“Childcare is tough,” Micki Velmer said, walking heavily from the parking lot into the school. Even for those, like her and Jason, with good jobs and some savings. “I honestly don’t know how some people do it.” She does know that costs like childcare are a big reason that, after this second child is born, she and Jason are unlikely to have any more. “We’d always said we’d have two or three, but the financial piece is so scary.”

And Georgia, compared to other states, does early care and learning pretty well.

The state pioneered one of the nation’s first universal pre-kindergarten programs in the country. In the Care Index, a data and methodology collaboration between New America and Care.com, Georgia ranked in the second quartile, 18th out of the 50 states. It scored in the top 15 on quality and availability, but fell to 31st in terms of affordability. Though quality is difficult to measure, 12 percent of centers and family homes in the state are nationally accredited for quality. The Care Index found that the average cost of full-time infant care in a childcare center or family-home center outstrips the average cost of in-state college tuition and fees, not just in Georgia, but in a total of 33 states. For a family with a single worker earning minimum wage, the average cost of childcare in a center for a child under 5 takes up more than half their income. Nanny care in Georgia, the Index found, runs $27,729 a year, more than two and a half times the average rent in the state.

The Velmers are not the only family to struggle to find and afford quality infant care. Every morning, Monyatta Carter, who works as a medical coder for Emory Healthcare, rises around 5:30 a.m. to get her baby and toddler out the door of their home in Conyers, Georgia, drive them to their family-home childcare center 15 miles away, then get back in the car and head toward her office in Decatur, Georgia, by 9 am. She initially wanted her children near her at work, in case of an emergency, as her husband has an unpredictable schedule. But tuition at one nearby on-site child-development center would have cost more than her salary, even with her employee discount. She debated staying home. But her job provides not only steady income, but also the family’s health insurance. “I couldn’t afford to work,” she said. “And I couldn’t afford not to work.”

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What Georgia does well, however, is its early and pioneering embrace of early-childhood education. Georgia was among the first states, along with Massachusetts and Washington, to create a stand-alone Department of Early Care and Learning. “We don’t talk about daycare here,” one state official said. “We talk about early learning.”

Both Democratic and Republican governors have supported the expansion of the universal pre-kindergarten program. The state has invested more than $6 billion in state lottery funds over 25 years to make high quality pre-K available to 1.4 million children, said Amy Jacobs, the commissioner of the Department of Early Care and Learning. Though demand still outstrips a supply—between 5,000 and 8,000 children sit on the waiting list every year—the system currently serves nearly 60 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds.