ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – Childcare providers are still struggling after months of delays in state subsidy payments.

At one point, Lisa Scheer, the childcare director at Baden Christian Child Care, said the state owed her center $17,000 in unpaid childcare subsidies.

“They have made significant payments to providers, and they are getting caught up,” she said.

She was one of many childcare providers affected by a new $13.79 million software that the Department of Education and Secondary Education (DESE) Launched at the beginning of the year.

Glitches have caused a backlog in delayed family and provider applications and ultimately payments. Centers across the state struggled to keep their doors open. DESE promised to correct the backlog by the end of October, but childcare providers say they are still missing payments. A state dashboard says 58% of payment corrections have been reviewed. The dashboard says it was last updated on Oct. 24.

Scheer says now she is having other challenges.

“You’re not able to see who all you missed payments for or who were authorized, not authorized, so there’s now some backlog of that,” she said.

Even though the state says it is 100% caught up on family applications, Scheer says that the state is denying payment in some situations that are difficult to explain.

“She qualified with two children; she’s not had a change in her pay at all, and now a third child, she’s not qualified?” she said.

Last year, as Missouri prepared to launch the new software with DESE, the subsidy eligibility was still being handled through the Department of Social Services. New DSS e-mails obtained by FOX 2 show concerns and confusion about the new software.

In August 2023, one DSS employee wrote colleagues that the new “application will not be able to access the eligibility determination information.” That same e-mail said, “ITSD-DSS has tried to explain our belief that this information is not only important for the Child Care Authorizations but may also have a legal requirement…”

Others expressed confusion over who would be responsible for childcare eligibility: DSS or DESE.

“We’re all pretty confused over here about what is being built and what is needed from DSS,” one person wrote.

A DESE spokesperson sent us a written statement saying the concerns in these e-mails did not lead to the problems we are seeing today.

She added that in August of this year, the DSS eligibility team members were moved to DESE’s Office of Childhood to “establish a more unified subsidy team.”

Scheer says the damage has already been done.

“The money that’s been lost, the childcare centers that have closed, those providers that have been impacted negatively—it’s going to be years for them to come out of that,” she said.

DESE says it will provide a status report on the backlog on Tuesday.