Park City child-care facilities closed earlier than usual Monday and encouraged parents to join them at Library Field to participate in A Day Without Child Care.
The nationwide cause is one that hits home for many local families.
“If your kids are no longer in child care, it’s kind of easy to forget how essential it is both for your kids to have high-quality development and also for the parents to be able to do whatever it is that they’re doing with their day,” said Kristen Schulz, the director of Park City Community Foundation’s Early Childhood Alliance. “Oftentimes, that’s working, or sometimes they’re in school or, you know, taking care of other loved ones, but we really want to kind of highlight how important our child care providers are in our community.”
Despite the importance of child care, Schulz said people who earn bachelor’s degrees in early education are among the lowest paid.
“Historically, we have underpaid and undervalued these workers. Traditionally, it’s been women’s work, often women of color. And frankly, we haven’t prioritized it,” she said. “It’s very difficult to have people in this profession not make enough to support their family. It’s hard to retain and recruit a highly qualified workforce.”
People never question whether their child can go to first grade once they’re old enough, she said. If the option was only available if parents could foot a $24,000 cost for the education, “people would think that’s a little bit crazy. But basically, parents are on their own from zero to 5. If you can’t pay for it, you’re out of luck.”
Child care also plays a vital role in making sure Park City has enough workers.
Miriam Nieto, the director of education at Holy Cross Ministries School Readiness Program, said their service helps take care of kids whose parents commute to Park City for work from Herriman, Heber City and other locations.
“Living here is not affordable for them, but they still need a place for their kids to be taken care of, and I think that’s challenging for new families that are coming into town and having to struggle a lot with the cost because it’s very expensive and because of the cost of living here,” she said. “They don’t necessarily have to live in the area, but they work here and they are a task force that is very important in town.”
Sue Banerjee, the executive director of PC Tots, said she’s seen a need for Park City child care that outstretches its availability.
“We’re also seeing an economic crunch because families just can’t afford to get the high quality child care they need. There aren’t enough slots and it’s really, really expensive,” Banerjee said. “Then from the provider side, it’s really expensive to run a high quality child care center, a high quality early education center. I think it’s just those market forces that we’re all experiencing that makes it really tough, especially in a community like this where things are just a little bit more expensive than other places.”
If the funding gap isn’t filled, Nieto and Banerjee agreed the community will suffer as child care classrooms close and spots are limited. And when the workforce can’t afford to enroll their children in child care, they’ll stop being the workforce.
“We all benefit from the barista whose child is at PC Tots or Holy Cross Ministries that can make that cup of coffee for us,” Banerjee said. “We benefit from the firefighter who is able to serve our community because their child is at a good child care. So I really think it needs to be addressed by the community.”
Beyond allowing parents to contribute to the community, Baerjee said that early child care helps young children prepare for K-12 education systems.
“I did some substitute teaching in the Park City School District doing kindergarten, and there’s a stark difference between the children that have some early education versus the ones that don’t,” Banerjee said. “And just little things like being able to get in a line. If a child has some early education, they know how to line up so the teacher doesn’t have to put their time and energy into correcting that behavior.”
The nationwide movement was organized by national nonprofit organization Community Change to raise awareness about the financial woes of the families who rely on child care services and the professionals who provide it.
Johnny Anderson, the CEO of the Utah child care chain ABC Great Beginnings and the state’s Day Without Child Care spokesperson, explained why the loss of COVID-era funding could prove harmful to Utah families, child care providers and subsequently the economy as parents who won’t be able to afford professional child care face having to leave the workforce.
“Prior to COVID, the average hourly wage for the teacher in a child care center, preschool, was around nine or 10 bucks an hour,” Anderson said. “As part of the COVID relief funding that we got, you were required to raise your teachers to $15 an hour if you wanted to receive the full funding. And of course we were happy to do that because we’ve always wanted to have the money to raise teachers’ pay and plus hiring was so tight.”
As COVID funding was set to expire, the child care community looked forward to continued funding that would have been provided with the passage of earlier iterations of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act. During bill negotiations, however, that funding was cut.
Now, child care facilities like Anderson’s must pay licensed child care workers lower wages or charge parents more.
Since around the beginning of 2023, Johnson said this has meant a roughly 10% increase in prices, and that will likely jump to 13% as the last of the grant funding expires this summer.
“Right now, we’re focusing more heavily on trying to grow enrollment. We’ve increased marketing, we’ve hired a team of enrollment specialists to just see if we can get through this by increasing enrollment,” he said. “But not everybody can do that. If you own a center or two centers, you don’t have the ability to go and hire two full-time enrollment specialists and spend more money on marketing to see if you can grow your way out of this problem.”
The issue only worsens for the state’s smaller child care businesses.
Schulz mentioned a study by Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman, who determined public early education investments save money in the long run. The earlier in a child’s life that money is spent on their development, the better rate of return that money will have.
“The highest rate of return in early childhood development comes from investing as early as possible, from birth through age 5, in disadvantaged families,” Heckman wrote in 2012. “Starting at age 3 or 4 is too little too late.”
