
What is your perspective on the cost of child care for Michigan families, and on the tools available to state or federal policymakers to address affordability?
For a lot of families, child care is basically another mortgage or rent payment. That is not sustainable.
There is not one magic program that fixes it. I support assistance for families who need it, programs like Tri-Share, access to Pre-K, and reimbursement rates that actually reflect what quality care costs to provide.
But I also do not think the answer is telling providers to charge less while their own employees are underpaid. If quality child care costs more than an average working family can reasonably afford, then there is a legitimate role for public investment. Parents being able to go to work is good for the family, good for employers, and good for the economy.
Early childhood educators are among the lowest paid workers in Michigan, and turnover in the field is high. How do you think about compensation, benefits, and working conditions in this profession?
We cannot keep calling early childhood education essential work while paying the people doing it wages that make it impossible to stay in the profession.
High turnover hurts everybody. It is hard on kids, hard on parents, and makes it harder for providers to keep classrooms open.
I support better pay, benefits, professional development, and real career pathways for early childhood workers. But again, we cannot just tell small providers to absorb those costs or pass them entirely onto families. The state has to be part of making the numbers work.
Michigan has dedicated funding for many critical services, but nothing specifically focused on the needs of families with young children. Advocates have proposed a dedicated, sustainable state revenue stream for early childhood, separate from the annual general fund appropriations process. What is your perspective on that idea?
I am open to and supportive of a dedicated, sustainable source of funding for early childhood.
Programs that families and providers rely on should not spend every year wondering whether the next budget is going to pull the rug out from under them. Stable funding makes it possible to hire people, expand capacity, and actually plan more than a few months ahead.
That said, I also want clear goals and accountability. Creating a new fund is not the accomplishment. The accomplishment is more families being able to find affordable care and better outcomes for kids.
If you were setting priorities within a constrained early childhood budget, what would you prioritize first, and why?
If money is limited, I would focus first on the places where investing early prevents much bigger problems later.
Infant and toddler care would be high on the list because that is where some of the biggest gaps are. I would also prioritize stabilizing the early childhood workforce, maternal and infant health, and Early On and other early intervention programs.
If we can identify a developmental, health, or family issue early and help then, that is better for the child, better for the family, and usually much less expensive than waiting until it becomes a crisis.
Michigan has made significant strides to promote maternal and infant health, though federal policy changes put many of these programs at risk. How would you work to preserve and expand access to important programs that promote maternal and infant health including Medicaid?
I will strongly defend Medicaid and programs that support maternal and infant health.
Pregnancy, delivery, postpartum care, mental health, and infant health are all connected. Cutting someone off from care does not make the health need disappear. It usually means they get help later, when the problem is worse and more expensive.
I support protecting Medicaid access, strengthening prenatal and postpartum care, expanding maternal mental health services, and making sure rural families can actually reach providers. I am also very concerned about the racial disparities we continue to see in maternal and infant health. We need to listen to patients and providers and use good data to figure out where the system is failing people.
Think Babies supports more funding for programs that support nurturing relationships and well-being for babies and caregivers — like home visiting, consultation, and intervention services —to help address and prevent stress and trauma before they become a crisis. How familiar are you with these kinds of programs, and would you support increased funding for them if elected?
I am familiar with these programs at a policy level, although I am not going to pretend I know them better than the nurses, social workers, educators, and families who use them every day.
The basic approach makes a lot of sense to me. Get to families early, meet them where they are, identify problems before they become emergencies, and help people navigate services that can otherwise be incredibly difficult to find.
I would support increased funding for evidence-based programs like home visiting and early intervention, especially where rural families currently have limited access. I would also want the people actually delivering those services involved in deciding how we improve them.
The Early On Coalition — which is part of Think Babies — has advocated for increased funding to support families with infants and toddlers who have disabilities and developmental delays to make sure they get the individualized early intervention services they are entitled to. What is your perspective on increasing funding for Early On?
I strongly support increasing funding for Early On.
If a child has a developmental delay or disability, we should not wait until they enter school and are already struggling before offering support we could have provided years earlier.
Early intervention can make an enormous difference for a child and their family. It can also reduce the need for more intensive services later. This is exactly the kind of place where government should be willing to invest early instead of paying much more after a problem has grown.
If elected, how would you gather input from parents, caregivers, and early childhood professionals in your district when making decisions that affect them?
I would start by going to them.
One of my biggest frustrations with government is how often policy gets written by people who have never had to use the system they are designing. I would meet with parents, child care centers, home-based providers, early childhood educators, Early On and Great Start staff, health care providers, schools, and employers.
I also believe in site visits. You understand the problem differently when you are standing in a child care center talking with the person trying to balance staffing ratios, payroll, licensing requirements, tuition, and a waiting list all at the same time.
My basic rule is pretty simple: talk to the people who will live with the consequences of a policy before Lansing decides what that policy should be.
Is there anything else you would like Michigan families, early childhood professionals, and advocates to know about your approach to young children and their families?
I think we sometimes talk about “supporting families” as if saying it is enough. Supporting families means building systems that actually make raising one possible.
That means affordable health care, good schools, clean water, safe communities, decent wages, paid leave, and child care that people can both find and afford. It also means respecting the professionals doing this work enough to pay them fairly and listen to them.
I tend to look at government as a system. If thousands of families keep running into the same problem, I want to know why that problem keeps happening and what we can change so the system works better.
Are there early childhood issues you believe are being overlooked in the current policy conversation in Michigan?
I think rural access and the basic logistics of child care get overlooked.
A lot of policy seems to assume that families live near several providers, work something close to 8 to 5, have reliable transportation, and have plenty of time to navigate different programs and applications. That is not the reality for a lot of people in my district.
We need more attention on infant and toddler care, home-based providers, second- and third-shift care for people working in manufacturing, health care, and other nontraditional schedules, transportation, and the administrative burden we put on both families and small providers.
I also think we need to stop treating child care, workforce, and economic development as completely separate conversations. If somebody cannot take a job because there is nowhere for their child to go, that is a child care problem for the family and a workforce problem for the employer at the exact same time.