The Baja California Sur state legislature voted unanimously to demand that the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP, the state Department of Education) release months of frozen salary payments owed to staff at CENDI Tierra y Libertad childcare centers. Workers at the centers have not been paid since January 2026, leaving them without income for four consecutive months.
The formal resolution, known as an exhorto, places blame squarely on federal delays. Lawmakers said the Mexican federal government has failed to approve operational guidelines for the Early Childhood Education Expansion Program, creating a bureaucratic bottleneck that blocks fund disbursement at the state level. The centers themselves bear no responsibility for the payment freeze, legislators said.
106 Families Left Without Income
The wage freeze directly affects 106 families whose household income depends on paychecks from the CENDI centers. State lawmaker Arlene Moreno Maciel warned that this crisis is not new. She said the same payment bottleneck repeats every year, even though the funds technically exist in the budget. Neither the SEP nor the state executive branch has proposed a workaround to prevent the annual disruption.
CENDI centers, or Centros de Desarrollo Infantil, are government-run childcare facilities that serve children of low-income working mothers. In Baja California Sur, where dual-income households in cities like La Paz and Los Cabos often depend on affordable daycare to keep jobs, the staffing crisis carries consequences beyond the workers themselves.
Childcare Access at Risk
When CENDI staff go unpaid, the centers risk losing teachers and caregivers. That puts pressure on the low-income mothers who rely on subsidized childcare to remain in the workforce. Without stable staffing, parents face the choice of leaving children without supervised care or quitting their own jobs.
The unanimous vote in the BCS Congress sends a clear political message, but an exhorto is not legally binding. It functions as a formal demand rather than an enforceable order. The SEP and the federal government are under no legal obligation to comply, though ignoring a unanimous legislative resolution carries political cost.
Moreno Maciel called on both the state and federal governments to find a permanent solution rather than letting the same payment crisis recur each year. The legislature did not announce a deadline for the SEP to respond.
This story was first reported by BCS Noticias.