5 key issues facing child care in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County
ANN ARBOR, MI - Child care workers and local and state officials agree it will take work from a wide variety of people to fix the shortage of child care in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.
A cross section of child care workers and advocates from Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan were joined by elected leaders from the city of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County and the state Friday, Oct. 29, at the Michigan Union to brainstorm ways to promote higher wages for child care workers and how to better support child care providers in the area. The event was hosted by Michigan Caregivers and Student Parents.
With Ann Arbor Public Schools largely discontinuing its before- and after-school care programming for 2021, local child care providers say it’s imperative that local, state and federal governments step up to support child care in Washtenaw County.
“I feel we’re at a reckoning,” Community Day Care Executive Director Laura Stidham said. “The old tuition-based model is hurting our future. I know dozens of other centers just like mine and if we don’t do something to provide financial relief in the future, we will not be able to survive.”
With Washtenaw County committing $2 million toward child care efforts and another $1.4 billion in federal funding available related to various child care efforts, elected leaders including Ann Arbor City Council member Lihn Song, Washtenaw County Commissioners Andy LaBarre and Caroline Harrison, State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, and State Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, shared insights into what can be done to address the issue moving forward.
Here are five takeaways from their discussion:
1. The struggle is constant between raising tuition and increasing wages
The biggest issue facing child care providers is finding qualified staff. The current business model for professional caregivers pits itself against each other, as it balances making enough money to stay in business with paying staff enough to keep them on board, Community Day Care Executive Director Laura Stidham said.
Since April 2020, nine child care centers and 21 home care centers have had to close, further impacting families in need of care, Stidham said.
Child care providers, on the other hand, must spend more time and resources in the hiring and screening process with the difficulties they’re experiencing in finding interested candidates.
“That is your families being affected and your children who don’t have care, she said.
2. Everything’s expensive, from licensing to the cost of child care
With some child care options costing Ann Arbor families “as much as a mortgage payment,” Song said the elimination of before- and after-school care at AAPS immediately revealed how essential child care is for all types of working parents.
The problem is, the cost of opening new child care options to address the shortage is equally expensive.
When Community Day Care opened a new preschool program four years ago, Stidham said it cost $15,000 up front, noting that takes into account it already had another preschool to draw from. Onboarding new staff members costs another $350 each, Stidham said.
As a result of these costs, Stidham said CDC currently is operating at a $40,000 budget loss while simultaneously needing to raise another $200,000 in funding.
Without being able to offer more competitive, full-time wages, Jennie McAlpine, the University of Michigan’s Work-Life Programs director, said the last four job openings have attracted just three applicants.
“I think it’s going to need to be systemic - it needs to be a millage or a regular tax like we pay for our schools,” McAlpine said of improving child care worker wages.
3. It starts with staffing. Where do you find them?
With everyone in attendance agreeing that staffing is the central issue facing child care centers across the country, local universities could play a role in filling in some of the shortages of available care.
Funded by federal grants, Eastern Michigan’s Bright Futures program provides 25 after-school programs across three school districts in Washtenaw County four days a week. Each site is staffed by a full-time site coordinator, an assistant and two part-time workers for about 25-35 children at each site, Bright Futures Assistant Director Will Spotts said.
Bright futures is regularly partnering with EMU and University of Michigan to bring in students in the education, social work and occupational therapy fields to get real work experience, Spotts said.
“That has potential to really be expanded upon,” he said. “The pipeline to development of more quality staff members is equally if not more important than having the actual buildings.”
4. Businesses must shoulder some of the child care responsibility
The pandemic has made clear that there needs to be a renewed call to the business community to play a direct monetary role in child care in addition to committing public dollars to addressing the crisis, LaBarre said.
While LaBarre said he believes the county should be one entity involved in helping to provide some sort of universal child care model throughout the county, it can’t be the only one at the table.
“We need to go to them and say this is a human issue and we need to provide direct public funding to help subsidize wages because it’s just morally right and we live in a civilization and not a cave,” LaBarre said.
5. Funding is coming. Who will it help?
Irwin broke down Gov. Gretchen Whitmer plan to use $1.4 billion in federal funding to expand child care access to 150,000 Michigan children.
That includes $700 million to help existing child care centers keep the lights on, Irwin said, with additional funding going toward increasing eligibility for child care subsidies, increasing reimbursement rates for providers who take the child care subsidy program and one-time bonuses to child care workers, Irwin said.
Irwin hopes that funding can help make the child care industry a more rational one for people to consider entering.
“We devalue these jobs and we pay these people wages that are criminally low and then we wonder why the system doesn’t work,” he said. “We were in a crisis before the pandemic and now the heat has been turned up several notches.”
