Dec 21, 2022 —
Not enough workers, less child care, stalled economic recovery
Toddlers at the Canton Daycare Center. December 2022. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
There’s a shortage of North Country child care workers, and that’s making it hard for parents to return to work, says Nancy Fox, the executive director at the Canton Day Care Center. "People call and they're like, 'Well, I've been offered a job, but I can't start the job until I find child care.'"
She says for the last six months, the demand for child care is back to pre-pandemic levels, if not higher. "At first it was slowly increasing. But now there's a very high demand for child care. I'm turning away people almost daily."
Across the North Country, lots of day cares closed these past few years, and never reopened.
That’s why it’s so frustrating to Fox to have empty classrooms here, at the center. They’re currently caring for 78 kids, but they’re licensed for 110. Fox points out a classroom that could be another toddler room, if she could find more staff. Fox says she could easily fill another two classrooms with the kids on her waitlist. But, "I have been searching for the past year for a qualified staff and no one has applied."
A county and regionwide problem
The Canton Day Care center is no outlier, says Bruce Stewart, the director of the St. Lawrence County Child Care Council. Programs all over St. Lawrence County, "are having horrendous times, finding, hiring and keeping staff."
He says this area has been losing child care capacity for a decade, and lost even more during the pandemic.
They’ve had some gains lately: a new center in Brasher Falls, a handful of new home-based day cares to help replace ones that have closed.
Canton Day Care Center. December 2022. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
But it’s hard to make real progress, said Dee Burlingame, who oversees child care centers, day cares and Headstart programs in the county. Staffing has always been hard, but not to this degree, said Burlingame. "It existed, but it was manageable. And it didn't really require shutting down rooms or keeping capacity lower. Whereas since the pandemic, it's a huge issue."
Yet St. Lawrence County is doing relatively well, compared to many other North Country counties.
Lynn Sickles is the executive director of the Southern Adirondack Child Care Network, which serves Warren, Washington, and Hamilton counties. She said that in the last three years, "we saw a major loss of programs in our area, which put the child care industry here in a serious crisis."
Since 2019, they’ve lost about one thousand child care slots, a 42% decline in capacity.
And they’re also having the same staffing issues. "We have had programs, mostly centers in this area, having to close classrooms because they can't find staff to work," said Sickles.
And even efforts to start new day cares have been stalled by a lack of participants. Waren and Washington counties dedicated some of their ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds towards "family and group family startups, and being able to offer them startup funds," said Sickles, but "we're having some struggles with recruitment."
This is a statewide issue. Recently the New York State Office of Children and Family Services teamed up with the state’s Department of Labor for a webinar, trying to help centers attract and retain employees.
New programs and funds, but no one to take advantage of them
In stark contrast to those empty child care rooms is the fact that, in just the past two years, a huge amount of money has been pumped into child care on the federal and state level, through stimulus bills like CARE and the American Rescue Plan Act. COVID-19 laid bare the importance of child care to a healthy workforce, and that was recognized at a federal level.
However, even though there are lots of new grants and programs that aim to try and help get people into the child care profession, very few people are biting.
That’s no surprise, says Sickles, because "child care has traditionally been underfunded and undervalued for decades."
Not publicly funded, low wages, no benefits
Nancy Fox, the director of the Canton Day Care Center, says they don't have much to offer employees. That's especially true in a comptetive labor market. "Staff start at minimum wage. Some people are looking for benefits...we don't have health insurance and stuff like that."
Wendy Flanagan, lead teacher of the Toddler 2 room at Canton Day Care Center. December 2022. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
Fox says centers would love to pay employees more. But when they do, it’s families that pay the cost, as a center’s revenue is tutition. That’s because unlike preschool and K-12 education, child care is not publicly funded. That needs to change, say child care experts.
So why do people do this work at all? Not for money, says Fox. "It's just watching them grow and learn. It's it's a rewarding job, not financially, but it's rewarding."
Wendy Flanagan has worked at Canton Daycare for six years. She’s stuck with it because she loves the work."I love watching them grow and learning and becoming their own person. A lot of these children [at the center] are from birth, like they come from six weeks and they stay."
Fears of closing classrooms and letting down families
Nancy Fox says she’s so grateful to the staff she does have, because she knows they don’t do it for the money.
She’s also worried about losing even one teacher or assistant, because she doesn’t know how she’d replace them. "In a worst case scenario, we would have to close down the classroom if we didn't have the staff," said Fox.
That’s a very present reality, because "we are short staffed all the time," said Fox. "And right now with all the sickness [the flu, RSV, COVID-19] that we're seeing among the children and our staff, we're short staffed every day."
Child care experts say child care can’t count on goodwill and employees making sacrifices forever. The way child care is funded has to change. Until then, day cares like the one in Canton are in this situation: lots of parents looking for care as they try to return to work, and centers with empty rooms that could have children in them.
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Demand for child care is high. But many North Country day cares have empty rooms - North Country Public Radio
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