Child Care Called Key to City's Health

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Category: News

Created on Friday, 01 November 2024 14:20

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    In the second program in a series on Sitka’s child care needs, the director of a regional association on early education spoke to the Chamber of Commerce Thursday on the importance of access to child care in a healthy community, and the need to consider public investment to keep those services available.
    In a wide-ranging online presentation from her office in Juneau, Blue Shibler, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children, cited a recent report at a regional economic forum showing accessible child care is essential to a healthy economy.
    “Businesses overwhelmingly responded that attracting and retaining a workforce-age demographic to their communities was critically important,” Shibler said, citing the “Alaska by the Numbers” report to the Southeast Conference by consultant Meilani Schijvens. “It was the second priority, or sense of urgency, that they felt around their businesses being successful –– right under housing,” Shibler said.
    With just under 400 pre-kindergarten aged kids in Sitka, and only 136 spots available for preschool and child care, many local parents are in a bind, she said.
    “Parents aren’t able to work without it,” Shibler said.
    The nonprofit she heads applies for and administers child care grants, and gives monthly stipends to child care businesses in Juneau.
    The core of the problem, she said, is that the accepted model of child care as a business is failing, as operators struggle to bring in enough revenue to pay staff members fairly while keeping tuition reasonable.
    “It’s really because it’s a broken business model,” Shibler said. “It hasn’t been successful in a free market economy for decades, and it’s largely because child care programs have one source of revenue, and that’s tuition from families.”
    Shibler cited the work SEAAEYC has done in Juneau, using dollars from federal pandemic relief funding to provide grants to child care operators.
     “As compared to the rest of the state, Juneau hasn’t lost any child care programs since the pandemic, and the rest of the state has –– I think it’s like 40 percent of all child care programs have closed,” Shibler said. “I hope that doesn’t happen in Sitka, but I think in order to avoid that, we need to figure out how to replace the operating subsidies that the programs have been getting from the state of Alaska during the pandemic.”
    Prior to her current position, she had owned a child care center, and has been working in the field since 1997. She underscored the economic impact of child care, telling the online audience that investment in child care can generate millions of dollars, and allow people to remain in their jobs after having children.
    “We can assume that a large number of workforce demographic people either have children, or want to have children at some point in the future, and they might not come to a town or stay in a town if those services aren’t available,” Shibler said. “We want families to work, live, spend money in our communities. We have to provide them with these services that they’re known to need, and child care is a key service, essential service.”
    At a Chamber meeting in October, a panel of local child care providers, experts and advocates reached the same conclusion: child care is essential, but it’s a struggle to run as a business.
    With tuition as the sole income for a child care center, Shibler said, wages are low. Workers are paid only about $20 per hour to start, though the figure has risen from the $12 or $13 hourly paid prior to the pandemic.
    In the present competitive labor market, operators can raise tuition rates only so much before they’re pricing parents out of the market,” Shibler said. “That’s kind of the inherent problem with the business model, and that’s actually happening at a national level. I think it’s particularly noticeable in Southeast Alaska because the cost of living is so high.”
    As COVID-era federal funding runs dry, she concluded, programs face decisions on cutting hours, increasing tuition or reducing pay for staff who already make little.
    To ensure Southeast Alaskans can continue to have access to child care services, Shibler highlighted the need for public support and funding.
    “What I’m hearing from programs is this grave concern over this (fiscal) cliff of not being able to maintain their payroll,” she said. “And I would think that that would lead to considerations of closure, and as we can see from these numbers here, Sitka cannot afford to lose any more child care spaces because it already doesn’t have enough… If we accept that this is a community priority and a community value, and it’s a public good, and it’s not thriving in the free market economy, one of the solutions that needs to be considered is public investment.”