Jen Scales was less than six months pregnant when she began looking for day care for her second son in 2017. Finding high-quality care for her older son had been a challenge, and she wanted to start the process early this time around.
The first center she called had a one- to two-year waitlist. The next three were fully booked, too. It was her fifth attempt before she finally found a child care center in Southeast Portland that said it would have space to take her son by his first birthday. She had to reduce her work hours for eight months before her son, Rhys Myers, was finally able to enroll.
Her experience isn’t unique. Even in the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, child care slots across Oregon were scarce. The pandemic has only exacerbated those issues as in-home providers and child care centers have closed, in some cases for good.
“Child care is very competitive in the Portland area and as a new parent it’s tough to navigate,” Scales said. “We don’t have a good system for connecting families with affordable and convenient options for child care.”
Oregon State University researchers this week released a study that found all 36 counties in the state were “child care deserts” for infants and toddlers up to age 2 before the pandemic in March 2020, meaning the community could accommodate less than 33% of children that age. Nearly 70% of Oregon counties were considered child care deserts for preschool-age children.
In rural Harney and Lake counties, only 10% of children 5 and younger had access to a state-regulated program before the pandemic, according to the study. The situation was somewhat better in the Portland area, but even in Multnomah County only 30% of children 5 and younger had access to state-regulated child care programs in March 2020.
And the slots that are available are out of reach for many parents.
Less than a quarter of child care slots across the state are publicly funded, according to the study, creating a significant barrier for families who can’t afford pricey child care costs. Portland parent Lydia Gray-Holifield said putting her 2-year-old daughter in day care costs $1,200 a month.
“I’m having to look at which bills I can put off to pay for child care,” Gray-Holifield said.
Oregon had started to make modest gains in improving access to child care before the pandemic, adding 588 child care slots statewide from 2018 to 2020 with increased public funding, according to the study.
But the pandemic appears to have wiped out those gains.
Approximately 3,700 state-regulated child care programs were operating in Oregon as of April, about 500 fewer programs than a year earlier, according to the Oregon Early Learning Division.
The state now requires providers to go through an emergency approval process and adhere to COVID-19 safety regulations to operate during the pandemic. It’s possible some programs could reopen as those requirements ease and more families feel comfortable sending their children back to day care.
Alyssa Chatterjee, acting director of the Early Learning Division, said the fallout from the pandemic could have been much worse for the state’s child care system, but Oregon used millions of dollars in state and federal relief funds to help struggling providers. The state will soon launch a grant program to try to help providers that closed within the last year reopen, Chatterjee said.
“Being able to provide a lot of direct assistance is why we didn’t see an even more dramatic loss of care,” Chatterjee said. “But there is a lot of rebuilding to do.”
PERMANENT CLOSURES
The true harm done to Oregon’s child care system might not be fully known for months, but the permanent loss of any significant number of day care slots could put a massive strain on families and make it more difficult for parents, especially women, to return to the workforce as the pandemic recedes.
In Southeast Portland, the city’s largest preschool, Childswork Learning Center, has been navigating an uncertain future since last year when St. Stephen Catholic Church informed the preschool it would have to vacate the space it has rented from the parish since 2006.
Mary Beth Kierstead, the school’s education director, said it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to improve the facility, including creating a new play area. But after a neighbor complained about parking availability in 2019, city officials told the church and school that they had to convert the play space back to parking.
Despite the ongoing dispute, Kierstead said school officials were shocked that the church had decided to force them out, especially during a pandemic. Gretchen Barnes, an attorney representing the parish, said it has plans for the school’s space more directly connected to its core ministry.
Childswork has been looking for a new facility for nearly a year, but hasn’t been able to find an affordable option with enough space to accommodate 13 classrooms and a playground. It has considered paying more to rent a smaller space at another church, but Kierstead said that would force it to turn away many of the 250 students that rely on Childswork for care.
Scales sends her two sons to Childswork and said she has been impressed by the individualized support the center provides to her two boys. But fearing she wouldn’t have time to find a new program if she waited for the school to announce its plans, Scales rushed to enroll both her kids in a nearby Montessori school for the fall.
Other Childswork parents who haven’t yet sought out new programs could be left with few options.
“We’re going to be downsizing, and we’re going to have to go through the process of figuring out what families we’re going to be able to offer space to and what staff members we can keep on,” Kierstead said. “It’s devastating.”
Another Portland preschool, the Opal School located at the Portland Children’s Museum, will close permanently at the end of June due to financial hardship brought on by the pandemic. The school served 37 preschoolers. The Nike Child Development Program, a subsidized day care program for employees at the company’s world headquarters near Beaverton, closed last year. That program served 500 families.
Briana Weber, executive director of Wild Lilac Child Development Community, a Southeast Portland early learning center, said she has heard about at least five other nearby facilities that have closed. She said Wild Lilac reached a point last year where it only had enough money to pay one more month of rent and payroll but managed to stay afloat thanks to a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program and grants from the state Early Learning Division.
The center is now caring for 75 children a day, and Weber expects to hit a full capacity of 89 by the fall.
That won’t come close to meeting demand. Weber said there are currently 160 families on Wild Lilac’s waitlist.
“The need for child care, any kind of child care, is so high right now,” Weber said. “I’m turning people away and the conversations I’m having with families are really hard.”
Angie Garcia, the owner of Escuela Viva Community School, a preschool with locations in Southeast and North Portland, said she had to dip into savings to keep the school open over the last year. Garcia said some parents haven’t felt comfortable putting their children back in day care due to concerns about the pandemic, but she expects that to soon change and is preparing to care for 130 children per day this fall.
But to return to full capacity, Garcia said the school needs to hire at least four new staff members, and that has proven a challenge.
She raised hourly wages last year but said child care workers put in long hours for little pay in an environment that has only become more stressful during the pandemic. She said few people are now looking for child care jobs, and some have left the industry entirely over the last year.
“There is no one that is looking for a job in this field and is qualified for a job in this field,” Garcia said. “We’re in this place where families want to come back to care and we may not have enough staff to meet the need.”
PUBLIC INVESTMENT
The pandemic has depleted Portland’s child care offerings at a time when Multnomah County is in the process of trying to launch Preschool for All, an initiative passed by voters last fall that aims to provide free universal preschool to Multnomah County families by 2030. The program would be paid for with a tax on high earners.
Preschool For All Director Leslee Barnes said the program will be phased-in over time and will serve just 500 children when it launches in September 2022. Given the slow rollout, she said the county is confident it will be able to find enough providers to launch next year.
However, the program will need a much larger base of providers to meet demand as it ramps up over time. Barnes said there continues to be a need for more investment in the child care system.
The rollout of state programs, like the Student Success Act and Preschool Promise, aim to help low-income Oregonians access child care. The pandemic has put investment in child care front-and-center in debates at the federal level as well. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill Wednesday that would increase child care funding to states to $10 billion per year and create a new $5 billion per year grant to increase child care capacity.
Barnes said Preschool for All is also hoping to work to ease barriers for child care programs by providing livable wages and professional development to participating providers and advocating for policies that will make it easier for providers to find affordable classroom space.
“How does our community value early learning in a systemwide way?” Barnes said. “How do we collaborate with schools? How do we talk to developers? How do we remove barriers? Long-term the problems that were there even before the pandemic will still be there if we don’t work collaboratively to remove barriers.”
-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg
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