Following up on last month’s decision to create new government supervised daycare’s across Israel, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett called upon municipal councils to immediately take advantage of the reforms being offered by his ministry and build additional daycare centers. The reforms that were agreed upon previously went into effect this week.
Bennett’s remarks, which were made at The Daycare Conference in Ma’aleh HaHamisha, urged local councilors from across the country to implement the newly passed reforms.
“In the coming years we plan to build 400 additional daycare centers for up to 30,000 children under the age of three. These new centers, on top of the currently existing ones which serve 90,000 children, will allow thousands more young mothers to join the workforce,” Bennett stated.
“The new method has come into force this morning, and I call on each and every one of the heads of the local councils, to storm the gates. I anticipate that we will see a tremendous increase in the rate of establishing daycare centers in the coming years, and we will see the results of the new track within a short space of time,” he said.
Last month Bennett and Finance Minister Yair Lapid approved the funding necessary to build the additional 400 daycare centers for children up to the age of three within a two-year time frame.
“I feel confident in the new model in which we have reduced bureaucracy and the prerequisites from the local councils. We have removed the barriers,” said Amit Lang, director-general of the Economy Ministry.
As part of the announcement, Deputy Director of the Economy Ministry Michal Tzuk delineated some of the incentives that will be included in the new program as well as listed the barriers that will be removed by the ministry.
According to Tzuk, the removal of bureaucratic barriers will include a ‘short track’ to receiving budgetary help from the government, easier money flow, adopting a ‘first come first serve’ attitude to local government councils who apply for aid, granting additional funding for construction and development costs, and a cessation of some of the more ‘tricky’ prerequisites required for receiving funding.
In 2012, following the recommendations made by the Trachtenberg Committee to increase the amount of daycare centers across the country, the two ministries approved a budget of some NIS 1.2 billion ($330 million) toward the implementation of the committee’s findings.
Approximately half of this amount was earmarked for local authorities. Despite this move, only a handful of daycare centers were built over the course of the past two years. The current reform aims to correct this.
“Today there is an understanding that in order to implement government reforms, it is necessary to grant local municipalities, the operational arm, the budgetary and administrative envelope to implement the program and carry it out,” said Haim Bibas, chairman of the Union of Local Authorities in Israel and mayor of Modi’in.
According to the Economy Ministry, there is a severe shortage of supervised and subsidized daycare centers.
To date some 90,000 children up to the age of three, accounting for roughly a quarter of this age group, attend government supervised and subsidized daycare centers. For the tens of thousands of parents whose children are accepted into the highly sought after daycare centers, the government provides yearly subsidies totaling some NIS 900 million ($247 million).
Those children who are not accepted into subsidized daycare’s are often placed in family care or in expensive private daycare centers, which are not subsidized or supervised by the government.
The government’s move to ease the creation of new daycare’s was heralded as a positive step by the Save A Jewish Baby/Efrat organization, an organization that has saved the lives of 57,000 children from abortion in Israel. Ruth Tidhar, the chief social worker at SAJB/Efrat, told Breaking Israel News that “it is fantastic that the government is finally doing something to encourage childbirth in the country and help take care of their children, and even have children. It is high time.”
She explained that often the prohibitively expensive costs of private daycare does actually cause parents, specifically mothers, to choose not to have children, or in cases where they have become pregnant to abort their pregnancies.
“People come to us quite often and ask ‘how can I have a baby when I have to work to support my children as well as the new child, and half of my salary goes to daycare?’ It is simply prohibitive, and from experience we know that the issue of expensive daycare actually does lead to abortions.”
