By Jennifer Fernandez
BURLINGTON — Omira Thompson sat on the floor Wednesday feeding lunch to two of the boys in her infant classroom at First Presbyterian Child Development Center.
One made a face, then tried to wipe out his mouth with his bib, which made Thompson laugh. “Guess he doesn’t like pear,” she said.
Thompson, the lead teacher for the infant classroom, is one of 32 teachers at the five-star rated child care facility, which serves about 90 children — from infants through age 6.
Across North Carolina, child care centers such as First Presbyterian’s will be faced with some difficult decisions in the coming months as the last of federal pandemic aid dries up at the end of June. The money, which Congress first allocated in 2020 during the early, confusing days of the pandemic, helped centers pay teachers more through raises or bonuses; some were even able to provide benefits — often for the first time. The grants were renewed in 2021 and again last year.
If centers can’t maintain that level of pay, teachers may leave to make more money at places like Target or Starbucks, child care advocates say.
A survey of child care centers released last week shows that without that extra government funding, centers expect to lose teachers, close classrooms, raise tuition and fees or a combination of those measures. More than 1,500 child care facilities in North Carolina could close, according to the survey commissioned by the North Carolina Child Care Resource & Referral Council.
“The work that we do is significant. We deserve the respect. We deserve a salary that is commensurate with what we do,” said Davina Boldin-Woods, director of First Presbyterian Child Development Center. “But more importantly, our children deserve it.”
The ‘cliff’
Pandemic aid from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act has helped child care providers boost pay and benefits, and it has subsidized the cost of child care for many families.
Last year, legislators approved using $150 million in discretionary funding from federal pandemic aid to continue the stabilization grants.
The so-called funding cliff, first expected in December 2023, is now expected to happen in June when that funding ends.
Child care providers, along with legislators from both parties, state officials and the state Chamber of Commerce, unsuccessfully petitioned the General Assembly to include $300 million in the state budget last year to cover the loss of the federal pandemic aid to help providers maintain raises or bonuses for staff for another year.
“As long as I’ve been in the business, early education professionals have wrestled with the shortage of child care workers and a marketplace competing for teachers with better pay and benefits,” Andrew H. “Sandy” Weathersbee, owner of Providence Preparatory School in Charlotte, told the N.C. General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Oversight committee on Health and Human Services on Tuesday.
“However, we’ve not been able to find a solution for the problem because it’s bigger than we are,” he said, “and we need help.”
Survey findings
A February survey of North Carolina child care providers found:
- 29 percent of all providers (center-based/family based) expect to close.
- 52 percent have already increased tuition.
- 58 percent said they plan to increase fees after June.
- 58 percent have already cut expenses in anticipation of the grants expiring, including reductions in:
- food costs (22 percent)
- teacher hours (16 percent)
- other staff hours (15 percent)
- number of other staff (14 percent)
- transportation costs (13 percent)
- 41 percent of center-based programs expect to close or combine classrooms when the grants sunset.
Source: North Carolina Child Care Resource & Referral Council
Effects on workforce
Child care plays a crucial role in the economy. Parents can’t work if they have nowhere to send their children.
A different survey last year of registered North Carolina voters showed that 26 percent of parents with children younger than 5 left the workforce because they couldn’t find affordable child care.
Six in 10 of those same workers reported missing work because of a problem with child care, according to results of the phone and online survey of 500 people commissioned by the NC Chamber Foundation.
Three in 10 did not pursue job training or continuing education due to a lack of affordable child care, and 37 percent refused a job opportunity, promotion or job change because it would increase child care expenses.
“Affordable, quality child care supports working parents on the job, allows businesses to recruit and retain talent, and helps North Carolina children develop skills for success in school and life,” Meredith Archie, president of the NC Chamber Foundation, said in a statement when their survey results were released. “The health of North Carolina’s economy is directly tied to the strength of its workforce. This survey shows that North Carolinians understand the critical role of child care and want it to be a top priority for the state.”
The chamber found that across the political spectrum, majorities of people wanted the state to increase funding to make affordable child care more accessible to workers.
A long-term study of children in Michigan who received quality early childhood care found they were more likely as adults to make a living wage and own a home compared with peers who did not receive that care.
“It’s not a child care issue. It’s not a parent issue. It’s an economic issue,” Boldin-Woods said. “So the economy, it literally doesn’t work unless early education and child care work.”
Educators, not babysitters
The first few years are a crucial time for children, whose brains are growing at nearly a million neural connections per second, according to Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child.
“The environment of every child’s first three years provides the foundation for the rest of their life,” Weathersbee said. “In other words, the cake is baked by the time a child turns 3 years old.”
Boldin-Woods said children spend anywhere from eight to 10 hours a day in an early education program “discovering and learning the things that are going to set them on the path to success.”
“I don’t think people see the significance of the work that is done, or understand the long-standing impact and the wide-ranging impact that early education … can have,” she said.
Researchers from across the globe have studied the effects of high-quality child care and education, according to the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska. Information from more than 150 scientific studies shows that good care can have major impacts, short term and long term, on everything from cognition and social-emotional development to school progress and earnings. It can also reduce antisocial behavior, lower welfare participation and even reduce trouble with the law.
Research also shows how important brain development is to health outcomes later in life.
A landmark North Carolina study, the Abecedarian Project, followed for decades children from low-income families who received high-quality child care. It found that children who received better care ended up healthier as adults, with lower rates of heart disease and diabetes and better mental health.
Finding solutions
“There is creative strategy going on,” said Janet Singerman, president and chief executive officer of Child Care Resources Inc. and co-leader of the Child Care Resources & Referral Council.
Kentucky legislators passed a bill in 2022 that set aside $15 million to create a public/private partnership between employers and the state to help families pay for high-quality child care.
States from Montana to Maine are increasing eligibility for child care subsidy funding through the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant program, according to a Feb. 21 article by the Center for American Progress.
Several states are pouring money into stabilizing the child care system: California is investing $600 million and Minnesota $316 million to increase pay for child care workers.
In the North Carolina budget passed last year, legislators addressed child care in several ways, such as $525,000 to increase the capacity of family child care homes and supporting a $900,000 pilot program that shares costs among families, the state and the provider.
The budget also included an increase in child care subsidies, mostly federal money used to help offset the cost to parents, although the increase was based on older market data.
The reimbursement covers 30 percent to 50 percent of the cost of a classroom slot, said Ariel Ford, who runs the Division of Child Development and Early Education for the state Department of Health and Human Services. But you can’t operate a business at 50 percent of the cost, she told lawmakers.
Ford said legislators should again look at increasing subsidies when the General Assembly reconvenes later this month.
“What we know is that the child care subsidy as we have it now is based on what our local families can afford to pay. But that’s not really what it costs,” Ford told the committee during her testimony Tuesday. “What that means … is that those wages just keep getting pushed down for child care because they can’t raise the cost anymore for families to afford it, which means they can’t pay any more for teachers to be in the classroom.”
Weathersbee suggested several ways local governments and businesses could work together to fix the problem, from employer tuition sharing and tuition discounts for early educators to a tax credit for tenured staff and tax incentives for employees offering certain benefits to child care employees.
Closures already happening
Based on response to the Child Care Resource & Referral Council survey, the expected closures would leave about 92,000 children without a child care home. That’s on top of the thousands of children who have already lost a slot as hundreds of facilities closed in the past year alone.
According to state data, the number of licensed facilities dropped from 5,500 in February 2023 to 5,166 in February this year. Enrollment during that period fell from 220,303 to 214,088. There are also 386 fewer teachers.
Many of the providers that plan to stay open said they’ll have to increase tuition and fees and expect to lose staff, forcing them to combine or close classrooms, reduce the number of children they serve or close entirely.
“There is no question we need to increase investment in child care across this nation. It is an underfinanced system,” Singerman said.
She called the survey responses “sobering.”
“If we care about what’s happening to our children, and our parents in the workforce … then child care is an issue that we should all have a stake in,” Singerman said.
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