Can Boise-area child care centers survive? What their fight means for parents & employers

Boise City Council Member Luci Willits was a junior in college when she had her first child.

At the time, she and her husband couldn’t afford child care. Instead, they planned their class schedules so that one of them was always available to take care of the baby. Occasionally, in a pinch, Willits had to bring her daughter with her to class.

“We were able to make it work” by relying on friends and family to fill in the gap, she told the Idaho Statesman in an interview. “But it was life-changing,” when, years later, her family found formal child care in their neighborhood.

“The woman who ran that child care center will be a saint forever in the Willits household,” she said. “She partnered with us in raising our children. And I was a better employee because I knew my children were well-taken care of.”

“I think I was lucky,” she said. But amid the Boise area’s rapid growth, rising cost of living, and instability in the child care industry caused in part by COVID-19, many families in the area still struggle to find affordable, high-quality child care.

The industry is suffering too. In 2023, Idaho lost over 1,300 child care spots and 86 child care centers, due in large part to turnover among child care workers, according to a report by IdahoSTARS, a child care-focused nonprofit. Nearly 300 of those spots were in Ada, Boise, Elmore and Valley counties, IdahoSTARS reported.

In 2020, the state had a nearly 30% gap between the number of children who needed care and the number slots available, according to a study by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank founded by former Senate leaders of both parties to craft bipartisan solutions to problems.

Drawing on her own experience, Willits, a Republican, has been among the members of the mostly Democratic Boise City Council pushing for the city to expand its support for child care and think creatively about how to partner with other organizations.

“It is a conversation we need to have because we are the land of innovation, and we are not innovating on this topic,” she told the Statesman. “The fact is, we have folks who want to live and work in this community and contribute their talents. And they’re not able to, because there is not a system and support in place for children.”

COVID money funds ‘incentive pay’ for workers

In recent years, the city has taken steps to increase access to child care, according to a presentation that Kate Nelson, the mayor’s director of community partnerships, gave to the City Council in March.

The city incorporated child care into its new zoning plan, allowing for child care centers in all “mixed-use” zones. The Capital City Development Corp., Boise’s urban renewal agency, has given priority to development projects that include child care, like the inclusion of a Giraffe Laugh child care center at The Franklin, a city-sponsored affordable-housing apartment complex at Franklin and Orchard streets on the Boise Bench that is set to open this spring.

In 2022, Boise used federal COVID relief funds to offer over a thousand child care workers in the city $1,500 in “incentive pay.”

In response to those payments, Nelson received calls from child care workers “in tears,” she said at the meeting. “They felt seen in a way they hadn’t previously experienced.”

The average wage for a child care worker in Idaho is around $13.50 an hour — a little over $28,000 each year, IdahoSTARS reported. So that incentive payment represented more than a 5% average increase in salary.

The city’s efforts have paid off, Nelson said. Boise saw an increase in child care centers over the last year, jumping from 195 to 215, with six more in the license-approval process.

City Council members applauded these efforts but urged the city to go further, especially in partnering with private companies. They spoke in support of the decision of Micron, Idaho’s largest for-profit employer, to build a child care center as part of its new memory-fabrication plant in Boise. Micron’s center will serve over 120 children once its doors open this fall.

Willits is insistent: This isn’t just a conversation about child development. From her perspective, the economic growth of the city is at stake.

“What Micron did was remarkable, but not everyone works at Micron,” Willits told the Statesman. “The companies that figure this out will have a huge economic advantage, because they’ll get the talent. This needs to become a conversation that is not an afterthought. It needs to be viewed as an economic driver for prosperity.”

Investment for economic growth

Micron, which broke ground on its child care center in May, is on the same page.

“We see this as a strategic investment … from an attraction and retention perspective,” Amanda Blumenstein, Micron’s director of people experience, told the Statesman in an interview. She called it “a way to enable people, women in particular, [to stay in] the workforce.”

Micron had been offering child care benefits to its employees for decades. But in the last five years, the company found that those benefits weren’t cutting it for U.S.-based employees, Blumenstein said. The company was offering flexible spending accounts for “dependent care,” paid parental leave, and “backup care” for families whose regular child care fell through.

Especially since COVID, “a lot of child care centers … weren’t able to stay open,” Blumenstein said. “So now it’s really a challenge to find child care.”

Micron plans to hold a lottery in April for its employees to sign up for slots at the center, which will be run by the Treasure Valley YMCA. Micron is following the same model it uses for on-site health clinics, outsourcing the operations to an entity that’s already in the business, “so we don’t have to become the experts there.”

Blumenstein called the center a “win-win-win” for the company, its employees, and other Boise-area residents.

“If people can’t show up to work because child care is a barrier, then you just lost them as a potential employee,” she said. “Micron wins, because it means we can get great talent … it’s a great employee benefit … and it’s introducing 124 more seats into the Treasure Valley,” leaving slots open elsewhere for other families amid shortages.

‘Astronomical’ child care costs

At God’s Creation Christian Daycare Center and Preschool in Nampa, Director Toni Rhoan shared her perspective on what’s driving those shortages.

Sitting in the center’s “purple room” for pre-K students — decorated with Froot Loop necklaces, Easter eggs and wall art urging kids to “choose to sparkle” — she shared the challenges she’s faced trying to keep her program staffed. Right now, she has five employees but would like to have seven.

“My experience is, it’s not that the day care centers don’t have room, [but that] they haven’t been able to staff,” she said. She feels stretched, she said, trying to keep up with inflation, rising wages and her employees’ cost of living – while trying to keep rates down for parents.

COVID posed a challenge, with federal unemployment benefits rivaling what Rhoan was able to pay her staff.

“For our workers, there was a real frustration that, here we are, out there working,” she said. “And there were people staying home, making more money than we were making going to work every day.”

Federal grants — part of American Recovery Plan Act funding — helped for a time, bumping up her employees’ wages by an extra $1.78 per hour, but the Idaho Legislature cut those grants off in June, three months early, citing “unresolved issues” with the funding source and possible misuse of funds, the Statesman previously reported.

By that time, Rhoan’s employees had gotten used to the extra pay, so she felt forced to absorb the cost to keep them. Before the pandemic, she was paying between $8 and $12 an hour. Now she pays $12 to $18.

Add that to “astronomical” increases in insurance, taxes, food and curricula, and things start to look impossible, she said.

During COVID, Rhoan raised her rates $40 per week to $210 —not enough to cover her rising costs, she said. Without new grant funding, she predicted another “shutdown” of the child care industry.

“There has always been a disconnect between the cost … versus what our parents can afford to pay us,” she said. “It does not balance at the end of the day.”

Her experience reflects regional data from IdahoSTARS. In 2023, Ada, Boise, Elmore and Valley counties had a 38% turnover rate among their child care workers. (The U.S. Administration for Children and Families considers 20% to be a high rate.) Of those who left, 30% cited low pay and lack of benefits as the reason, according to IdahoSTARS’ statewide data.

Less tangible, but often demoralizing, is a sense that child care work is not respected, Rhoan said.

“A lot of people think that … we just sit and watch the kids play all day,” she said. “I don’t think that my teachers hardly get to sit at all during the day … it’s just up and down, up and down.”

Rhoan took offense at comments by state Sen. Scott Herndon, R-Sagle, who raised concerns last year about providers’ dependence on government funds, comparing providers to “crack addicts,” the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.

“We have a lot of people making decisions that probably have never even spent a day in a child care facility,” Rhoan said.

Research: Early education helps later in life

A growing body of research links high-quality early childhood education to better outcomes in adulthood, including improved language development, problem-solving and emotional regulation.

At the March City Council meeting, Nelson emphasized the city government’s “high degree of emphasis” on the quality of its child care options. Boise’s standards for its child care providers are well above Idaho’s minimum requirements, she said. Boise regulations demand smaller ratios of teachers to children, higher levels of education for providers, and additional specifications for centers’ physical environments.

Still, Nelson acknowledged, it’s a “trade-off” between quality and cost. One large provider in the area told her that even with its “economy of scale,” care costs $1,500 per child each month. For smaller providers, the cost is closer to $2,000, Nelson said.

The city has “limited avenues” it can take to help, Nelson said — a point Willits echoes.

“I’m very, very keen about the city staying in its lane, the state staying in its lane and the federal government staying in its lane,” she told the Statesman. “Unfortunately,” on this topic, “there’s no lane. We really are in the Wild West here.”

Partnerships with businesses, Boise chamber

So she and other council members urged city officials to “deepen” partnerships around child care with outside organizations, including local businesses and the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce.

At the moment, those conversations are “fairly preliminary,” Sean Keithly, the city’s economic development director, told the Statesman. Still, he acknowledged that among businesses, child care has become a critical workforce issue — “right up there with things like housing and transportation.”

For Willits, whose own daughter went from “playing day care” to working as an adult in a Meridian Montessori school, the drive for this is urgent — and personal.

Her daughter “was the child I was struggling with to get child care, and now she is the child care worker struggling to stay in it,” she added. “It’s her calling … When we don’t invest in that talent, then we lose stability.”

“It’s the worst possible situation,” Willits said. “It’s expensive for families, and the people that are working in child care don’t make enough money to stay.”

©2024 The Idaho Statesman. Visit idahostatesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.