West Virginia turns to tech to implement a new child care payment model
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The state is grappling with unemployment as a result of a child care shortage. A data platform is helping fill those gaps and keep more West Virginians in the workforce.
Nationwide, 4.2 million U.S. children lack access to care in their community, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and helping families find available and affordable child care slots is an increasing priority for state lawmakers across the U.S. In West Virginia, officials are exploring an emerging model to increase child care access, and tech is helping drive the mission.
About 64% of West Virginians live in a child care desert, which is defined as an area with more than 50 children under five years old that has no child care providers or so few that the number of children in need of care is three times the number of available slots, Will Miller, state director of the West Virginia Small Business Development Center, said in an email to Route Fifty.
A scarcity of child care often drives family members to choose between staying employed or leaving the workforce to care for their children amid skyrocketing prices. Indeed, more than 400,000 women across the nation left the workforce within the first half of 2025, which researchers say is the largest decline in more than 40 years. And in 2024, the national average price of child care was $13,128, up from $11,582 in 2023, according to Child Care Aware of America.
“The shortage of childcare is a workforce participation issue,” Miller explained. “This is a serious concern for the state, which is already last in the nation when it comes to workforce participation.”
To address the child care shortage and help more people remain employed, West Virginia is exploring a new approach to paying for child care that splits the cost among parents, employers and the state government. Payments are managed and automatically billed through a platform from the child care solutions provider Wonderschool, helping reduce paper-based processes and enabling data insights for policymakers.
West Virginia launched a pilot program in eight counties this summer to implement the “tri-share model,” under which a business offers financial support toward an employee’s monthly child care cost that the state matches based on the employer’s contribution and their employee’s household income, Miller explained. Families then pay the remaining balance to ensure the child care provider receives their full payment.
Businesses and families can enroll into the platform and verify their income and qualifications for the program within minutes. The Wonderschool system then compiles their payments with the government’s contribution on a monthly basis to be sent to the child care provider, explained Marcus Keech, who leads Wonderschool’s partnerships.
The platform offers data insights that policymakers can leverage to inform further efforts to expand child care options in the state, Keech said. For instance, the platform collects data like average provider cost or average amount a business invests in the cost-sharing model.
Those insights can guide policymakers to identify and target investments in areas of the state where child care shortages are particularly challenging for families, he explained. Such insights are particularly valuable as the program could end in August unless lawmakers continue to fund it.
As of this week, eighteen companies across the state have enrolled in the tri-share model and 30 child care providers have joined the effort, Miller said. That translates to nearly 100 children enrolled in child care who may not have been otherwise, helping dozens of caregivers remain in West Virginia’s workforce.
“Our leadership recognizes that if we want to raise the number of people in the workforce, we have to have affordable childcare options for working parents,” Miller said.