NBA’s Kyrie Irving donates to Missoula refugee women hit by MT childcare subsidy cut

By David Erickson

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    MISSOULA, Montana (Missoulian) — Mercurial basketball superstar Kyrie Irving may have provided temporary relief with a big donation, but the low-income families of over 6,620 Montana kids will still see their monthly child care costs rise as much as $1,000 in January. That’s because Montana’s state health department is pulling the plug on a pandemic-era scholarship program because federal funds have run out.

At one Missoula child care center, the change means that about 10 refugee women who work as child care educators to toddlers may be forced to quit their jobs to stay home and care for their young ones rather than pay the huge increase every month.

“What the government did was thoughtless,” said Marmot Snetsinger, the owner and director of Little Twigs Childcare in Missoula. “And so you just pulled 6,000 people out of the workforce. (The state health department) could have warned people the money was gonna run out in June and come up with a plan, but they didn’t want anybody to know about it, that they were gonna do that, until after the election.”

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The families in Montana that have been eligible for the Best Beginnings Child Care Scholarship Program, which has subsidized almost the entire cost of their child care with federal COVID funds since mid-2021, have been notified that the money is gone. The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services has notified those families in December that starting on Jan. 1, they will no longer have the $10 copay bill. Instead, the copay bills for their child care costs will now rise on a sliding scale according to their income.

Snetsinger employs 15 refugee women at her center, and almost all of them have their own children at the day care. That means that they can work during the day watching their own children and other people’s kids while their partner can also earn a paycheck to allow the family to build a life. Now, however, that’s all in question.

Snetsinger showed several bills for her employees that show the copay going up from $10 in December to as much as $1,000 for all future months, starting in January.

Jon Ebelt, the state health department’s spokesperson, told the Lee Newspapers Montana News Bureau earlier this month that the program is going back to its pre-pandemic price scale because the federal money from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act has run out.

“Those funds have been exhausted and in January we will reinstitute pre-pandemic policies as a result,” Ebelt told bureau chief Holly Michels in an email.

Snetsinger said the state is also lowering the income threshold to qualify back down to 150% of the federal poverty level instead of where it is currently, 185%.

“It’s just horrendous,” Snetsinger said. “The new cut-off for the scholarship is if you’re a single mom making more than $13 an hour, you don’t qualify. You can get more than that easily working at Taco Bell. So the decision the women face is: ‘Do I pay a huge bill like this or do I just stay home with my kids,’ right?”

Snetsinger said she’s the largest employer of refugees in the state.

“It’s the first job they’ve ever had in their lives, for many of them, because they come from cultures where women typically stay home with their children,” she said. “But they come to the United States, and to make ends meet, they need to work.”

She said the women she employs are incredible child care providers.

“So I wanted to provide a place where they can not only work but they can also stay with their children if they want to, because they’ve lost everything in their lives,” Snetsinger said. “They lost their families, they lost their culture, they lost their communities. So they get to work with a skill set here that they know how to do very, very well.”

Tekea Abrha is a refugee from war-ravaged Eritrea who works full time at Little Twigs. Because her husband is employed full-time as a forklift operator and they have a young son, she wouldn’t be able to work unless she could watch her child at the day care. The huge increase in her child care copay is something she wouldn’t be able to afford, she explained.

“It’s a lot of money,” she said.

Snetsinger couldn’t believe that the 10 refugee women at her child care center who qualify got less than a month’s notice that they’ll be paying $1,000 more a month. So, she started a fundraiser through GoFundMe to try to come up with money.

“The Montana government made sudden changes to the childcare subsidy program and put the bill in the hands of these hard-working childcare professionals,” she wrote in the fundraiser. “Little Twigs employs 15 women refugees and provides childcare to over 50 children. We have built a model of a global community that nurtures and empowers women and children from Syria, The Democratic Republic of (the) Congo, Eritrea, and Afghanistan.”

She set the goal at $24,000, and so far has had 98 donations, most of them in the $100 range. But last week, they got a huge donation of $50,000 from Kyrie Irving, a star point guard for the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. Irving made headlines earlier this year when he tweeted a link to an antisemitic film. He was subsequently suspended by the NBA and issued an apology.

Irving has been making a huge amount of donations in recent weeks to causes all over the country. On Dec. 20, he donated $50,000 to the GoFundMe for Jaheim McMillan, a 16-year-old Black boy who was shot and killed by police on Oct. 6 in Mississippi. Irving has also donated $323,000 to Feeding America, $22,000 to a college student at Howard University and $65,000 to the family of Shanquella Robinson, an American woman who died in Mexico.

Snetsinger said she was shocked by the donation, which has now put her fundraiser at about $65,711 as of Tuesday morning. She noted that a lot of people had donated to the cause, which may have helped it catch the attention of Irving.

Abrha, the refugee child care educator, said she’s never heard of Irving before last week. But now, she’s thankful to him and all the other donors that will give her and her colleagues some temporary relief.

Snetsinger noted the fundraiser is only a temporary reprieve and the state still needs to find a permanent solution.

“We’re 10 families,” she said. “What about the other 5,990 families that need support? We shouldn’t have to fund-raise for basic things like child care when the governor is saying we have a $2.4 billion budget surplus.”

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