Starting next month, child care providers participating in Arkansas’s School Readiness Assistance program will see significantly reduced reimbursements from the state, with higher-quality child care centers being hit the hardest.

The Arkansas Department of Education announced on Friday a slate of changes to the program, which currently subsidizes care for 16,000 young children of low-income, working families. The changes, the Department of Education said, are a strategy to whittle the program’s waitlist, which has grown to more than 1,000.

But the cuts to provider reimbursements has early childhood education advocates worried that centers will close because of their diminished income, or will stop accepting School Readiness Assistance children because of the lower payments.

There are

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