A new registered child care provider hasn’t opened for business in Flathead County since last fall. Usually, one or two open each month.
“We’ve been letting the few interested people know that they might want to wait awhile,” said Lori Riley, a child care trainer with the Nurturing Center, a Kalispell nonprofit that tracks the industry regionally and provides resource and referral services for families and providers.
“Layoffs have definitely impacted the child care industry here,” Riley said. “And if the Legislature agrees to a reimbursement freeze, it’ll just be one more obstacle for the providers and families who are already struggling here.”
In recent months, layoffs have swept the region, leaving hundreds of area residents without work. As more parents here are handed pink slips, there’s less demand for daycare. Families may no longer be able to afford the costs and unemployed parents are watching their own children.
At Flathead Valley Community College’s Early Childhood Education Center, director Laurie Peiffer said numbers were holding fairly steady, but estimated four of the center’s children had left recently “at least in part, because of layoffs.” Drop-in daycares and providers with fewer children have likely been hit harder.
“Even places that are so high quality and have been in business for years and years and have never had openings because their reputations were so good, are now having openings with the layoffs,” Riley said.
At a recent economic forum, FVCC economics instructor Gregg Davis estimated that just the 615 job cuts at three of the valley’s largest employers would result in a trickle-down loss of 15 jobs in the local child care industry.
Adding to local providers worries is a suggestion before the 2009 Legislature to freeze the reimbursement rates they get from the state to care for and educate children as part of the Best Beginnings Scholarship Program.
The federal- and state-funded program helps working families whose income is at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty limit, or $26,400 for a family of three based on last year’s poverty rate.
Families enrolled in the program must be either working or going to school, according to the Early Childhood Services Bureau in the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, which runs the program. Enrolled families make a co-payment toward their child care costs based on their income level. Best Beginnings then reimburses child care centers up to 75 percent of whatever the average child care costs are in their community.
Those costs vary by place, and are determined by annual state-run business surveys. In Kalispell, the reimbursement rate at a center is $30.80 a day for children under age 2 and $29.30 for older children.
During the last fiscal year, which ran July 2007 through June 2008, there was around $80,000 spent every month on child care subsidy dollars in Flathead County – or nearly $900,000 over the year.
Initially, Gov. Brian Schweitzer included assessing and raising the state’s child care reimbursement rate in the budget. But as state revenue projections worsened, that was removed and the budget before lawmakers now suggests freezing that rate along with those for other professionals who provide subsidized or free services to the poor.
Local providers say a reimbursement freeze could force providers out of business or poor children out of quality child care.
“Child care providers are already at the bottom ranks of providers in salary levels and benefits and this will have a broader effect on them than physicians and counselors,” Collette Box of the Discovery Development Center said. The average annual wage for Montana’s child care workers in 2007 was just $17,119.
“Some places are already juggling to keep employees and keep the doors open,” Box, who estimates about 25 percent of her center’s children receive some aid from the program, added.
Box was one of about a dozen child care center providers and advocates who traveled to Helena two weeks ago to encourage a panel of lawmakers on the Joint Subcommittee for Health and Human Services not to freeze the rates.
Providers warned that they would have to start charging Best Beginning families the difference between the state rate and the true cost of doing business or quit taking the children of the working poor. Poor families, already struggling to afford quality child care, would be further priced out.
“They’ll be forced to go where they can afford,” Riley said. “Where’s that? Maybe an unregistered facility or a drop-in care facility that isn’t supposed to take them full-time and isn’t regulated.”
Quality early childhood care and education are crucial to the future success of that child, Riley added, and preventing poor families from accessing it would be akin to discrimination. And this at a time where she expects more and more families will be in need of help.
“Ultimately,” Riley said, “we’re hurting the entire community if we don’t take care of these children at an early age.”