Child Care Aware

CCA helped me and my family during a very stressful time. The staff there really care and take the extra time and effort to help military families. The cost of childcare without assistance is astronomical. CCA made this process as easy as possible (though the paperwork the DOD requires is very time consuming).

By the time I receive assistance I will be nearly on my THIRD semester of college. I have to call back every week in order to get a status update or else they will allow my case to sit there & collect dust. When I do call, I have to wait at least 30 minutes & sometimes I get automatically hung up on after 30 minutes. If you are working full time & or in full time school, you don't have the time to call back at least once a week to make sure these people are doing their jobs. I have been trying to get my case processed for 5 months. FIVE MONTHS. Unacceptable & all I get told when I bring this concern up is just to call back the next week. It's like this company doesn't want to assist your family (or that's how it appear in my case anyway).

We have been on the waitlist for over 4 months and each time we submit documents they come back with absolutely ridiculus questions or requests. We believe this organization embezzles money from military families while "shoranda" gets her nails done...

We have been utilizing the childcare fee assistance for about a year and a half to help cover the cost of childcare. As a military family, we are constantly being reminded of this great resource available to us, but it is so difficult to actually get access to it. There is no continuity with that system. Every time we call, we talk to a new person, and that new person has no record of the stuff the previous person went over with us. They'll email us for something, we respond to that email, then don't hear anything for months. When we call, they say, oh, no one checks that email. What? And if there's multiple things they need from us, they tell us about one thing at a time, rather than letting us know everything that's missing at one time. Most likely because they are just going through a checklist and stop when they get to the first thing on the list we don't have. They don't bother to go through the rest of the list to see if there might be something else. For example, if they need new LES, an updated address, and forms from the daycare, ask for all of that in one shot.

With the kids last daycare, we started working on fee assistance for them in Oct 23, and did not get any sort of reimbursement or backpay until the end o f April…after we had already PCS'd. Now that we've PCS'd, we are going through this process all over again. My husband called CCA again this morning to ask why the fee assistance had not kicked in yet and if there is anything else they need from us. He was told no, and that our paperwork is just being "processed". They have been processing it for over a month now. The most frustrating part of PCSing isn't packing our lives and trying find a new job every few years. It's knowing that we'll have to find a new daycare and go through this process all over again.

My most important job as a military spouse is to make sure things are good at home, that my family unit is solid, and not suffering in any way…that includes financial suffering. The lack of urgency and efficiency at CCA is impeding on my ability to do that.