On child care, a search for local solutions to a national problem

By MAX SCHAEFFER  and CAROLINE PECORA

Capital News Service

Transylvania County, North Carolina, tried to solve its child care shortage by spurring the development of small in-home day care facilities — but the effort ended up creating only two of them.

Meanwhile in the mountains of western Colorado, Mesa County’s attempt to create 8,000 child care slots stalled at the 5,000 mark.

And in Iowa, the state has crafted a program for publicly funded, privately operated day care centers, a system that has alleviated — but not ended — the child care shortage in the state.

Such are the piecemeal efforts that localities and states have undertaken to address America’s child care shortage, which extends far beyond Maryland. Despite those endeavors, the overall condition of child care in the U.S. is a “dumpster fire,” according to family policy expert and author Elliot Haspel.

“The U.S. treats child care like a private market good, much more like a restaurant or a gym, than it does like a social or public piece of infrastructure, like a library or a school,”  said Haspel, author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.”

The U.S. spends $500 per child annually on early childhood care, according to 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The average annual spending for the 38 member countries in the organization is $14,436.

The result? The international development group said that in America in 2022, an average-income family with two children in day care spent nearly a third of their income paying for it. In several other developed countries, families devoted less than half as much of their income to child care.

The reason? Other countries have implemented nationwide efforts such as one in Canada that aims to reduce the cost of child care in most places to less than $10 a day.

Absent such a nationwide program in the U.S., localities, states and nonprofits are finding they can only partially address a child care shortage that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, has forced more than 100,000 American parents to stay home from work on occasion.

A rural struggle

Rural America has been hit particularly hard by the child care shortage. According to research conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, only 26% of rural parents were able to access child care within 5 miles. That compares to 39% for suburban parents.

In addition, “rural areas feel the child care workforce shortages more acutely than urban areas, making it even harder to sustain programs and maintain quality,” the Bipartisan Policy Center said in its 2023 report on the issue.

Transylvania County, a mountainous swath of North Carolina with a population estimated at 33,549 last year, is one of the rural areas where parents struggle to find child care. For that reason, the county has made addressing child care shortages a priority for almost a decade, County Executive Jaime Laughter said.

Laughter contributed to a 2015 report called “State of the Young Child in Transylvania County,” which detailed the issues and challenges that faced the county’s youngest citizens. The report emphasized the lack of both availability and affordability of child care in the county.

Searching for solutions, Transylvania County and Smart Start, a private partnership funded by North Carolina’s state government, established a program that aimed to help local residents establish more small in-home child care centers. People who want to start in-home care facilities receive coaching and help with the licensing process.

While the initiative has helped create two new small home-based options in the community, Laughter said that a few years into the effort, quality, affordable child care is even more difficult to come by in Transylvania County.

“Today, the numbers are even worse,” Laughter said. “We have fewer child care slots than we had before, roughly the same amount of children (age) 0-5 in our community. But now, the market rate in our county for monthly child care is about $1,100 a month.”

This would set the annual cost over a calendar year at $13,200. A year of in-state tuition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for the 2024-25 school year without any additional aid is $7,020.

Another part of the problem has been the regulations that make it difficult to become a licensed child care provider. Laughter said many potential applicants for home-based care centers lose enthusiasm when they become aware of the regulations surrounding it.

“Don’t get me wrong, you always want children to be in a safe environment and have standards,” Laughter said. “But I think it did help us to see how hard it is to get through that process.”

Laughter said she does not see the issue seriously improving until there is a dramatic change in public funding.

“This same conversation happened many, many years ago around education, that you know, you could only access it if you had the funds, and it became, ‘Well this is a public good, this is good for us as a society and as a country,’” Laughter said.

A partial solution

Mesa County lies on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, a geographic feature that restricts the area from many resources. The rural Colorado county is considered a child care desert — an area that lacks child care options or has a child-to-provider ratio greater than 3-to-1, according to the Center for American Progress.

Curtis Englehart, executive director at Grand Junction Economic Partnership, learned firsthand about the area’s child care shortage. The father of two young girls said it was hard to find care while he and his wife worked during the day.

“When they say Mesa County was a child care desert, I can attest to that,” he said.

Child Care 8,000, named for the number of child care spots local officials sought to create, was conceived in 2018 to address this problem. Although the effort doesn’t exist in name anymore — community organizers shortly discovered 8,000 was too lofty a goal — the mission still lives on.

Mesa County’s Partnership for Children and Families, the parent program of the Early Childhood Council, offers workforce development, funding opportunities for would-be child care providers, and a resource and referral database that connects families with nearby care. Stephanie Bivins, director of Mesa County’s Early Childhood Council, said the effort has created over 5,000 child care slots.

“I know the goal was 8,000. That’s going to take a long time,” Bivins said. “But we are seeing an increase in availability, and we’re also seeing an increase in quality, so that tells me the systems we’re putting into place are working.”

Grace Luchavez operates a Mesa County child care business from her home. Because of the program’s incentives, she earned $5,000 for taking licensing classes and receiving her license. She encourages other community members to get involved with the program if they are interested in child care, because, although the problem is improving, there is still a need for more providers.

“Last week, I got four calls from parents (asking) if I still had spots,” Luchavez said in an interview in April. “It’s already filled in. And last week, I also received a call, but it’s already full. And just today, I also received a call … and I’m already full.”

Progress in Iowa

As Mesa County works toward a solution, Iowa has been addressing the child care shortage on a statewide basis.

In fall 2020, Gov. Kim Reynolds created a task force to brainstorm solutions. The group’s work resulted in a program that provides grants for private businesses that agree to build their own child care centers. The state also provides other assistance that promotes local access to child care.

As a result, 6,740 new child care slots were created in Iowa as of late 2023.

“Child care is the catalyst that drives economic growth,” Reynolds, a Republican, said in announcing the last of a round of stipends the state made available to child care providers. “At a time when most parents work outside the home, access to reliable, safe and affordable child care allows parents to pursue their careers and contribute to the productivity and growth of our economy.”

Deann Cook, president and CEO of Iowa Women’s Foundation, said her group has been elevating the child care issue for about seven years. Post-pandemic, she said, the state became more involved with the issue and partnered with the foundation.

“The thing I think that has made Iowa really excel at this work as a whole state is the partnerships and collaborations, the public-private investment and that we keep it pretty local,” Cook said.

But the state’s efforts haven’t completely solved the child care shortage in Iowa. The 2023 Iowa Child Care Workforce Study, conducted by the Iowa Association for the Education of Young Children, suggests low wages have led to a shortage of people who want to work in child care.

“There is no child care without child care workers,” a brief of the study said.

Despite the workforce issue, the state’s grant programs have improved child care availability in the state, said Jillian Herink, executive director of the Iowa Association for the Education of Young Children.

“I believe that, exponentially, we would have lost more child care centers and more people in the workforce if the grant programs had not been implemented,” she said.

A solution in Canada?

Some child care experts argue for America’s child care system to be fixed, sweeping changes would have to be made on the federal level.

“The specifics almost matter less than the idea of putting permanent, robust amounts of public money into a system that is in desperate need of more public support,” said Haspel, the author who has written extensively about the child care shortage. “And that is what Canada has been doing.”

The United States’ northern neighbor — which had child care costs nearly as high as America’s in 2022 — has set an overall goal to make child care cost an average of $10 per day in most of the country by March 2026.

To achieve this, the Canadian government rolled out a $27 billion investment over the course of five years that began in 2021. The money goes to provincial governments, which distribute it directly to child care centers to reduce costs for families.

“More than 300,000 Ontario families are already saving thousands of dollars annually because of the Canadian government effort,” said Jenna Sudds, Canada’s minister of families, children and social development. “Affordable, high-quality child care has provided families with financial relief and is giving thousands of children the best possible start in life.”

Canada’s effort has already made significant progress, with six provinces and two territories already having met the $10 a day goal and some exceeding it, according to Morna Ballantyne, executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada.

“Family-based child care providers and the child care centers receive more than 50% of their funding from government,” Ballantyne said, “and the private revenue from parent fees has gone down dramatically.”

Canada still faces plenty of difficulties in the implementation of its new system, though.

“Canada is undergoing massive change and we’re in transition, and so there are some very good things that are happening and there’s some major, major challenges,” Ballantyne said.

The challenges include expanding access and improving the quality of child care. Improving quality has been difficult due to the lack of early childhood educators. Like in the U.S., the low pay child care workers receive contributes to that shortage.

“I would say compensation is still a huge issue,” Ballantyne said.

Ballantyne said she doesn’t see any way around the U.S. fixing its child care shortage without a large increase in government funding, although having the funds is just part of the battle.

“Public funding without a really good policy framework can end up putting you in a worse position,” Ballantyne said.