- [Announcer] Funding for "Utah Insight" is made possible by viewers like you, thank you.

- [Liz] On this edition of "Utah Insight," we explore the challenges parents in Utah face while searching for childcare.

- It's hard, it's hard for parents in the middle to afford.

- [Liz] How gaps in the system are creating long wait lists.

- The childcare industry has been, just working so hard for so long that they're sort of at a breaking point.

- [Liz] We'll share what local leaders, and childcare advocates, are doing to reshape the conversation to provide long-lasting solutions.

(light upbeat music) Welcome to "Utah Insight."

I'm your host, Liz Adeola.

Utah's Workforce Services Childcare Division released a report showing that in Utah more than half the number of children, under the age of seven, need childcare, but there's a 65% gap between needs and access and that was before childcare centers started shutting down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Infant care costs are also on the rise growing 13% from 2015 to 2017.

Joining us now to talk about this issue and what are some of the possible solutions for parents out there, we have Anna Thomas, who is the Senior Policy Analyst with Voices For Utah Children, Sharon Miller is a childcare provider and helper, she owns Sharon's Early Care And Education Program, and Gonzalo Palza is the Executive Director and CEO, of Centro De La Familia.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us for this important discussion.

Anna, I wanna start with you and talk about the framing of this issue.

For so long we've heard time and time again, that early childcare costs are rising and it costs more now here in Utah to pay for early childcare than it does for a four-year in-state college tuition.

How does that make you feel when you hear people talk about the issue like that?

- Well, I'm so steeped in it I have a lot of immediate reactions to it.

I think one thing I would say about the cost of childcare, I think it's a good place to start.

Historically I feel like every year there's been media stories about the cost of childcare going up and how expensive it is without really diving into why that is and some of the structural issues in the childcare market.

I like to remind people that one of the reasons that childcare for your infant, your child under one year of age, is so expensive is because it's the health and safety of your child under one year of age and ostensibly, your child has the capacity to learn and develop more in that one year than in college, graduate school, a PhD program.

So, I like to flip the script a little bit on that to say the reason that childcare is so expensive is because it is literally invaluable for people to have a place where they can be sure that their child is being cared for, is safe, is having good social interactions with other kids, is with adults who pay them attention and help them learn and grow, that said, that doesn't provide a lot of comfort for the parents who are paying for childcare.

And I think we've gotten to a point in our system where the people like Sharon, who provide childcare, have absorbed as much of the cost as they can.

The people who need childcare, parents and other guardians of children, have absorbed as much of the cost as they can and the numbers still aren't working out.

So I think the cost is a good place to start, but the absolute necessity of childcare and how we have the opportunity to start thinking about it in a different way, less about something that parents need when they're working, and more as an extension of what kids do in our public education system, a critical foundation for learning and growth for people who are gonna be living in and leading our state and our country for decades to come.

- Yeah, I wanted to dive into that mindset because it seems as though maybe during the pandemic people started to realize that this is not just a women's issue, this is not just a family's issue, this can impact businesses in a major way.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I think we've seen some of the consequences of what happens when families have to make difficult decisions about who is able to work, and who is not able to work, whether it's worth having second and third jobs in order to pay for childcare.

There is a big impact on the economy, but I would even stress that that's probably, it's the easiest to see in the short term, but in the long-term is arguably the least important.

These are kids who need investment and attention now so that they can be successful later in life.

So the economic frame is helpful when you're speaking with policy makers who are particularly concerned about that, but I think that the more important framing, as we talk about childcare moving forward, is this is an investment in families, this is an investment in the good work of people who care for children, and most importantly, this is a critical public good for children themselves who have no control over their family and household situations, but deserve good care.

- Absolutely.

Gonzalo, what have you noticed while working with families that are struggling to get by?

- Well, thank you for having me and I am really happy to be here next to Anna who gets me in trouble all the time.

(laughing) - It's co-trouble.

- And so here we are again, but I would, if you allow me, I would like to focus this childcare issue on the neediest of the needy in our communities, right?

It's a huge issue, there's many nuances to it, but we focus on the children that are most needed in our communities, right?

One of our core competencies is parent engagement and we really believe that if we can engage the parents in the early education of their children, those children will be able to read and write perhaps in two languages when they hit elementary school, which is our focus, right?

- Yeah.

- But it is particularly difficult for those communities that are isolated, minority communities that are in rural Utah, even in suburbs in the cities, who absolutely have no access to early childcare and those are the communities that are actually filtering into our elementary schools, and those are the children that at third grade cannot read and write.

And if you look at the numbers how many of those children are actually unable to read and write at third grade?

I think the numbers are staggering and once they can't read and write at third grade, then you have to bring in the programs to help them and it just costs a lot of money.

So we focus on those communities that mostly don't have that access and this is an opportunity to have people think about that.

It's not just the middle class, it is mostly, and most difficult for those families, who don't have access to childcare, because those are the investments that are going to pay off the most in the future.

And all the children in this country that we deal with are U.S. citizens.

Their parents may not be and because of the condition of their parents those children don't have the same rights and access to services that everybody else has, we fight for that and that's what we're doing now.

We were very successful recently to make it so that children of mixed-family status would have access to subsidies for early childhood, which is a great success in this state and I'm very proud of our legislators, of the people we worked with, and the workforce services and everybody that made that happen.

So we're progressing, but there's still a whole bunch of children, little kids there, that regardless of how much the parents will engage with them, if they don't have access to those services and benefits that everybody else has, they're gonna fail at third grade.

And that's the problem for, that's the social fabric that we're building.

- Sharon, I wanna bring you into this 'cause I spoke to so many providers who said we're not in this to get rich, we're not, you know, we're not making, running away with a bag of money or anything like that.

I spoke to a provider who said she's been in the industry for over 20 years, works more than 40 hours a week every week, has a college degree and she's never made more than 24,000 a year.

And while looking at the research that's around the average rate range for a lot of people who are in this industry, can you speak to that?

- Yes, that's it, that's the case.

We work sometimes, I know I work 12 hours a day, and that's just while the children are here and then I work an average of two, three hours after they leave just cleaning up and getting ready for the next day.

So that's a lot of hours and if you, even if you figured that out, what I made per hour after I pay the bills, it's not even 24,000 a year and it's less than minimum wage per hour.

So yeah, we're not getting rich here, and if we run a high-quality program a lot of what we make goes right back into our programs.

So we're, a lot of us are just breaking even.

- Well, here's what "PBS Utah" viewers are saying on the issue on our Facebook page.

Phil Montano says, "Parents should care for their own children."

Liz Steere wrote back to that statement saying, "Unfortunately, that is often easier said than done."

While Steve Smith says, "We should reduce regulations, stop zoning daycare out of neighborhoods."

And Sharon, I know that you worked in licensing for quite a bit, what are your thoughts on zoning and regulations?

Is this industry overregulated?

- I don't think that's the case.

I think there are some regulations that are challenges for providers, especially home providers, and related to the infants, and some of them are challenging and it does, some of the regulations cause more costs mostly for infant care, but I think the regulations keep children safe.

And I think when you start- - That's exactly right.

- Easing up on those and I know there's a lot of providers out there that will disagree with me, but I've seen both sides, so I can tell you that it's necessary to have some regulations and have rules in place to keep children safe.

And it's not always a matter of a provider being neglectful, intentionally.

Sometimes I think some of those rules are set up as a reminder to remind us that we need to do certain things to keep the kids safe, I don't think it's too much.

- I would agree with that.

I really appreciate that balanced response, Sharon.

I think the comment about zoning is a really good one.

I think one of the things that we all work on together as advocates, is trying to help cities, and communities, understand what they may or may not be doing that could help, or hinder, access to childcare.

So if you have random caps on how many children can be in a home-based childcare, because that's what your rules are for all of your local home-based businesses, there's an opportunity to reexamine that so that more children have access to safe care, like Sharon had said.

I would strongly caution that we need a lot more than the deregulation that is appropriate in the industry.

At the end of the day we are dealing with the health, and care, and safety, of human children.

(laughing) There are certain compromises you simply cannot make and if that is your only mechanism for driving costs down, you are failing children and you will not produce the savings that parents are looking for.

So, while I think that there is some really good projects and collaborations that we can pursue around, particularly, community-level zoning, and those kinds of requirements, there's a lot of education we can do for local governments about how they can better support access to childcare.

I think there's sometimes just too much attention just placed on regulation and using that as a way of controlling costs.

The issues in the childcare sector are much more systemic than that, so that is not gonna do it alone and simply hoping that more people will stay home with their children is also not going to accomplish any of the solutions that we need.

It's simply not a demographic reality for, as you mentioned, Liz, at least half of the state.

So as much as we might want to see it that way, and as much as many families may wish to be able to stay home with their kids, it's just not an economic reality, unfortunately, and I would say that's especially true, Gonzalo, with the families that you work with, everybody's gotta be working- - Absolutely.

- All the time.

- And maybe one or two jobs a day and the children are there and they need to have the access that everybody has.

And what Sharon says, I agree 100%, it's not about regulation, it's about the children's safety, the health and safety of the children and you cannot spare on that at all.

And we work with many, I mean we're grantees from the federal government and those federal government regulations drive me crazy.

(laughing) But I know that they're there for a reason and if you understand why they're there then you accept it and you make sure that it happens because it's all about the children's safety.

- Absolutely, and high-quality childcare that is also affordable can be difficult to find in rural areas.

- Absolutely.

"Utah Insights'", RaeAnn Christensen shares, how a Southern Utah mom took matters into her own hands.

- You ready?

When we first got married and started having kids, my husband was in school, I was working, and so we had to have childcare.

Shall we find a bigger one?

But we had to put it all on student loans because I just simply was not making enough, but we also made just a little bit too much to get help and assistance.

There you go.

- That costly childcare debt, Kristy Degraaf says she's still paying off to this day.

Kristy says it was so difficult and expensive to find good childcare for her two children it's part of the reason she knew she had to do something.

- Once my husband had a job with benefits, and insurance, and a steady income, we sort of flip-flopped.

You made the rock?

It was better for me to be running my program and then being able to care for my own kids versus putting them all in childcare.

- [RaeAnn] Now running, Learning Tree Childcare in Cedar City, this helped solve Kristy's problem, but she says it's difficult seeing so many parents struggle to find high-quality childcare.

- [Kristy] The problem is it's always full.

- [RaeAnn] Once they do find a spot for their child, then paying the bill is a struggle for many.

- Squash it harder.

On the one hand, if you qualify for assistance, that is really helpful.

In Cedar City most providers are charging about what assistance will pay so most parents don't have extra that they have to pay on top of that.

It's really hard for those families in the middle who are not quite making enough to afford it, but make too much to be able to qualify for assistance.

- I'm done.

- I'm done.

- [RaeAnn] Between materials and investing in good teachers, Kristy says it costs a lot to provide quality care.

- And we have matching shapes.

Really, if I were gonna charge parents enough to pay my teachers a living wage, to pay myself a decent wage, to keep up with all the projects and program improvement, I'd have to be charging 'em two or three times as much as I'm charging 'em.

- [RaeAnn] Kristy isn't sure what the solution is.

- There's a gap in the middle that I don't think providers can continue to carry and parents can't make up the difference and so there's gotta be some help in the middle, which is not necessarily always a popular solution for taxpayers, or lawmakers.

We're gonna let Tyson do some.

- [RaeAnn] But she does know if children are not in the home with a parent, they need to be somewhere with high-quality childcare, otherwise she believes we will see the repercussions of that as a society.

- They found that investing in early childhood pays back like seven times in lower rates of crime, lower rates of poverty, better health, better mental health.

It is so good for the whole community, but you can't see it right away.

You have to wait 10, 20 years to really see the impacts of not investing in early childhood.

- [RaeAnn] In Cedar City for "Utah Insight," I'm RaeAnn Christensen.

(girl squealing) - [Kristy] Where are we going?

- Well, April Richey had this to say about the issues surrounding childcare access in Utah on our Facebook page, she said, "This doesn't surprise me given that my relatively cheap daycare is more than my rent, and I know there are other daycares near me that charge almost, if not actually double, what mine does."

In 2020 the average cost of infant care for one child in Utah was $829 a month, that's 14% of a median family's income in Utah.

When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines affordable childcare as that which costs no more than 7% of a family's income.

So according to the numbers, only about 12% of Utahans can afford childcare in the state yet many establishments are packed with long waiting lists.

Anna, what programs are there to help people, as we saw in the story, so many people are caught in that middle area where they don't qualify for programs, that grant assistance, because they make too much, but it's still unaffordable to them?

- Yeah, I think in addition to the financial subsidies that are available to some lower income Utahans, throughout the state, there isn't a lot of financial help.

I think probably the most generous grant program available in the childcare sector right now, is the fact that people like Kristy, and people like Sharon, don't charge what it costs them.

So that is actually a subsidy that is being provided by the largely female workforce that is providing this care.

I think, you know, there have been different large-scale reform proposals at the federal government level, that have not attracted a lot of political will, unfortunately, that would have focused on, exactly what you mentioned, providing support for families higher up the income, the income tiers, understanding that it's not just low-income folks who have a hard time affording childcare, but lots of different families.

What I like to compare the costliness of childcare to the situation that we would have in this country if public education cost everybody money.

If tomorrow everybody suddenly had to pay for their child's K through 12 education, most people would be unable to afford to send their kids to school.

So they would have to send them to subpar educational programs that fit their budgets and public education would cease to be the great equalizer that we've always hoped in this country that it could be.

Childcare is very much an extension of that kind of education.

Kids do an enormous amount of learning and development between the ages of zero and six, an enormous amount, and I think that we, just because we've thought of childcare as an individual family problem, we don't think of it in the frame of education and I think it's really helpful to consider the reasons why we invest in public education, why that's been a priority in our country, and in our state for a long time, and how that is at all different than the needs of families who have kids that are younger than school age, and I think that can help us understand a little bit better why Sharon, and Kristy, and Gonzalo and others, talk about the importance of looking at this as an investment in safe communities, in educated communities, and healthy communities, in the future.

- Sharon, I wanna ask you about the COVID-19 relief funds and how that's assisted some childcare centers during this time.

Have you heard anything about those being extended or going on any longer to help out?

- Well, they're offering grants to providers.

If the current grants are to help stabilize us for the future, so a lot of providers have used these grants to do repairs on their programs that they couldn't afford before and upgrade some of their equipment that's all wore out and things like that, so that they can be prepared to last out the next, how many every years, so.

And then they've got a compliance grant that's just coming out and if you have things in your program that are, I guess, worn out, or need repair, or whatever, and it could cause you to be in violation of licensing rules, then those grants will help you pay to get things fixed.

- So has- - So that's great help.

- Has that made a difference for you during the pandemic, or during this time?

How has that impacted your business?

- Yes, it's been great because there's all kinds of things on the list, I call it, the list, of things that need to be done, and fixed, and repaired, that all of this influx of money has helped me to catch up on all of the things that are in bad repair that need to be fixed, so yeah, it's been helpful.

I don't, and also the Sustainability Grant helps us pay our employees, there are a few stipulations, but that is helpful too because that frees up some other money for us to put toward the repairs and things that we need to have done, so yeah, it's been helpful.

- As we wrap up the show I'd like each of you to share any resources for our viewers, for the audience, that they should look into that could assist them if they're struggling during this time, Gonzalo.

- There are many resources, however, I wanna add on to what Sharon just said, in that in our case we are federally funded and we have about 20 different centers throughout Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, and because of the pandemic many of our parents chose not to send their children to school so we had staffing issues.

However, we did receive money from our programs and we invested them in technology and we are now currently able to run our programs remotely quite easily which has made a big difference in how we serve the children.

So yeah, the money is welcome and it's well-put to use.

- That's incredible.

- So, but if I can finish by saying that one of our core competencies is parent engagement and parents that we serve, the children we serve, parents are really struggling with the time, the quality time that they can spend with their children and we would like to see somehow that parents engage in quality time with their parents, with their children, towards the developmental domains of the child, because those years are critical.

And so if they cannot go into a childcare program they need to be able to invest that quality time with their children and that is very difficult for them to do.

It is important that parents are engaged in their children's education and that's one of our, our main focus is to get parents to understand the importance of engaging in their children's developmental domains at every stage, not just, it's from the moment they're born all the way, until they get to elementary school, and hopefully in elementary school they'll be taken care of.

But if parents engage with their children before elementary school, once they're in elementary school the parents will support them through those first three years, which are critical.

If they're not there those children are bound to fail and there are too many children failing at third grade in our state, in the country, and this is affecting the social fabric of our communities and that's what we fight for, that's what we try to address.

- Sharon, what are your final thoughts?

- I'm not really sure what he said 'cause I couldn't hear a word he was saying, but I think that there's a gap between the funding that's available to help parents pay for childcare.

That threshold of qualifying for help is too high and it's hurting a lot of parents and they have to figure out how to fill that gap.

- Absolutely.

- And a lot of times it's, they're shuffling kids from family member, to family member, to family member, 'cause they can't afford childcare and they don't qualify.

- [Gonzalo] That's an excellent point.

- And that hurts children in the long run too because they don't have stability, they never know from day to day where they're gonna be, or who's gonna be taking care of them, and a lot of times their main activity is sitting in front of the television all day.

- That's right.

- And Anna, I'm getting a wrap, but I wanna leave it with you with the final thoughts.

- I would encourage parents and families that are struggling who need immediate help identifying childcare options to look into the care about childcare offices that are around the state.

There are resource and referral agencies that support parents and support providers.

They usually have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what's going on in the community and might have some ideas about where parents could turn.

- All right, well thank you all for joining this conversation and thank you all for tuning in to "Utah Insight."

Next week we're talking about water issues in the state.

You can chime in with your thoughts about Utah's drought and water issues on our Facebook page, or on our Instagram page as well.

Thank you so much for watching "Utah Insight," we'll see you again next week.

(upbeat music)