REPORT

First Annual Report (September 2025) and Executive Summary

Executive Summary

This is the first of four reports in the ongoing evaluation by the UH IRWGS of the Harris County Department of Economic
Equity and Opportunity’s Early REACH Program (ER). ER was initiated as a pilot, and funded with federal American Rescue
Plan Act (ARPA) dollars, sufficient to cover the cost of 800-to-1,000 contracted slots in high-quality child care deserts
from June 2023 through September 2026. The program aims to provide free, high-quality care for children whose families
face economic hardship and/or live in areas of Harris County with a high Social Vulnerability Index.

The national affordable child care shortage is also an issue in Harris County. Of the roughly 322,000 children 4 and under
in the county, at least 166,092 would be eligible for a contracted slot under ER’s “85% of State Median Income” criterion.
Even with multiple sources of federal child care funding, in Harris County there is a federally funded slot available for
fewer than 1 in every 5 eligible children (18%).

Accomplishments to date

• Developed prioritization mechanism for allocation of children to
• Developed, fielded, and analyzed two large-scale surveys, of caregivers and child care centers, including both participant and comparison groups. Five survey rounds will be fielded.

First round of Family Surveys – 941 respondents

Topics include labor-force, school, health, child wellbeing, income data, etc.

First round of Center Surveys – 137 respondents

Topics include services, tuition/fees, expenditures, staff demographics, positions filled, salaries, attrition, children served, ER slots filled, demographic data, etc.

• Collected and analyzed administrative and program data, in addition to survey

Initial findings

• Our invoicing data analysis finds that the vacancy fill rate was largely consistent across centers, and that, on average, centers took approximately 5 months to achieve a 97% steady state filled rate, an efficient outcome.

Stopping and re-starting the program would be costly, since it would involve repeating the ramp-up period, with its built-in high vacancy costs.

• Among caregivers not working when they applied to ER between December 2023 and May 2025, those awarded ER slots were 1 percentage points more likely to begin working relative to those who were not awarded slots (44.7% vs. 32.6%). Thus caregivers/parents with ER were 37% more likely to become employed than caregivers/parents without ER.

Many of these caregivers’ children were admitted recently, and since labor market entry takes time, this may be an underestimate of the ultimate effects on employment.

• Wages for staff rose among both designated ER staff for whom a $15/hour minimum was required and non-ER staff

in the same centers. (The minimum is higher than market wage to attract skilled workers and increase retention.)

This suggests that ER funding had spillover effects, lifting compensation across all ER center staff.

• Staffing levels increased significantly more at ER centers compared to non-ER centers, at all age
• ER centers consistently reported lower tuition levels than non-ER centers (another apparent spillover effect), although the differences were not statistically significant.

The gap between the rapid ramp up of the ER program and the start of the evaluation has presented some challenges, which we have worked assiduously to resolve. In subsequent reports, we will extend and expand these analyses to examine ER program-specific outcomes in the context of broader family, community, labor-force, and market impacts. The results presented are preliminary; more in-depth and comprehensive analyses will be conducted in the next phases of the study.

Among the data and issues to be examined in future reports

For centers:

• the numbers of slots added across centers (net enrollment change in ER non-ER centers)
• total funds expended on vacant seats to date
• any observable spillover effects of ER on centers in the vicinity of ER centers
• the impact of the contracted slot model on center stability
• time factors involved in quality growth and their impact on center expansion
• changes to the continuity and quality of staff recruited under this system relative to what was in place previously and what is in place in similar but non-participating centers
• analysis of outreach effects

For families:

• the continued transitions into and out of employment for those who are and are not offered slots,
• descriptions of different families who would be offered slots under different allocation mechanisms
• the child care arrangements of applicants prior to being offered a slot
• other measures of family well-being that may be altered by having free high-quality child

We will also explore administrative and structural effectiveness and learning over the course of the ER pilot.