Inclusion Cannot Be an Unfunded Mandate for Childcare Providers

Across Virginia and throughout the country, childcare providers are enrolling increasing numbers of children with developmental delays, disabilities, behavioral health needs, sensory differences, communication challenges, chronic medical conditions, and other needs requiring individualized support.

This should not be viewed as a problem caused by the children. Children with special needs belong in our classrooms, communities, and programs alongside their peers. The problem is that the systems responsible for financing and supporting childcare have not kept pace with the changing needs of the children and families providers are being asked to serve.

Childcare centers were already struggling with shortages of qualified educators, high turnover, low compensation, escalating operating costs, and complex regulatory demands. Many are now also being asked to provide intensive behavioral, developmental, medical, and communication support without the staffing, clinical expertise, or funding necessary to do so successfully.

The result is a growing strain on everyone involved: children who need specialized attention, their classmates, classroom educators, center administrators, and families desperately searching for care that will welcome and support their children.

A Fairfax County provider illustrates the challenge.

This experience is not unique to Hopkins House, providers around the Commonwealth are also struggling.  The ACCA Child Development Center in Fairfax County demonstrates the scale and urgency of this issue.

According to ACCA’s July 2026 policy brief, “Making Inclusion Sustainable: MRR Support for Children with Special Needs”, 58 of the center’s 209 enrolled children (28 percent) had an Individualized Education Program or Individualized Family Service Plan as of July 31, 2026. That figure did not include children who were still being evaluated.

In several ACCA preschool classrooms, children with IEPs or IFSPs represented between 40 and 47 percent of enrollment.

These are not abstract percentages. As ACCA explains, some of these children require intensive behavioral, developmental, communication, safety, or nearly continuous one-to-one support. Staff members have reportedly been hit, kicked, scratched, and bitten, while administrators are routinely pulled away from their primary responsibilities to assist in classrooms.

The center remains committed to inclusion. But, as its policy brief correctly states, meaningful inclusion requires staffing, expertise, and funding.

ACCA reports that it does not receive the full enhanced Maximum Reimbursable Rate support available for most of the children it serves who have IEPs or IFSPs. The organization is therefore obliged to absorb the cost of additional support within classrooms operating under standard staffing and reimbursement assumptions.

The challenge becomes particularly acute during summer and winter breaks. Children who receive therapies and specialized assistance through public schools may experience reduced or interrupted access to those services when schools close. Their needs do not disappear during those periods. Instead, childcare centers providing full-day, year-round care must absorb the additional responsibility, often without a corresponding increase in staffing, expertise, or reimbursement.

ACCA’s policy brief warns that this mismatch can lead to staff injuries, burnout, turnover, and reduced administrative capacity. It can also affect the classroom experiences of other children and ultimately diminish the ability of community-based providers to offer the inclusive care families need.

The goal of ACCA, Hopkins House, and other childcare providers is not to limit inclusion. Our goal is to ensure that inclusion is properly funded. That distinction should guide Virginia’s response.

The challenge extends far beyond one provider.

National evidence affirms what childcare providers are experiencing locally. According to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, approximately 2.2 million American children age five and younger (about one in 10 children in this age group) have a reported physical, intellectual, or developmental disability.

The GAO found that families of children with disabilities often have difficulty locating childcare programs capable of meeting their needs. Families reported limited program availability, long waiting lists, lengthy commutes, restrictive eligibility requirements, and childcare schedules that failed to cover parents’ working hours. Some parents reduced their working hours, left their jobs, or moved their families because appropriate care was unavailable.

Providers surveyed by the GAO described making important accommodations, including installing accessible playground equipment and using picture cards and assistive tablets to help nonverbal children communicate. Yet these providers also identified staff shortages and funding constraints as major obstacles to fully supporting children and parents with disabilities.

The number of children receiving services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is also rising. National data reported by the Advocacy Institute show that the number of IDEA-eligible children ages three through 21 increased by 3.8 percent in 2024, reaching more than 8.1 million. Among children ages three through five who had not yet entered kindergarten, enrollment increased by 2.7 percent to more than 603,000. That followed a 9.8 percent increase for the same preschool-age group in 2023.

These figures do not capture every young child with an emerging or undiagnosed need. Many childcare providers serve children whose families are still waiting for developmental evaluations, early-intervention services, diagnoses, individualized plans, or appointments with specialists.

Providers are frequently the first to recognize that a child may need additional support because early educators observe children for hours each day during learning activities, play, meals, transitions, and social interactions.

Inclusion requires more than an open classroom door.

Virginia recognizes the importance of inclusion. The Virginia Department of Education defines early childhood inclusion as educating and caring for children with disabilities in the same settings as their typically developing peers, with children participating together in daily activities and routines.

Eligible Virginia children ages two through five may receive Early Childhood Special Education services through local school divisions under disability categories that include autism, developmental delay, emotional disability, speech or language impairment, intellectual disability, and other health impairment. Early Intervention services are also available for infants and toddlers with delays or disabilities.

But acknowledging a right to inclusion is not the same as financing the support necessary to make inclusion successful.

In a childcare classroom, inclusion requires much more than opening the door and offering a seat. Depending on the child, it may require lower ratios, additional classroom personnel, individualized instructional strategies, behavioral consultation, adaptive equipment, environmental modifications, family support, and coordination with early-intervention providers, school divisions, physicians, therapists, and other professionals.

A child who struggles to communicate may need visual supports or help from a speech-language professional. A child with sensory differences may need a modified environment and an educator trained to recognize and prevent overstimulation. A child experiencing significant emotional or behavioral challenges may need assistance from a clinician or behavioral specialist. A family navigating evaluations, referrals, insurance, and public programs may need the guidance of a social worker or family-support professional.

Most childcare centers do not have these specialists on staff. Many cannot afford them.

When the necessary resources are unavailable, childcare educators are expected to fill the gap. They do so with compassion and commitment, but often without specialized credentials, planning time, clinical supervision, or additional compensation.

One educator may be responsible for supporting a child experiencing a behavioral crisis while simultaneously supervising seven, nine, or more other young children. A principal may spend hours coordinating services, responding to incidents, reassuring families, and searching for outside assistance while still being responsible for staffing, licensing compliance, enrollment, and daily operations.

This is not fair to the child who needs individualized help. It is not fair to the other children in the classroom. It is not fair to the educator expected to perform the work of a teacher, behavioral specialist, social worker, and clinician at the same time. And it is not fair to families who are told that inclusion is a public priority but discover that the resources necessary to make it real are unavailable.

With funding from the City of Alexandria, Hopkins House employs a Family Support Coordinator trained to help families and our educators identify and access the resources they need to support children with disabilities and other special needs enrolled at the Academy. However, the grant covers only a portion of the coordinator’s compensation and must be renewed annually, with no assurance of continued long-term funding. This uncertainty makes it difficult to attract and retain qualified professionals seeking stable, long-term career opportunities.

Enhanced reimbursement exists, but providers need a workable path to it.

Virginia’s childcare subsidy regulations recognize that caring for children with special needs may cost more. Under 8VAC20-790-80, payment above the standard maximum reimbursable rate is allowed when a local department determines and documents that enhanced reimbursement is appropriate. The payment may be as much as twice the rate available for a child without special needs.

This provision is important. But its value depends entirely on whether eligible children and providers can access it through a clear, timely, and consistent process.

Local and state officials should clarify how eligibility for enhanced reimbursement is determined and documented, identify administrative or procedural barriers delaying access, and address gaps during periods when school-based therapies and supports are reduced or unavailable.

Virginia should examine how often enhanced reimbursement is requested, approved, delayed, or denied; how long decisions take; whether providers and families receive clear instructions; and whether reimbursement reflects the actual cost of the staffing and specialized services required.

A benefit that exists on paper but is inaccessible in practice does not help the child, family, or provider.

We cannot build inclusive classrooms
without supporting the people responsible for making them inclusive.

What Virginia policymakers can do to address this issue:

• Establish a dedicated inclusion-support fund for licensed childcare centers and home-based providers. Funding should follow the child and reflect the actual level of assistance required, rather than offering a flat amount bearing little relationship to need.

• Allow providers to use these resources to hire additional educators, reduce classroom ratios, purchase adaptive equipment, modify facilities, obtain specialized training, and contract with qualified professionals.

• Finance regional teams of social workers, behavioral-health clinicians, early-childhood mental-health consultants, speech-language professionals, occupational therapists, nurses, and special-education specialists. These teams could respond quickly when a provider or family requests assistance, observe children in their regular classroom environments, coach educators, connect families with services, and help programs develop appropriate support plans.

• Establish funding mechanisms that recognize that services are needed year-round. If school-based therapy or specialized support pauses during summer, winter, or other school closures, funding should allow those supports to continue in the community-based childcare setting where the child spends the day.

Virginia’s private philanthropy, healthcare systems, insurers, employers, and businesses must be part of the solution:

• Foundations could fund inclusion specialists shared among networks of community-based providers.

• Hospitals and healthcare organizations could partner with childcare centers to provide developmental screenings and clinical consultation.

• Employers could invest in inclusive childcare as a workforce-stability strategy, recognizing that parents cannot remain reliably employed when appropriate care is unavailable.

Families need support navigating the system.

Investment must include meaningful assistance for families. Social workers and family navigators can help parents understand evaluation processes, early-intervention programs, special-education eligibility, Medicaid waivers, insurance benefits, transportation options, and their legal rights.

The GAO found that many parents were unaware of existing federal and state resources, including Parent Training and Information Centers. Government agencies should not assume that making a program available on a website makes it accessible to a family already overwhelmed by work, caregiving, appointments, and complex application procedures.

Virginia must also strengthen coordination among childcare providers, local school divisions, community services boards, early-intervention agencies, healthcare systems, and social-service departments. A child does not stop needing assistance when crossing the boundary between a publicly administered special-education program and a privately operated childcare center.

Services should be designed around the child’s day and the family’s circumstances, not around institutional boundaries.

Inclusion must be sustainable.

An inclusive classroom benefits children with and without disabilities. It teaches empathy, cooperation, patience, acceptance, and respect for human differences. It gives children with special needs the opportunity to form relationships, participate in their communities, and learn alongside their peers.

But inclusion cannot succeed as an unfunded mandate resting on the goodwill and exhaustion of early childhood educators.

If Virginia and the nation are serious about welcoming all children, government and private funders must invest in the qualified people who make inclusion possible: additional classroom educators, social workers, clinicians, therapists, nurses, family-support professionals, and special-education specialists.

Every child deserves a place where that child is safe, supported, understood, and included. Every family deserves access to care that does not treat a child’s disability or developmental need as a disqualifying burden. Every early educator deserves the staffing, training, professional support, and compensation necessary to care for all children well.

Opening the classroom door is only the beginning. We must also provide the resources that allow every child, and every educator to succeed once inside.