Jamie Potter has welcomed nearly 40 children into her home in the past decade. Some were long-term foster placements, others were emergency or short-term stays. She and her husband focus on giving these kids a sense of stability and safety.
In her home, there are no iPads or Netflix accounts. Instead, there are stacks of books, like "Goodnight Moon," used to bridge developmental gaps for children who arrive only knowing a few words. To Potter, fostering is a lifelong ministry.
“I'm passionate about children and just focusing on one child at a time, just helping whatever child can come into our home for the time period that's given,” said Potter, who fostered four infants and toddlers for long-term stays.
But Potter, who owns a small business with her husband and has three biological children, said her calling is at a standstill. She recently made the difficult decision to turn down an infant she had already fallen in love with while providing short-term care. The reason was the lack of a child care voucher.
Potter’s struggle is a symptom of what state officials call a “funding cliff.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Indiana used more than $1 billion in federal aid to aggressively expand its early learning system, supporting nearly 70,000 children in 2023. But when that money dried up in late 2024, the state stopped giving new vouchers to low-income families and established a waitlist. More than 33,000 families were waiting as of last December.
Foster families, who are also eligible for the voucher, are now facing that waitlist.
That service would be missed across Indiana, where around 3,950 children under 5 are in an out-of-home placement as of early March. That includes children in group homes and in kinship care with families.
For years, Potter said, the state vouchers funded by the Child Care and Development Fund, or CCDF, were a reliable way to help her cover the cost of child care.
“We said ‘yes’ to a four-year-old boy, and that day was the first day that CCDF got cut off for foster families,” Potter said of the waitlist. “I still applied to CCDF, just because I personally wanted to know how long it would take or if it would get funded. So during that time, we paid for child care, which was over the amount of the [daily payment rate], plus all the care that was needed for the child.”
She never received a voucher.
A 2025 state law attempted to safeguard the foster care system by requiring 200 vouchers be set aside for foster families. But advocates say foster parents feel shut out as most sit on the massive waitlist.
Shannon Schumacher, president and CEO of The Villages of Indiana, one of the state’s largest foster care and child welfare organizations, said the strain is being felt everywhere. Seven of its "rock solid" families stopped accepting small children because they can’t afford to pay for child care.
“Since the start of the waitlist … they will often say ‘no’ to those placements because they can't get those vouchers,” Schumacher said, adding that the refusal can leave agencies and the state scrambling for safe placements.
“We know that safety is a real concern around this limited access to child care for families,” she said.
The cost of infant care in Indiana is $1,206 per month, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. Foster families get a $28 per day base rate to take an infant.
Before the voucher crisis, Schumacher said, her agency could call foster families when there was an emergency placement of a child under 4. A voucher would be quickly approved after a family requested it.
In response to the waitlist, The Villages of Indiana turned to philanthropy to prevent the system's collapse. In 2025, the agency paid out $80,000 just to have foster parents take children into their homes and help them pay for child care, Schumacher said.
State agencies say they are helping
While families like the Potters face empty nurseries, state officials maintain they are navigating the same financial constraints that have crippled the voucher program.
The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration said there was no pause on foster family enrollment when the waitlist was reinstated. The department provided vouchers to foster families as they became available, deputy chief of staff Marcus J. Barlow wrote in a March 2 email.
“We currently have 124 foster children placed with licensed foster families receiving vouchers,” Barlow wrote. “We pull additional children from the waiting list (in the order they applied) to try to maintain as close to 200 slots as possible.
“We pull families every 4 weeks and they are issued a 16-week voucher — that is renewed if the child is still in foster care.”
The legislation for the 200 CCDF vouchers for licensed foster parents is being followed, said Ron Green, Indiana Department of Child Services director of communications.
"Though there is a waiting list for the vouchers, foster families are encouraged to apply,” Green wrote in an email.
Even as some families receive a voucher, it’s a dramatic decrease from the recent past. In December 2025, only 26 vouchers for infants were in use, according to a state report, compared to November 2024, before the waitlist began, when 3,673 infants received support.
New funds may come too late
There could be additional money for the voucher program. The Indiana General Assembly recently passed Senate Enrolled Act 4, which makes the CCDF vouchers an eligible recipient of the state's Financial Responsibility and Opportunity Growth Fund — a roughly $300 million reserve previously restricted to state prisons, Medicaid and the Department of Child Services.
The Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning will now have to compete with those other state agencies for a share of these dollars, subject to approval by the Indiana State Budget Agency.
But for Potter, these legislative maneuvers feel distant from the immediate reality of her empty nursery. She recently turned down a four-week-old baby she had fallen in love with while providing short-term respite care.
The reason was the lack of a child care voucher.
Potter worries that without funding to provide child care assistance, the pool of who can afford to be a foster parent will shrink. Fostering, she said, could be limited to couples where one parent can remain at home.
“This is going to create a bigger crisis by eliminating working parents who need CCDF or child care to open up their home to children in need,” she said.
Potter’s foster license is up for renewal in November.
