Lack of teachers in child care, preschool reaches 'crisis' in Colorado Springs

A teacher shortage in early childhood education is forcing licensed centers and homes in El Paso County to reduce classrooms, which, in turn, is creating wait lists for children and leading some parents to seek unlicensed care out of sheer desperation.

“We are absolutely in a workforce crisis for the early childhood sector,” said Kelly Hurtado, early childhood program director for Joint Initiatives for Youth and Families. The nonprofit works on improving legal, government and community services for children and families.

El Paso County has 437 state licensed centers and homes that provide day care and preschool for infants through 5-year-olds, Hurtado said.

An estimated 75% are reporting shortages of teacher-qualified staff, studies show.

Teacher-qualified employees are certified to lead classrooms, and without them, classrooms cannot open, Hurtado said.

“It’s a job that has such a huge impact for our community,” she said. “We’ve got to help licensed businesses attract and retain the staff they need to keep our community recovering from the pandemic and moving forward economically.”

Early Connections Learning Centers in Colorado Springs, the state’s oldest nonprofit childcare system, has 15 openings for teachers and has frozen enrollment until it can fill positions, said Diane Price, president and CEO.

“We don’t have enough staff, and we’re asking the ones we have to work overtime,” she said. “We have a supply and demand problem — there’s high demand for employees and a low supply of people taking the jobs.”

Help is on the way, say community leaders.

The Alliance for Kids, an arm of Joint Initiatives for Youth and Families, in December 2020 formed the El Paso County Early Childhood Workforce Task Force. About 30 people from various sectors are on the task force and charged with figuring out how to address the problem.

Members have raised $175,000, Hurtado said, to stimulate interest in early childhood education and attract more workers.

Pikes Peak Community College contributed $25,000 to hire a firm, Design Rangers, to develop an advertising and marketing campaign, said college president Lance Bolton.

Targeted messages aimed at new high school graduates, military spouses and career changers are rolling out this month to identified social media users who might like the field.

Those online users will see pop-up advertising about the “earn and learn” program, which allows prospective students to simultaneously study for teacher certification while working as a paid employee at one of 10 licensed centers participating in the pilot project.

The goal: Add 60 teachers to the local labor pool over the next few years and retain them in the jobs.

Hurtado thinks it’s a realistic objective.

An early childhood education navigator has been hired to help prospective applicants figure out if the program is a good fit and then with applying, getting in and working their way through the process, she said.

“Previous models were confusing as to how employees came into the field and burned people out,” Hurtado said. “Now we’re looking at what do you come into the field with, and how can we enhance that.”

Existing teacher certification takes 18 to 24 months to complete and requires hours of unpaid classroom training, but the new program will pay people for working at centers immediately, while they learn about the profession.

“Our students could not afford to put in the time in doing these practicums without being compensated,” Bolton said.

A $10,000 grant from the Dakota Foundation will fund the first year of paid apprenticeships for students, he said.

“It’s hard for childcare providers to pay students as practicum workers when they can’t fill the regular slots in the classroom,” he said.

Exacerbated by pandemic

The problem isn't new, Bolton said: “This is an industry teetering on crisis for years.”

Infant and toddler care has been especially hard to come by for "a very long time," Price said.

But the lack of early childhood education teachers, in particular, became more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 7% of local licensed businesses closing, Hurtado said.

In addition to providing training for such jobs, Pikes Peak Community College also operates child development centers at its Centennial and Rampart campuses.

“The pain was getting really bad, when we started not being able to fill our own teacher slots at the two centers we run,” Bolton said. “We thought, ‘We’ve got to do something.’”

Bolton remembers sitting in a meeting at the Air Force Academy last spring with a group talking about how to get the federal government’s Space Force to permanently be headquartered in Colorado Springs.

“A high-ranking general said early childhood education and the availability of quality child-care was a critical component in recruiting Space Force here,” Bolton said. “That was surprising to me.”

Access to reliable and affordable childcare impacts labor participation rates in the region, said Dirk Draper, president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC.

“It’s a complex issue with several factors at play,” he said in an email, “but addressing the labor shortage in the childcare sector will help eligible workers who are home caring for children return to work.”

That creates a domino effect, Draper said, as people returning to work after COVID-19 helps fill openings in other industry sectors, which increases overall labor participation rates.

“In short, childcare providers and educators play a critical role in our economy and business community,” Draper said.

Bolton said hearing a top military official talk about childcare hit home because “we train people to work in the field.”

But early childhood education never has been a big program at PPCC, he said, averaging about 40 students at a given time.

By contrast, the community college’s cybersecurity program has about 300 students currently enrolled, Bolton said.

A workforce recovery council that Bolton has co-chaired found that the pandemic disproportionately affected women who were displaced from the workforce, as layoffs, school closures, online learning and limited childcare availability converged at once.

“A lot of teachers left early childhood education and didn’t come back,” Bolton said. “We really saw this as a key element to getting Colorado Springs to recover.”

Helping build strong brains

The child care and early education industry’s overall business model is fragile, Price said.

“Personnel are funded by what parents pay,” she said. “And you can only charge parents a certain amount to pay for childcare.”

Cost usually varies by ZIP code and center, Price said, with some such as hers basing fees on household income.

Traditionally, entry-level workers earn minimum wage, but the field offers the ability to advance and progress on a career path, Bolton said.

Employees with bachelor's degrees can earn $20 an hour or more, Price said.

And efforts to increase compensation are underway, Hurtado said.

The first five years of life are “the most important in a child’s development," Price said. Studies show quality early education is more likely to lead to success later in school.

According to the U.S. Department of Education a high-quality early childhood program provides a safe and nurturing environment while promoting the physical, social, emotional and intellectual development of young children.

The career can be very rewarding, Hurtado said, as workers interact with children and “help build strong brains.”

One of Hurtado’s concerns is that the workforce shortage will push more parents to seek out unlicensed care.

More parents turned to family, friends and neighbors during the pandemic, she said, as some people weren’t comfortable using licensed centers or homes or couldn’t find placement.

An estimated 45% of children ages 0-5 are cared for in unlicensed settings, Hurtado said.

Many unlicensed operators abide by restrictions on how many children they can take and set up safety measures.

Some do not, however, which in El Paso County has led to recent arrests and even deaths of children.

“If it’s done legally with the right amount of children, it can be a good situation,” Hurtado said of unlicensed care. “Where it gets scary is unlicensed care with too many children, which can be a safety risk. We’ve seen those incidents locally, and that’s not OK.”

The industry’s labor shortages come as Colorado lawmakers passed a bill last session to create universal preschool for all children by 2023, which will necessitate even more employees.