I have often written about fresh funds flowing to early learning, but the reality is fewer Washington State children received federal child care aid during the recession’s first full year and publicly-funded preschool waiting lists are at record levels.

In 2008, one of the federal government’s biggest early learning programs, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, helped the fewest number of children, 1.6 million, in this decade, the Center on Law and Social Policy, reports. The block grant funds subsidies families use to cover child care costs and other programs. (Check out data on Washington State’s use of these funds in this brief.)

This is an obvious and big problem because child care aid is falling at the same time an historic recession is forcing more families into poverty, CLASP points out.

Meanwhile, the waiting list for Washington’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program is now at a record high of 3,294, which is a 50 percent jump over last year, the Washington State Association of Head Start and ECEAP says.

There is good news. The economic stimulus package sent $2 billion in Child Care and Development Block Grant funding to states, which should allow an additional 300,000 children to receive child care, CLASP said in its policy brief.

But $2 billion is not enough to serve every eligible child. In fact, the program only helps one in seven of those kids, Danielle Ewen, CLASP’s director of Child Care and Early Education, told me this morning. Many states are using stimulus money to avoid making cuts in child care programs, she added. One of the problems is the federal block grant lost ground in recent years thanks to flat funding and budget cuts, she added.

The policy analysis also offered evidence that these are families who deserve help. Among those receiving CCDBG aid, 92 percent are working or in training – only 16 percent are on welfare – but they only earned, on average $15,400 a year in 2005, CLASP reports, relying on the most recent available data.

In a recession, “the truth of the matter is low-income families are the last to recover,” Ewen said.

“It hits them harder. They lose more ground.”