Child Care Dilemma Outlined at Chamber

Details

Category: News

Created on Tuesday, 15 October 2024 14:38

Hits: 101

By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Sitka’s child care deficiencies and some possible ways to address them were laid out Wednesday by a local panel, in the first of a series of presentations on the topic hosted by the Chamber of Commerce this fall.
    It’s a big challenge for parents to find care for their kids who are too young to go to kindergarten, said Lauren Wild, a panelist who is an assistant professor at UAS and a parent of a young child.
    “The wait lists are a couple years long, and often they don’t get in until the kid’s already in kindergarten. There’s a lot of non-licensed home care shuffling that happens,” Wild said.
    She stressed the importance of pre-kindergarten development, and noted the lack of child care options in town.
    “The environment that children are in from birth to five is crucial in setting them up for successful development for the rest of their lives. In Sitka, access to child care and early childhood education has dwindled in the past 10 to 15 years since we’ve lost places like SEARHC. Right now we have one option for licensed care for infants in Sitka, and that’s Betty Eliason, and there’s approximately eight to 10 spots. We have approximately 120 infant-age children in Sitka,” Wild said. “... For toddlers, we have two options. We have Betty Eliason and the SJ Child Care Center, and together, they have about 16 to 18 toddlers, with about 120 toddlers in Sitka as well. That gives us about 14 percent coverage. These numbers are astoundingly low.”
    Around the state, she added, there’s about 24 percent coverage for child care, with figures nationally ranging from about a third to half of pre-K kids having access to care outside the home.
    The difficulty of raising kids, Wild said, is a major barrier to young families.
    “Many young people are leaving Sitka if they want to have a family, because they can’t access child care here or afford to raise a family. Our school district is feeling this crisis in that they’re experiencing really high rates of children entering kindergarten that are not kindergarten-ready,” she said.
    The financial burden of operating a child care center in Sitka is immense, Betty Eliason Child Care Center board president Joel Markis told the Chamber. The nonprofit, which provides the only infant care available in town, operates in the red at the moment.
    “Some of the realities of operating a child care center in Sitka -- we have a fixed operating cost of over $10,000 a month, and so those happen regardless of enrollment, and they cover things like utilities, insurance, repairs and maintenance and a modest amount of supplies necessary to operate the center,” Markis said. “Those are big numbers; those are hard operating costs. Currently the center’s operating in the red; we are not solvent at this moment. We are buoyed up by COVID relief money and by external grant funding, but we are very aware of the glide slope that our current financial situation has us in. And so, you know, if we continue to struggle to meet those enrollment targets, this model will not be sustainable.”
    He appreciated assistance received from Sitka Tribe of Alaska to keep Betty Eliason running, but noted that the center has trouble keeping staff.
    “We struggle to retain and recruit staff, and because of some of those challenges, we’re struggling to meet our enrollment targets and our enrollment goals at the center,” he said. “We’ve worked hard to try to increase staff benefits, we’ve increased salaries, we’ve developed a health and wellness stipend of $200 a month… There’s professional development opportunities, and we have a hiring bonus.”
    The center got started in 1981 as the Sitka Daycare Center, and the current Lincoln Street building was raised with $600,000 in grant funds from the city, Markis said. The center has about 40 students now, but is licensed for 99 and has a staff of eight.
    Markis, who is a parent of three young kids, would like to see further help from the city to keep Betty Eliason Child Care Center operating as it should.
    “I would love to have a rent-free space where some of the burdens of payroll and some of these other challenges were taken care of for us, and we didn’t have to seek out external vendors in order to accomplish those things,” he said.
    Ellen Hughes, assistant director of the center, said in the past there were more child care providers in town, though the desire for infant and toddler care has risen to its current level only in recent decades.
    “The focus was more preschool mindset. Infant, toddler care was there, but it wasn’t real prominent. The building itself, the child care center itself, was not built with infants in mind at all… There were a lot of home preschools and home child cares that are not in existence now. So it’s really tight now, as compared to when there were, I mean, it was pretty much Betty Eliason and then SJ at the very onset, and then SEARHC came on board, and that was a huge help,” Hughes said.
    Another panelist, Becky Workman, discussed the history of the now-defunct SEARHC child care center, which started out as a program to help employees before branching out. That child care program, Workman said, received subsidies from the hospital, but also took tuition to make ends meet.
    “SEARHC took care of the building. They took the electricity, they took care of the heat, they maintained the building. We paid the staff, and SEARHC provided benefits and stuff,” Workman said. She was the director of the center for years before it closed in 2013.
    Workman emphasized the importance of the community’s working to raise kids together.
    “It’s all of our responsibility, not just two people... I don’t have to look for child care, but if I did, I wouldn’t be able to work,” she said.
    One of the key reasons SEARHC supported such a program was to retain workforce, said Frank Sutton, former SEARHC chief operating officer who was in attendance at the meeting.
    “We had any number of people that I recall turning us down because, ‘I don’t have child care, I can’t do it.’ And that was... our driving force, my driving force, for fighting the internal battle, you know, to get it going,” Sutton recalled. “And it wasn’t easy, even internally within SEARHC administration. It was not popular to go that direction.”
    Kari Sagel, a retired school district librarian and member of Sitka’s Early Childhood Coalition, chaired the panel discussion.
    A week ago at a special meeting, the Sitka School Board voted in favor of a proposal to establish a school district pre-K program with a $1,000 monthly tuition. Following the vote, the district is moving forward with that plan.
    Annette Evans, a panelist who works as the therapeutic preschool manager at Sitka Counseling, highlighted the role of Sitka Tribe of Alaska in seeking ways to train people to work in child care.
    “Where the federal government hasn’t been supporting early child care, early education, zero to five, they’ve passed that off to the state, and where the state hasn’t been helping, our tribes are… Something STA is doing is instead of going through the state licensing office, they’re working with families to be able to do relative-care in home,” Evans said.
    Evans cited work done in Valdez in 2023, in which the city dedicated $880,000 to study possibilities for a child care center, and Anchorage, where the city put marijuana tax dollars into child care.
    Work on that front also has taken place in Juneau, she said.
    “Providers in Juneau are able to submit their numbers that are enrolled; they submit the number of staff that they have, and then per child, and they get a certain amount of money, and per staff, they get a certain amount of money. That money for children is going to the program, and the money for the staff is going directly towards workforce, recruiting and retaining and wages,” Evans said.
    Because the lack of child care often causes a parent to remain at home, she added, an economic price is paid as new parents leave their jobs.
    At the core of the issue, Lauren Wild said, is what she sees as a broken economic model for how child care operates.
    “The best and most comprehensive way to address this crisis is to find ways to increase the availability and accessibility of care for children birth-to-five in Sitka... This can happen in a center-based child care center, like we’ve been hearing about with Betty Eliason or SEARHC or a preschool system. This could also happen in a home-based care environment as well. The child care industry nationwide is that of a failed business model. So why are we here? This business model… is a fee-for-services model.”
    She likened child care to “a public sector industry operating in the private sector, or trying to, and this is because our tax dollars that pay for education and care of children starting at age five, do not pay; they leave out that population of birth to five.”