By GvilleTX Newsroom
Texas will aim its child-care scholarship program at fewer children next contract year, a state decision that matters in Cooke County because Workforce Solutions Texoma already reports a 3-to-4-month wait list for help paying for care. The Texas Workforce Commission approved the lower statewide target on Aug. 11 after agency staff said rising child-care costs and flat funding mean the same pool of money will reach fewer children.
TWC staff presented a Board Contract Year 2027 target of about 133,000 average children served per day, down from about 147,000 for BCY 2026, according to the commission's Aug. 11 meeting record. Staff attributed the reduction to cost and funding pressure, not to a drop in family need.
The target was not lowered for lack of a funding shift inside the agency, according to TWC staff. Staff told commissioners the 2027 target already counted money moved from canceled statewide initiatives into direct child care.
The local program runs through Workforce Solutions Texoma, which covers Cooke, Fannin and Grayson counties and operates workforce centers in all three, including Gainesville. Workforce Solutions Texoma says its Child Care Services program helps low-income families pay for care while parents are working, in training or looking for work, using federal Child Care and Development Fund money.
For Texoma, TWC's BCY 2026 allocation table listed child-care funding of about $10 million and a target near 1,200 average children served per day. The same table shows the Texoma target is not a 1,400-child target; a 1,405 target was listed for Middle Rio Grande Valley. The neighboring North Central Texas workforce area was assigned a much larger base allocation.
TWC says the statewide Child Care Services program is funded through the federal Child Care and Development Fund and that most CCDF child-care dollars go to Texas' 28 local workforce development boards, which manage delivery through Workforce Solutions offices. The Administration for Children and Families reported that states also transferred TANF block-grant money into CCDF in fiscal 2024, showing how child-care aid can depend on flexible federal funds.
The budget pressure comes as families are paying more for care and household basics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' July CPI table showed day-care and preschool prices higher nationally than a year earlier, while the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington CPI-U also rose over the 12 months ending in July, with food and energy costs higher as well. TWC's child-care data page says its market-rate survey tracks rates charged to the public in each local workforce area.
The shift follows the end of a large round of pandemic-era child-care support. TWC's child-care relief page says federal ARPA money used for the 2022 Child Care Relief Fund expired on Sept. 30, 2024.
TWC's Child Care by the Numbers page for Texoma says its monthly average-children-served chart covers January 2025 through March 2026 and matches the agency's performance measure for average children served per day. The same page cautions that wait-list figures from January 2025 forward were not finalized because of the state's new child-care case-management system and related data problems. Workforce Solutions Texoma's own public child-care page, however, still reports a 3-to-4-month wait list for Child Care Services.
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