There is a specific type of bad news that doesn’t make a big announcement. Beneath rankings and percentages in a spreadsheet, it appears and waits for someone to notice. That’s essentially how Ohio’s most recent early childhood dashboard arrived this year—not with warning signs, but rather with a steady, quiet drumbeat of numbers that don’t add up to anything positive.
Groundwork Ohio and the Health Policy Institute of Ohio created the dashboard, which compiles two years’ worth of data on the true well-being of the state’s youngest citizens. The truth is that it’s not very good. When it comes to eligibility for child care subsidies, Ohio ranks last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Last, not close to the bottom. The income cap for families seeking assistance paying for care is so low that the majority of working parents are not even eligible.
Sitting with that for a moment is worthwhile. In Ohio, a family with two children spends nearly 29% of their income on child care. That line isn’t part of the budget. That is a second rent payment, but there is no room for flexibility or missing a month.
The remaining figures resemble a gradual accumulation of minor setbacks. Ohio is ranked 40th in young child poverty, 42nd in Early Head Start access, 43rd in infant mortality, and 44th in child food insecurity. By themselves, none of these are disastrous. When taken as a whole, they begin to resemble a pattern, and patterns are more difficult to explain away than individual bad years.
It would be unfair to ignore the improvement that has occurred. Early intervention access has gotten better. So have parental incarceration rates and housing cost burdens for some families. Lynanne Gutierrez, who leads Groundwork Ohio, pointed to these gains while also acknowledging the obvious: incremental progress doesn’t move the needle on outcomes that matter most, like whether a baby survives infancy or whether a kindergartner can read.
That gap — between effort and outcome — is the real story here. Ohio isn’t doing nothing. It’s doing things that simply aren’t enough yet, or aren’t reaching the families who need them most.
Perhaps the most striking example is maternal health. There are no maternity care providers in thirteen of the state’s counties. Not one. In those counties, getting checked out requires a pregnant woman to drive, sometimes a long way. Nearly a quarter of pregnant Ohioans didn’t receive prenatal care in their first trimester back in 2022, and Black infants in the state remain more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday compared to white infants. These are not abstract concepts. They’re outcomes shaped by where a hospital happens to sit, or doesn’t.
Then there’s kindergarten. Sixty-five percent of Ohio’s kindergartners arrive at school not considered ready to learn. Two out of three kids, essentially starting a step behind before the first bell even rings. It’s hard not to wonder how much of that traces back to the same gaps in food access and prenatal care showing up elsewhere in the data.
Governor Mike DeWine’s proposed child tax credit, worth roughly $890 million over two years, is currently sitting in the Ohio House, waiting on committee decisions that could reshape or preserve it. Whether it survives intact remains genuinely uncertain. The Senate will draft its own version, and the two chambers have until early July to reconcile their differences with the governor’s plan.
This cannot be resolved by policy alone. Advocates like Gutierrez keep returning to a simpler point — that parents living through these shortages understand the problem better than any dashboard ever could. Whether lawmakers are listening is the question Ohio hasn’t yet answered.
