Legislative Session Brought a Wide Range of Policies that Will Improve Well-Being for Children and Families

The 2022 Maryland legislative session saw the passage of several bills that will increase economic security and improve the wellbeing of children and families. Legislators not only passed the Time to Care Act, which will provide paid family and medical leave to all working Marylanders, but also bills that will help the child care sector recover from the pandemic, ensure that undocumented mothers and their babies have access to medical care, and bolster economic and housing supports, among others.

Most of these bills are now on Governor Hogan’s desk for consideration. To support healthy, thriving families in Maryland, the governor should sign these bills into law.

Economic Security

For years working parents in Maryland have had to choose between taking care of their newborn child and their own health or not getting paid and keeping their job. This is a choice that no working parent should have to make, which is why passage of SB 275, known as the Time to Care Act, was such a significant win for Maryland’s families. The bill, which is now law after legislators overrode the governor’s veto, will provide Maryland workers with up to 12 weeks of annual paid leave to care for a new child, allow them to tend to their own medical needs or that of a family member with serious illness. A parent can also get up to 24 weeks should medical leave be needed during pregnancy followed by parental leave after childbirth. This will be beneficial to families because access to paid leave has been shown to increase a family’s economic security, improve maternal mental health, foster better parent-child relation and support child health and development.

Maryland’s public assistance programs provide critical economic support for families as they navigate various challenges. Too often these programs are tied down in paperwork or have stringent requirements that end up discouraging and frustrating people who would benefit from the support. House Bills 1041 and 1043 each seek to find ways to make the work programs that are part of Maryland’s Temporary Cash Assistance program more effective and less punitive, ensuring that families receive the financial support they need.

For students receiving free school meals, funding was included in the budget for the Summer SNAP program, which provides additional food assistance to families during the summer months when children aren’t receiving meals at school. This is welcome news for the more than 500,000 households in Maryland who participate in SNAP.

The General Assembly also passed several bills that would help guarantee tenant protections and prevent evictions. Unstable housing and evictions have been shown to have a detrimental effect on childhood development and can also have mental health implications for children and their parents.

Child Care

More than 800 child care centers across the state have closed since the start of the pandemic and many more are still unable to operate at their full capacity. Aiming to address these challenges, which are important in early childhood education and development, the legislature passed a package of bills to support child care providers and families struggling to afford child care.

Among them, HB 993 would create a revolving loan fund that would enable providers who enroll families paying with scholarship to make necessary and sometime costly changes to their location. It grants priority to:

• Child care providers in underserved communities
• Child care providers in areas designated by MSDE as lacking child care slots
• Child care providers in located rural communities
• Child care providers that serve primarily low-income families in areas of high poverty
• Child care providers that serve children with special needs
• Child care providers that serve children ages 2 and under

HB 995 addresses concerns that both parents and providers experience about the scholarship program. It establishes presumptive eligibility for families accessing child care scholarships, which means they can start work activities right away knowing they can enroll in child care and the provider can expect scholarship payment. The bill also establishes copay relief for some families experiencing challenges. It also ends pursuit of child support enforcement as a requirement to qualify for a child care scholarship.

Health

Lead poisoning has individual and public costs, costs in health care, IQ loss, increased special education needs, and lower earnings.  To address the need for lead poisoning prevention, which would help individual victims in turn the State as a whole,  HB 1110 would alter the application and meaning of “elevated blood level” and “reference level” as those definitions apply to specified provisions of law that initiate case management, notification, and lead risk reduction requirements under the state’s lead poisoning prevention laws. It would require the Maryland Department of the Environment, in consultation with the Maryland Department of Health, and local health departments, and other relevant stakeholders to study and evaluate the most effective means of incorporating CDC’s “blood lead reference value” into the State’s lead poisoning prevention programs.

To ensure that all babies and mothers in Maryland get the medical care they need, irrespective of immigration status, HB 1080 the Healthy Babies Equity Act would require the state’s Medicaid program to provide medical care and other health care services to noncitizen pregnant women who would qualify for the program but for their immigration status and their children up to the age of 1 year. This bill was presented to the governor early and is now law.

Juvenile Justice

In the area of youth justice, a broad juvenile justice reform bill passed and is now law. The bill was based mainly on recommendations of the Juvenile Justice Reform Council. Among the law’s provisions is that children younger than 13 will not be subject to the jurisdiction of juvenile court for delinquency proceedings and may not be charged with a crime, but juvenile courts would have jurisdiction over a child who is at least 10 and has committed the most serious crimes, like murder and other crimes of violence. This is a significant victory, though by no means final, in an area that often includes more punitive than rehabilitative practices. These changes are particularly important due to the disproportionate number of non-white youth in arrest and confinement. This bill begins the process of tackling these issues.