Workers Are About To Get Hit Hard By The Child Care Funding Crisis

On Saturday, Sept. 30, $39 billion in pandemic-era child care funding will expire — the bulk of those funds, some $24 billion, was dedicated to helping child care centers stay open during the chaos of the pandemic. But for many in child care, those “emergency funds” represented a rare glimpse of normalcy — for the first time in their careers, child care was being prioritized by the federal government and funded to an appropriate level.

Centers were able to stay open, increase pay for their providers, and complete necessary repairs. That funding was a lifeline for many hundreds of thousands of child care centers across the country, and a lifeline for parents, too — the need for child care is constant for working parents, and already hard to access and afford: While almost 60% of working parents rely on child care, one survey found that 43% of parents find it difficult to afford, while another 2021 survey found that 1 in 3 U.S. families struggle to find any available child care.

Child care has always been a business in which the numbers just don’t add up, says Melissa Colagrosso, a veteran of the child care industry and CEO of A Place To Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The razor-thin profit margins, high operating costs, and professional requirements for early childhood educators mean one small blip and your business could be deep in the red. Melissa spent her first 30 years running her program in debt. “There are a lot of my generation of owners and directors, especially the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) quality ones. I know all those directors. We're right in the same ballpark,” she says.

Just ask Amy Jo Hutchison, an economic justice organizer with Rattle the Windows in West Virginia, MomsRising, and the Raising Child Care Fund. Amy Joy and Melissa have traveled the state fighting for a permanent shift to funding child care based on enrollment, not attendance, and to sound the alarm on the coming impact on families.

Amy Jo and Melissa spoke to Fatherly about their work, the crisis as it comes, and what people just don’t understand about child care.

Talk to me about your experience working in the child care industry — and what you’re seeing right now.

Melissa: I've been in this industry for 28 years. The math has never added up for child care. It's always been a losing business. What happened during the stabilization funds was wonderful. It was great. It was a good, solid way to make sure child care was here when people were ready to go back to work.

We stayed open throughout the pandemic. Sometimes we had eight kids, and we had more teachers than kids, but as soon as a parent called us and said, “My job says come back to work,” we said, “Come on in.” I watched other centers that had closed down in our state and surrounding states. Some states — Ohio being one — actually closed child care centers and then regretted it, because if this child care center closes, you can't reopen just for one child, or two, or three. So there's a breaking point of, OK, when do I reopen? Do I wait for 20 people to say I'm ready to go back to work?

It really stunted [economic recovery]. Calling employees back [to child care work] was next to impossible for them because they went on unemployment, or they found other jobs.

Mostly, we served people working in the medical field. We spent a good probably three or four months with respiratory therapists at the hospitals. I had nursing homes that were paying for their employees' children to come because they were desperate — the kids' schools were closed.

[But] that's the kind of model we have to see long-term for child care — not just the government funding, but a partnership with businesses, hospitals, and corporations and everyone realizing if we want people to work, we have to have good quality child care.

What will you see when this child-care cliff hits — this funding expires?

M: What's going to happen as this cliff happens is, we're going to turn around and say to employees at child care centers, "I'm sorry, we can't pay you what we've been paying you. We can't give you the benefits we've been giving to you.” That's not going to work. There are already centers closing classrooms because they don't have staff. They might not have closed the whole center — but they’re saying, “I can't have preschool on Wednesday.”

By 2024, without any resolution, it's just going to dry up. People cannot operate on 2019 budgets. It's not going to happen. Groceries aren't the same. None of it's the same.

That you can't go back to 2019 budgets — what do you mean by that?

M: I started in child care for a purely selfish reason. I had two young children and I did not have care. I was in a child care desert. There are so many of those across the country, but particularly in rural areas. And I knew I needed to work outside of the home so we could have a better life. I said, "You know what I'll do? We'll just have to open our own. That will be my job.”

We jumped in it with both feet. Now, after over 28 years of different legislatures, different presidents, all the things that have happened, there were good years and bad years. There were grants occasionally — occasionally — depending on where our funding was going, depending on the political climate. There were loans, a lot. Over 28 years, we gathered over $100,000 in debt. We just kept going. I met the bills, but we borrowed. We got further and further in debt. A lot of large businesses will say, “Businesses always have debt. That's how you run a big business.”

A lot of corporations that file bankruptcy walk away from that debt. In all honesty, I couldn't have given my business away in 2018 and 2019, because there was too much debt. It wasn't even worth what there was in debt, and I'm not alone in that. There are a lot of my generation of owners and directors, especially the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) quality ones. If you look up the high-quality centers in West Virginia that are accredited by the NAEYC, I know all those directors. We're right in the same ballpark. It’s a work of heart. We all put our lives into it, but we cannot go back into debt.

What does that debt — the fact that so many providers just operate with it — do to the industry?

M: New centers are not opening. When you go to a bank and you say, “I want to open this business, here's my business model,” and you lay out your spreadsheet and it shows you losing money, they go, “No, I don't think we're lending you any money. No, you can't borrow and open a child care center right now, and unless you have $20,000 to $30,000 in your pocket.” Even the small facilities will spend $5,000 to $10,000 getting the equipment they need, getting playgrounds, and getting their homes safe enough. You can't start a child care business right now. The math doesn't add up.

Amy Jo, what have you seen in your work organizing in this economic landscape over the past few years?

Amy Jo: Melissa and I are part of a table of collaborators, working on these child care issues here in West Virginia. During the Build Back Better push, I worked a lot on the child tax credit. My mind is still blown that we reduced child poverty by 40%, and yet our government decided that that wasn't worthy of being extended. Most of my work, because of my lived experience, is with poor, marginalized folks in the state of West Virginia. I don't think we can honestly talk about workforce participation if we don't include child care in that.

That's really the point that we're driving home — we can't even talk about workforce or economic development if we don't include this conversation on child care. The other day, Melissa and I heard from a parent from Pocahontas County in West Virginia, which is a very, very rural county. That mom said that there is not a spot in the county for her 2-year-old. When we talk about child care, I think a lot of people, even myself — my kids are 19 and 16 — everyone's like, why does it matter to you? It matters to me because it affects our communities. I don't think people understand how much our communities rely on the child care system. If they shut down, it's going to shut the whole state down.

I worked a lot on the child tax credit. My mind is still blown that we reduced child poverty by 40%, and yet our government decided that that wasn't worthy of being extended.

During the pandemic, a lot of economists were referring to it as a “she-cession,” where so many women were functionally locked out of the workforce because they had no child care options at all — and you can't just return to work when you have a 2-year-old.

AJ: West Virginia has one of the, if not the lowest workforce participation rates: 64% of West Virginians live in a child care desert. This isn't rocket science, y'all. This is all across the state. It's not just where Melissa is in southern West Virginia. It's not where I am in northern West Virginia. It's everywhere. They’re talking about poverty rates and high unemployment rates, and when they look at their census for small counties, they have some households that were identified as being led by unmarried heads of households, and there wasn't a child care center in that entire county.

If we're really going to be honest and transparent about pushing for people to join the workforce, pushing for people to be self-sustainable, then we have to start fixing this child care problem. No one's going to work if they don't have someone that they trust to watch their kids.

And here, the cost for private child care, pre-pandemic, cost more for a family across the state of West Virginia than it did for that same family to send a child to our two biggest universities, WVU and Marshall.

I think [people] just lack a heart and empathy for the care industry across the nation, especially my generation. I'm raising kids, but I'm also helping with my elderly mother. We live in a state where there's no paid leave. We have one of the highest child poverty rates. We have huge problems with access and affordability to child care. Most child care workers are working for poverty wages and until we build up a care infrastructure, we're just going to keep getting the same results. West Virginia also has one of the most aging populations in the nation. There’s no one to take care of our elderly, and our children. What are we doing for our state's most vulnerable? People like Melissa will put their hearts and souls into this to make sure that those needs are met to the best of their abilities — but it's like fighting an uphill battle.

It sounds like there were two major changes during the pandemic: the American Rescue Plan stabilization funds, and that you were able to be paid based on enrollment, not just attendance. What changed for you when you got those stabilization funds from the American Rescue Plan?

M: Flat out, the quality of care the children received improved. We are a NAEYC accredited center, so I consider us high quality, but we were able to improve our physical environment. We did repairs that had been needed for a long time — new HVAC systems, and new fencing. We expanded our playground and added additional equipment. The staff got extra help.

If we're really going to be honest and transparent about pushing for people to join the workforce, pushing for people to be self-sustainable, then we have to start fixing this child care problem. No one's going to work if they don't have someone that they trust to watch their kids.

I have a lot of children with special needs. We live in an area that suffered through the opioid crisis, and we have a lot of children in foster care and kids who were born with exposure to drugs. Those children need extra help.

Now, the typical child care budget is going to run real close. You got to be on those [child-to-teacher] ratios. You can't afford extra teachers. So providing those children with extra support in the classroom helped the stress levels of my staff. My staff was able to do better teaching with all the children, not just the children with special needs. All of them received a better early childhood education, more relationship building, more exposure to what they needed, and more individualized instruction. So I got a less stressed staff, less stressed teachers, lower [kid-to-teacher] ratios. A better physical environment, which means better quality care, better early childhood education experiences for all of the children.

The cliff is looming — just days away — but you say the cliff's already here. What will happen when we officially fly off of it?

M: The first thing that'll go will be the quality. The quality is not there, and it's going to get worse, because everyone that's in this is in it for the heart. If you're working, owning, and you're in charge of child care, if you’re a home provider, you're doing it because you love children. So you're going to try to still stay there for your family. [Folks are] going to try to make it work, but you got to cut the budget. So you start worrying about — “Well, maybe one less teacher, maybe I won't do that repair that needs to be done. I'll get my husband to half-fix it.”

We've already seen some centers closing classrooms: “I can have this family for three days and this family for three days.” Well, that’s not good for children. Children need continuity of care. They need regular caregivers, regular teachers, regular exposure to their friends, and to not be juggled between different scenarios.

AJ: A lot of the providers that used those stabilization funds provided subsidies for their child care staff's children. Providers were able to help their staff with things that they normally weren’t able to help them with. Staff retention and turnover, I think, is always a huge issue when it comes to child care, but we also devalue that.

Child care workers are development specialists. They're highly trained. They have lesson plans, they have a curriculum. They're working on all aspects of development, socioemotional, physical, mental, all of it.

For whatever reason, we're still in that 1950s, glorified-babysitter mentality when it comes to child care providers. I don't think the general public realizes how specialized the training has to be for these folks to sign on for that. Whenever we start removing these incentives that were keeping them there, my fear is that we’re going to have centers with bare-bones staff. No one’s going to be able to do anything.

I imagine that once these centers start closing, you'll start to see it hit your economy as well, and workers in general.

M: I'm certain of that. I actually had a senator say that to us, “What did they do before the pandemic?” There's still this mentality that this is a women's issue, and people just stay home and take care of their babies. He said, "Why aren't the grandparents doing this?" Society has changed. If there are two adults in the home, they both need to work in most cases.

Children need continuity of care. They need regular caregivers, regular teachers, regular exposure to their friends, and to not be juggled between different scenarios.

Maybe they find a way to have one stay home and one work, but there are an awful lot of single-parent families and single dads. I'm old-school. I did this 28 years ago. I mostly only saw single moms. A single dad was a rarity, and now I have as many single dads as moms. It’s a societal issue. It's not even just a parents’ issue anymore.

AJ: There's such a disconnect between the state-level work and the national work. No one will ever be able to convince me that our senators — Manchin and Capito — haven't read about our work in the news. I find that impossible to believe.

What can we do to bridge that huge divide? To get the attention of our senators back here into the state so they can talk to us and have conversations with us? So they listen to parents, especially when so many of them say their purpose is being a champion for women and children?

M: There is a bill right now at the federal level, the childcare stabilization fund. It would only be another bandaid, but it's a five-year package. We're waiting for it to come up for a vote. It has not made it to the Senate or House floor, but both of them always end up stuck in finance, and of course, with the budget argument we're having right now, there’s not a lot of hope. But we still have to keep on pushing forward.

AJ: Melissa had a town hall and she had a man there who works at the local hospital. He asked, “Do you understand what it's like to run a hospital and not be able to have employees because there's no child care?” We’ve talked to a lot of different small businesses across the state who have stood up and said, “We absolutely support child care, because it's crucial for our livelihood.”

For whatever reason, we're still in that 1950s, glorified-babysitter mentality when it comes to child care providers. I don't think the general public realizes how specialized the training has to be for these folks to sign on for that.

People think the child care cliff won’t affect them. It will, though. If you're working a retail job, for instance, and I'm your co-worker, and I don't have child care and have to continuously call off, that is going to affect you — you're going to be the one responsible for picking up everything that I had to drop.

How does this affect all of us — regardless of age and parental status?

We have so many kids in our foster system that there was actually an investigation done by the Department of Justice a couple of years ago. We are literally begging people to become foster parents, but child care is one of those supports that can't be offered.

How is it feasible for someone to bring a child into their home when they don't have the support that will allow them to work and do that at the same time? All of the most vulnerable populations are the ones that are always the hardest hit.

M: I had a legislator say to me one time, "Well, I don't think it's the government's job to take care of people's children.”

People think the child care cliff won’t affect them. It will, though. If you're working a retail job, for instance, and I'm your co-worker, and I don't have child care and have to continuously call off, that is going to affect you.

I said, "You know what? It'll be your job to take care of them when they're in your prisons, so decide which one you want to spend money on. If you spend money on early childhood, we have a good chance of spending less on our prisons. It will be your job if you keep neglecting early childhood and young families and they're not working because they don't have child care, so you're going to take care of them. Your food stamps are going to be higher, everything's going to be higher. Let's invest in child care. Give people the chance to work and be proud, be part of society."

I know someone who worked for a government-funded program with kids and loved her job but eventually had to leave it because the government cut the funding for this program, and their pay, by half. This was a job they did not want to leave and due to economic conditions, was basically forced to.

M: You know we've got our things out of order when we're saying you can make more money working at a [convenience store like] Sheetz than you can taking care of babies — being a brain builder for kids. These workers are influencing our future forever, but they're enticed to go to Sheetz and work behind the counter, even though that's not what they want to do, because it pays better and it has college tuition assistance and some benefits.

AJ: We know that the first 1,000 days of a child's life are the most important of their lives when it comes to development, and yet we're putting no quality, no emphasis on that at all, as a society.

M: This is a societal responsibility. It's not about raising other people's kids. It really isn't. If you want to make that argument, you can make that about public schools. Why do we do public school? Because we know kids are the future. We hope that we can get at least 75% of these kids to be contributing adults. I think these first 1,000 days are more important than the senior year of high school. I really do.