PROVIDENCE — Worried parents packed a windowless State House hearing room last night to denounce the governor’s efforts to rein in the cost of state-subsidized childcare as: “ill-conceived,” “short sighted” and worst of all, “devastating to working families, their children, employers and the state’s economy.”

Christine Rego, left, of North Kingstown, the mother of three, waits to testify before a House committee yesterday. At right is Stephanie Mello, also of North Kingstown.

The Providence Journal Connie Grosch

One of the professional childcare providers asked the state lawmakers on the House Finance Committee to consider this question: “Do you want to ask parents to decide between continuing to work or leaving their children home alone?”

Dawn Auclair, a certified nursing assistant at a North Providence nursing home — who is also a mother of three — asked this: “Every day, I go to work and care for our state’s most vulnerable population — the elderly. How can I care for them if I don’t have childcare for my own kids?”

And, “I know my nursing home can’t give me a big enough raise for me to pay for childcare on my own,” she said, “because they are facing cuts from the state, too.”

In his budget for the year starting July 1, Governor Carcieri proposes to change the threshold for who can receive subsidized or free childcare. It is one of a package of proposed cost-cuts aimed at closing a projected $354-million deficit this year and next. The new childcare restrictions alone are aimed at saving $19.4 million in state and federal dollars.

Created initially to help families make the move from welfare to work, the state-paid tab for the childcare program has increased from $52 million in 2000 to a projected $78.4 million next year.

Currently, the program is open to families making up to 225 percent of the federal poverty level: $38,633 for a family of three. Carcieri wants to change the cutoff to 150 percent of poverty, or $25,755 for that same family. There are about 11,950 children in the program now. Carcieri’s proposal would drop that number by 3,800.

The budget also proposes to postpone, for the third year in a row, a scheduled childcare provider rate increase.

At an earlier budget hearing, a parade of childcare providers — including a top honcho at the YMCA — said the state’s cost-cutting efforts would force them to reduce the amount of programming they offer, lay off experienced staff, or shut down entirely, reducing the availability of “affordable, quality programs for all families — not just those directly affected by the budget changes.”

“Continued deferral of this rate increase is making it increasingly difficult for providers to afford the basic operating costs associated with safe, updated, licensed programs such as educational materials, trained staff, and facilities that support learning,” said Kim Maine, president of the RI Child Care Directors Association, again yesterday.

Feeling more like a protest rally at times than a budget hearing, parents and their squiggling children packed the State House hearing room and the hallway outside — alongside an army of professional childcare providers and their paid advocates — to await their turn at the microphone. Many came with carefully typed statements that they read to the lawmakers.

The turnout was organized by a new coalition of 39 childcare, union and community-based groups — including Kids Count, the RI Afterschool Plus Alliance, the YMCA and the Child Care Providers Union/ SEIU District 1199 — that calls itself: Care for Kids.

Among their arguments: that “national research has shown that childcare subsidies enable parents to work at a job, work more hours, sustain employment, and earn more.”

And also: that “studies from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have found that on school days, the hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. are the peak hours for juvenile crime and experimentation with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and sex.”

Faced with a drop in state-subsidized enrollments and another postponement in their long-promised rate increase, the coalition predicted many childcare providers would curtail their offerings or shut down entirely and “that will leave thousands of children and youth with no safe place to go and without adult supervision.”

“To survive without childcare assistance, you need to be making more than $18 an hour,” said Auclair, the nursing assistant at Hopkins Manor Nursing Home in North Providence. “A lot of jobs in Rhode Island just don’t pay that … How are we supposed to keep people in this state working — especially in essential jobs like mine — without proper childcare?” she said in a statement released by the coalition.

Stephanie Mello told the lawmakers she isn’t eligible for state subsidies now, but as the mother of two children ages 10 and 6 who attend Sunshine Child Development Center in North Kingstown, she said she is threatened as well.

“In order to compensate for the cuts,” she said in her written testimony, “Sunshine Child Development Center is proposing the elimination of transportation services and morning care for all the school-age children. This puts both subsidized and non-subsidized families in a precarious situation, by forcing families to put their child on the bus or be late for work.”

Christine Rego, a 26-year-old employee at the KFC in North Kingstown and mother of three, said the cuts would deal her a double-whammy, knocking her off the subsidized rolls and leaving her without a means of getting her daughter from kindergarten to afterschool care at 11:30 a.m. if Sunshine is forced to cut the transportation services it currently provides which, in turn, would mean: “I wouldn’t be able to work.”

The lawmakers were openly skeptical of the answers they received when they asked Department of Human Services officials how many people they expected to fall back on welfare because they could no longer afford childcare. Acting Human Services Director Gary Alexander said his “department does not believe the vast majority” will resort to welfare because they are at the “upper limits” of the eligibility scale.

But Rep. Thomas Slater, D-Providence, called his optimism “hard to believe.” Rep. Elizabeth Dennigan, D-East Providence, defending the subsidy program, said: “It’s not that it’s the nice caring thing to do, it’s because it makes sense.”

But none of the lawmakers exhibited any enthusiasm for the “loophole-closing” tax package that many of the same advocacy groups are proposing to avert Carcieri’s proposed budget cuts. Among them: revoking the tax break lawmakers gave the state’s wealthiest income taxpayers last year and freezing the phaseout of the state’s capital gains tax in its tracks, at a point where it matches the rate in Massachusetts.

The president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization of Women, Carolyn Mark, described the cuts as an assault on women “who are trying to do the right thing: support their families by making a living.”

Charlotte Boudreau, childcare director at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Providence, did the rough math. A parent with two children “making $25,000 a year would no longer qualify for assistance. Without assistance the tuition for this family’s 4 and 10 year old would be $16,380 a year at our sites. Infant care would be even higher. This would leave $8,620 for rent, food, [clothing], electricity, telephone and heat. Ladies and gentlemen could you support your two children for a year with $8,620?”