Back to School: Child care programs persist against staff struggles

Aug. 31—TRAVERSE CITY — Back to school means that parents now don't have to worry about childcare for the whole work day — only part of it.

But finding a program or facility to send your child to, even for just a few hours, at a low price is a difficult task for many parents in the region and the state as a whole.

According to the Michigan League for Public Policy, 44 percent of Michiganders live in "child care deserts," which is defined as when the ratio of children ages 0-5 to the number of licensed child care spots is greater than three.

A recent investigation by MuckRock and a consortium of Michigan newsrooms found that actually more children live in child care deserts. The investigation also found that there are just 264,000 daycare slots for Michigan's 559,000 0 to 5-year-olds and, since February 2020, Michigan has 637 fewer childcare providers.

School districts typically try to help their parents out with child care before and after school. In the five county area — Antrim, Benzie, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska and Leelanau counties — the five largest school districts are seeing some improvements and some new struggles moving into the new school year.

"We want to help as many families as we can, and if we could take 100 kids per program we would," said Jessica Anderson, TCAPS's Licensed Child Care Director. "But it's all limited to staffing."

TCAPS's extended day program serves about 450 students each day and is currently offered in nine elementary school buildings, all of which have waitlists, Anderson said. TCAPS is also looking to hire staff to run a program at the Montessori school, but it has proven difficult, she said.

Staffing these programs can become difficult, especially because of the odd hours and the fact that school districts cannot easily pull from their current or retired teaching staff, who are qualified to watch over children until the final bell of the school day rings.

Licensing and Regulatory Affairs handles the certification of childcare providers and inspections of facilities. LARA regulations require childcare providers to undergo procedures like background checks, TB Tests and fingerprinting, all of which is unique to LARA and does not overlap with teaching requirements, as well as 16 hours of professional development.

"It's definitely hard to draw individuals to an extracurricular program like this that may just be for a couple hours a day when the licensing credentials require so much of them," Anderson said.

LARA also regulates teacher-student ratios (1-18) and limits the number of kids who can be in one space. A dearth of applicants for open positions impacts almost all of these programs, pushing them to take fewer kids or hold the program for fewer days. Some only need two or three more people to get through their waitlists.

Kid's Club, the extended-day child care program at Elk Rapids Schools, is looking to hire just two more staff in order to fully serve their community, but it has proved to be difficult for the program to offer pay that competes with other local employers, said Joann Miracle, the school district's childcare coordinator.

This year, they are hiring for one employee at the Lakeland Elementary School program, where there is a waitlist of four kids, and one at the Mill Creek Elementary School program, where the after school program is currently not offered because of a lack of staff. Miracle said the job posting at Mill Creek has been up for a year with no takers.

To adjust to staff shortages in the child care industry, Miracle has come up with some creative solutions in the past, like hiring 18-year-olds from Elk Rapids high school as staff for the program. Miracle said she hopes that can be an option this year, too.

"I put it out to the high school principal and said, 'Hey, who do you got for me this year?'"

Extended day programs at Benzie Central Schools serve about 20 to 60 kids per week and are run out of Lake Ann Elementary School, said Amber Wilson, the district's early childhood coordinator. The programs' staffing problems pushed them to cut the week short, only offering child care Monday through Thursday, which is an improvement from last year, when they had to run just Monday through Wednesday.

The Latchkey program at Kalkaska Public Schools' Birch Street Elementary, is licensed for up to 100 students, but it currently is capped at 25 because of staffing shortages, said Arica Zenner, Kalkaska child care director.

Zenner said she received very few applications, so she recently changed them to offer a higher wage. To no longer have a waitlist for the program, Zenner would need to hire at least three people, she said.

During the height of the pandemic, COVID restrictions enacted and enforced by LARA also limited the programs in the number of students they could take in, so some school district child care coordinators are celebrating the fact that they can have more kids than years prior.

Kingsley's extended child care program at Kingsley Middle School will serve 40 kids this year, which is more than they could with COVID restrictions, said Monica Crockett, the school district's director of childcare.

Crockett said her program has not had a lot of trouble with hiring staff, in part because they also run a summer camp program that college students will work at. Those same college students often seek a job at Kingsley after they graduate.

For many in childcare, the ability to offer services to the parents who need them is of the utmost importance, as they know how few options working parents have outside of what the school offer.

In Elk Rapids, Miracle said that parents' options for child care are slim, and they often turn to their community for support. The same is the case in Benzie County, Wilson said.

"To be honest, I wish there was somewhere that I could direct families once we're full," Wilson said. "For the most part, it's a lot of parents helping parents or grandparents, aunts, uncles helping."

___

(c)2022 The Record-Eagle (Traverse City, Mich.)

Visit The Record-Eagle (Traverse City, Mich.) at record-eagle.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.