Family

Alaska lawmakers approved legislation that would nearly double the state’s support to early childhood programs for low income families.

The boost comes amid a crisis the child care sector, where low wages suppress the number of spaces available and reduce access to care.

Mark Lackey, director of a Head Start program in Wasilla, attributes the change to the scope of the problem. “There were schools closing down, there were classrooms being shuttered,” he said.

Last year the Legislature would have given Head Starts $5 million in one-time funding, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed most of it.

The new proposal still needs Dunleavy’s approval to become law, but Lackey said this year he is optimistic. He pointed to the governor’s initiation of a task force to find solutions to the child care crunch: “He saw that the sector needed help and that he saw that families were not able to stay in Alaska.”

Alaska’s Head Start program provides child care, early education and services like health and dental care to more than 3,000 children in low-income families. The federal government funds 80% of Head Start costs and programs need to come up with the rest of the money.

The state of Alaska paid the full 20% match for the programs for decades until the price of oil sank in 2010. State support has shrunk about half of the match.

House Bill 148 includes a commitment that the state will increase its contribution to the full 20% match. This year that is a $5.2 million increase.

Lackey said that’s necessary because Head Start programs, unlike private centers, cannot increase their rates to support better wages for staff. “We’re serving parents that don’t have those resources,” he said. “So when our grants are flat for 14 years — it really hurts. So this is huge.”

The years of flat-funding, coupled with the instability of pandemic years and rising prices, took their toll on his organization. Just two weeks ago, Meadow Lakes Head Start, one of his Wasilla preschools that served about 45 students, closed for good. The board of CCS Learning cut nearly 100 spaces this year because the organization could not afford enough staff.

Now, he said they can start to rebuild.

“I’m excited about being able to advertise our vacancies at a wage that isn’t lower than Target, “ he said. “Individuals that are taking care of young children, they have a lot of responsibility on their plate and they should be compensated accordingly.”

The increase also benefits rural areas. Anne Shade, director of Bristol Bay Native Association’s child care programs, called it “life changing.”

In her region, an area about the size of Ohio, Head Start works in conjunction with the school district and is the only early childhood option. But she said Head Start often loses highly qualified workers to the district, where wages are higher. That has led to classroom closures in the past. With the increased funding, she said she can compete for the most skilled workers.

“The prices are so high out here. We’re looking at going to almost $7 a gallon for gas, milk at $10 a gallon — you can’t pay people $14 an hour, you can’t survive,” she said.

Lackey said the state’s commitment staves off future closures and allows Head Start programs to rebuild.

“I think this absolutely gives breathing room and keeps future closures from being so imminent. I know that programs all around the state of Alaska are still under-enrolled. And we are going to have to have time to hire new people at better wages to get them trained, you know, to get back to where we were pre pandemic.”

Lawmakers also included $7.5 million in the budget for grants for child care centers and a number of policy changes aimed at increasing access for families. Lackey has worked in early childhood for decades and said this support is unlike what he’s experienced before.

“I’ve been going to Juneau now for 20 years and have never felt such a successful legislative session for early childhood,” he said.

About a dozen preschoolers played in the snowmelt in the yard of Hillcrest Children’s Center in Anchorage this April. Most were zipped into heavy duty outerwear against the spring chill. All of them were splattered with dirt.

“One of our values is mud,” said Christina Eubanks, the center’s director, before an exuberant and particularly mud-coated child pulled her aside to tell her about his day and offer her some of the muffin that was part of the day’s afternoon snack.

Caring for kids costs money. Eubanks had popped out into the yard after reviewing the budget the center’s board had voted on the night before. The balance sheet is riddled with negative numbers, but Hillcrest will be in the black this year. That is only possible because of nearly $200,000 in grants from federal pandemic aid that the organization used to offset tuition costs. “That is not expected in the year coming forward,” Eubanks said.

The state will distribute the last of the federal aid to child care centers this summer.

“So we’re hoping that will be enough to balance out this year’s budget. It would be great if there was some funding to go into next year’s,” Eubanks said.

Hillcrest had to increase what it paid workers just to be competitive with unemployment benefits during the pandemic. Eubanks said she knows the child care center’s costs are reaching the limit of what families can afford, but the parent-run board still voted to increase its monthly rates to up to $1,850 to keep up with the cost of operation.

It is in these tenuous conditions that Alaska lawmakers passed the child care legislation. The proposed law expands eligibility for families to get financial assistance for child care, offers tax incentives for companies to invest in child care options and gives the state the option to consider the actual cost of care, rather than the market rate, when setting its rates.

Lawmakers separately included $7.5 million in the state’s budget for grants to support child care centers.

Stephanie Berglund, the leader of a nonprofit resource and referral center for child care in the state, hailed the achievement. “This is a landmark milestone for Alaska,” she said. “What’s significant is recognizing the importance and value of working families, and the need for our state to be investing in critical child care support.”

By her estimate, the changes could double the amount of Alaska families eligible for child care subsidies and assistance. But she said that since the pandemic, nearly a quarter of Alaska’s small child care businesses have closed and her organization has not seen new ones fill the gap. She cautioned that without movement to support child care businesses and create new ones, there may not be enough programs for newly qualifying families to apply their benefits to.

“This legislation is just one piece of what’s needed. Child care is still very much in crisis in Alaska,” she said.

It doesn’t fix everything

Rep. Julie Coulombe, R-Anchorage, sponsored the legislation, which began as House Bill 89 — and she is the first to admit that it is not a complete solution. “HB 89 doesn’t fix everything. But it’s a start,” she said. “I think it just brings a lot of people hope that maybe we can keep this momentum going.”

Coulombe serves on the governor’s child care task force and said there was celebration of the bill at its meeting this week because the changes come directly from work with state staff and care center operators from around the state.

The piece she is most excited about is the public private partnership that offers tax credits to businesses that make payments or contributions for child care and child care facilities. “In my opinion, that’s what’s going to move the needle the most, because that’s right where people are working, that’s their employers. That’s going to have a really big impact.”

Another supporter of the bill, Rep. Zack Fields, D-Anchorage, said its language was based on  legislative best practices from around the country that were successful in states with either  mixed or Republican-led legislatures. “It represented what is possible in Republican legislatures,” he said.

He also stressed the need to expand child care. “It’s not enough to stabilize a sector; the sector has grossly inadequate capacity right now,” he said. So, he too has his eye on tax credits.

“The biggest question is, what is the uptake on these tax credits to expand care?” he said. “The best thing that could happen would be a bunch of companies invest in new child care facilities.”

The tax credit is the reason Kati Capozzi, president of the Alaska Chamber, was one of the bill’s most active advocates. She said it is a priority for the businesses that are her organization’s members, an indication that the businesses that pay taxes in the state would use the incentive.

“They took a look at it, saw the tax credits that are available and encouraged the chamber to support the bill, presumably because they plan on using the tax credits that are included in it,” she said.

Data shows unaffordable or unavailable child care affects Alaska’s workforce. Seventy-seven percent of Alaska parents reported missing work because of child care challenges in one study.

‘Hail Mary’

The milestone legislation did not succeed as a standalone bill. Instead lawmakers slipped it into a much larger bill at the 11th hour of the legislative session. Coulombe described it as “kind of a Hail Mary,” but said she doesn’t mind what form it takes as long as it serves its purpose.

After passage by the House, HB 89 got hung up in the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, tried to put the bill’s language in a bill that dealt with Medicaid in schools, but that proposal didn’t get enough votes. So Fields asked Coulombe for permission to add it as an amendment to a popular board extension bill. “It’s the last day, and I got nothing to lose. So let’s just try it,” Coulombe recalled saying. It passed easily in the House and the Senate concurred just before gaveling out for the year at about a quarter midnight.

Fields called the amendment’s passage a “miracle,” but there is another hurdle before the bill becomes law. The popular bill that was such a successful vehicle for HB 89 was also a successful vehicle for a wide-ranging array of other bills. The practice of adding legislation as amendments to bills likely to pass, known as “bill stuffing,” is common and widespread, but this particular instance may have stretched the limits of what is allowed. Lawmakers are restricted to keeping the amendments to a single subject. The measure, Senate Bill 189, now ranges from board extensions to child care to big game permitting and marijuana taxes.

“The governor has always said he supported HB 89,” the original bill, Coulombe said, but added that she is sure the administration is going to give it a close look.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Opill, the first oral contraceptive pill to be available without a prescription in the U.S., has shipped to retailers nationwide. It will be sold online and in the family planning aisle of drugstores, convenience stores and supermarkets later this month, the manufacturer announced Monday.

The drug itself has been around for decades, but manufacturers have been working nine years toward making it available over the counter. Here’s what else to know about Opill.

What’s in it?

Opill is a daily progestin-only pill, meaning there’s no estrogen in it. That’s why this kind of pill is sometimes called a mini-pill.

This isn’t a new kind of birth control pill. The drug substance was originally approved for prescription use in 1973, according to the Food and Drug Administration. But this is the first birth control pill that has been approved for use without a prescription from a health care provider.

“We have been working on it for nine years and got approval in July 2023 from the FDA to move forward. And it’s been kind of full-steam ahead since that day,” says Triona Schmelter, an executive at Perrigo, which manufactures Opill.

Is it safe? And does it work?

Yes. Like many other oral contraceptives, it’s 98% effective at preventing pregnancy if taken correctly. It should start to work 48 hours after taking the first dose. Potential side effects include headaches, bloating and cramping.

The FDA convened its panel of outside experts to advise it on this approval back in May, and the panel voted unanimously in favor of approval.

They said that the labeling alone was enough for people to be able to use Opill correctly without a doctor’s help.

“The progestin-only pill has an extremely high safety profile, and virtually no one can have a health concern using a progestin-only pill,” Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told NPR in July when Opill was first approved by the FDA.

Where will it be sold?

Major retailers will sell Opill where you’d typically find condoms and pregnancy tests.

“Today we start shipping Opill to our retailers for their brick-and-mortar stores,” says Schmelter. It will be available in the coming weeks in-store in the family planning aisle, she says, as well as on online marketplaces and Opill.com.

How much will it cost?

A month’s supply of Opill has a recommended retail price of $19.99. It will be a little cheaper to buy in bulk, however, with a three-month supply costing $49.99. Opill.com will also sell a six-month supply for $89.99.

Although birth control pills are available to people with insurance without a copay due to the Affordable Care Act, not everyone wants their birth control pill to show up on their insurance, so they may choose to pay out of pocket.

Schmelter says Perrigo has also set up a patient assistance program for people who don’t have insurance and can’t afford Opill.

Who is this for?

This is for people who want to prevent pregnancy but perhaps aren’t able to visit their health care provider to get a prescription. They may be in between medical appointments, or they may be teens who otherwise aren’t able to access reproductive health care.

“It doesn’t require a doctor’s visit, which means it doesn’t require time off work or potentially a babysitter or finding a doctor,” Schmelter says. “You can walk into any local retailer and, in the family planning section, pick it up at your convenience.”

“When it comes from Opill.com, the packaging will be discreet,” Schmelter says. “It’s nobody’s business but your own.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Most members of the House supported a bill that aims to expand the number of families that can afford child care and increase child care subsidies so they reflect the actual cost of care.

Rep. Julie Coulombe, R-Anchorage, sponsored the bill and called HB89 a commonsense bill that could build the state’s workforce and support families.

“In my district, families are really struggling. The inflation and the energy costs — both parents have to work, that’s just the reality,” she said. “They want to go back to work; they can’t find child care. Sometimes when they find child care, they can’t afford it.”

The bill would increase access for middle-class families by raising the maximum income level to qualify for assistance, and it adds a sliding-fee scale for families who increase their household income so that they are weaned off of subsidies.

The bill would create incentives for the private sector to help with child care costs and access, including a tax incentive for corporations to provide child care benefits to their employees. It would raise the amount of tax credits corporations can claim to $3 million from $1 million.

“It’s a very specific and targeted way to try to incentivize the private sector. I don’t think the government can solve this problem; I think everyone needs to kick in,” Coulombe said.

Alaska families shoulder the burden of child care and early education costs, which can be 17% to 34% of family income, according to data from thread, a resource and referral network for child care in the state. Alaska families spend about $223 million a year on early child care and learning; the state contributes about $36 million.

Rep. Zack Fields, D-Anchorage, said the bill incorporates best practices for alleviating the child care crisis, which is a nationwide problem. “This bill directly addresses the biggest challenge for families trying to go back to the workforce, which is the simple ability to take care of their kids,” he said.

The House passed the bill 35 to 5. Reps. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River; Ben Carpenter, R-Nikiski; David Eastman, R-Wasilla; George Rauscher, R-Sutton; and Sarah Vance, R-Homer, voted against the bill.

Unaffordable or unavailable child care significantly affects Alaska’s workforce. According to one study, 77% percent of Alaska parents reported missing work because of child care challenges. Forty percent of Alaskans interviewed for the study said that they or someone in their household had left a job, declined a job offer, or changed jobs because of child care issues in the last year.

Coulombe is an ex officio member of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s child care task force, which was formed in April 2023 to examine the issue and create recommendations to make child care in the state more available and affordable.

“We’re trying to make Alaska friendly to Alaska families, and they’re really struggling, and I’m hoping this bill will be a step in the right direction,” Coulombe said.

A scientific paper that raised concerns about the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone was retracted by its publisher this week. The study was cited three times by a federal judge who ruled against mifepristone last spring. That case, which could limit access to mifepristone throughout the country, will soon be heard in the Supreme Court.

The now retracted study used Medicaid claims data to track E.R. visits by patients in the month after having an abortion. The study found a much higher rate of complications than similar studies that have examined abortion safety.

Sage, the publisher of the journal, retracted the study on Monday along with two other papers, explaining in a statement that “expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions.”

It also noted that most of the authors on the paper worked for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of anti-abortion lobbying group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and that one of the original peer reviewers had also worked for the Lozier Institute.

The Sage journal, Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, published all three research articles, which are still available online along with the retraction notice. In an email to NPR, a spokesperson for Sage wrote that the process leading to the retractions “was thorough, fair, and careful.”

The lead author on the paper, James Studnicki, fiercely defends his work. “Sage is targeting us because we have been successful for a long period of time,” he says on a video posted online this week. He asserts that the retraction has “nothing to do with real science and has everything to do with a political assassination of science.”

He says that because the study’s findings have been cited in legal cases like the one challenging the abortion pill, “we have become visible – people are quoting us. And for that reason, we are dangerous, and for that reason, they want to cancel our work,” Studnicki says in the video.

In an email to NPR, a spokesperson for the Charlotte Lozier Institute said that they “will be taking appropriate legal action.”

Role in abortion pill legal case

Anti-abortion rights groups, including a group of doctors, sued the federal Food and Drug Administration in 2022 over the approval of mifepristone, which is part of a two-drug regimen used in most medication abortions. The pill has been on the market for over 20 years, and is used in more than half abortions nationally. The FDA stands by its research that finds adverse events from mifepristone are extremely rare.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the district court judge who initially ruled on the case, pointed to the now-retracted study to support the idea that the anti-abortion rights physicians suing the FDA had the right to do so. “The associations’ members have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress’ on doctors during emergencies and complications,” he wrote in his decision, citing Studnicki. He ruled that mifepristone should be pulled from the market nationwide, although his decision never took effect.

Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee who was a vocal abortion opponent before becoming a federal judge.

“I don’t think he would view the retraction as delegitimizing the research,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor and expert on the legal history of abortion at U.C. Davis. “There’s been so much polarization about what the reality of abortion is on the right that I’m not sure how much a retraction would affect his reasoning.”

Ziegler also doubts the retractions will alter much in the Supreme Court case, given its conservative majority. “We’ve already seen, when it comes to abortion, that the court has a propensity to look at the views of experts that support the results it wants,” she says. The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade is an example, she says. “The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn’t really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject.”

In the mifepristone case, “there’s a lot of supposition and speculation” in the argument about who has standing to sue, she explains. “There’s a probability that people will take mifepristone and then there’s a probability that they’ll get complications and then there’s a probability that they’ll get treatment in the E.R. and then there’s a probability that they’ll encounter physicians with certain objections to mifepristone. So the question is, if this [retraction] knocks out one leg of the stool, does that somehow affect how the court is going to view standing? I imagine not.”

It’s impossible to know who will win the Supreme Court case, but Ziegler thinks that this retraction probably won’t sway the outcome either way. “If the court is skeptical of standing because of all these aforementioned weaknesses, this is just more fuel to that fire,” she says. “It’s not as if this were an airtight case for standing and this was a potentially game-changing development.”

Oral arguments for the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, are scheduled for March 26 at the Supreme Court. A decision is expected by summer. Mifepristone remains available while the legal process continues.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Juneau welcomed its first baby of 2024 over the weekend. 

Weighing in at 10 pounds and 2 ounces, Cosmo Jobsis was born Saturday at Bartlett Regional Hospital to local residents Emma and Dylan Jobsis. 

Cosmo is 21 and 1/4 inches long and joins an excited big brother named Cade, according to a hospital press release. 

In keeping with tradition, Cosmo’s family received a wooden rocking boat handmade from Sitka spruce by Bartlett’s Dr. Lindy Jones and his wife, Colleen. It was filled with gifts for the newborn. The Joneses have made the rocking boats to welcome the first baby of the year born at Bartlett for years.

Cosmo is the seventh baby to receive one.