Annual child wellbeing survey reveals child care continues to hit low-income families

Jul. 25—FAIRMONT — Child care continues to be a catch-22 in West Virginia.

It is one of the principal reasons why the state ranks 42nd in child wellbeing, according to the 2023 Kids Count Databook published every year by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The latest one was published in June.

"Imagine somebody pulls up for lunch and you order your Wendy's number two meal," Tricia Kingery, executive director of West Virginia's Kids Count, said. "And, you look at that mom there who has a young child. Who's watching her child and how can she afford it if she's making a Wendy's payroll?"

The state didn't budge from its overall ranking from the previous data book. This year, Kids Count focused on the child care crisis taking place within the state.

Child care in West Virginia can best be described as an interlocking series of catch-22s that make it difficult to adequately support parents and their families and trap children in poverty. Raising a child is expensive.

Kingery said that for middle income families, it can cost as much to send a child to daycare as it does to send them to college. That creates a difficult situation for low income parents who need a job to stay financially afloat but need to make sure their child is taken care of in order to keep their low-paying job.

Without access to child care, a parent might have no choice but to stay home, continuing the cycle of poverty that makes it hard to access child care in the first place.

According to the data book, the average cost of center-based child care for a toddler in West Virginia is roughly $8,000 per year. For a couple, that's 9% of their median income and 35% for a single mother's income.

Providers face their own conundrums as well. Subsidized child care is available in the state, removing some barriers for parents. However, even if funding is available an open spot most likely won't be.

"The child care programs I speak to, it's common for them to have anywhere from 60 to 150 people on their waiting list of children," Kristy Ritz, executive director of the West Virginia Association for Young Children, said. "And, we recommend that families get on child care waiting lists as soon as they find out they're pregnant."

Landing on the waitlist means a one or 2 year wait. Ritz said child care depends on a flawed business model, where providers are typically paid by daily attendance rather than enrollment. That means that whenever a child doesn't attend class that day, the provider loses money that would be used to pay for staff or other upkeep.

This contributes to the low wages that child care providers make. According to the Kids Count Data Book, child care workers are paid 98% worse than other professions. Ritz said that even retail or fast food pays better, at $16 or $18 an hour compared to the $12 to $14 that working in a child care center pays.

"So since child care workers are earning such low wages, and they're earning these low wages because the cost of child care is so expensive, child care providers can't charge families more because the families can't afford it, but they can't charge less because then they can't pay their employees," Ritz said.

Tiffany Gale is the owner and director of the Miss Tiffany's School for Young Children, in Weirton, West Virginia She's also the family child care chair of the West Virginia Association for Young Children. She pointed out that child care is more than just babysitting or giving a child a hand-me-down Barbie to play with.

"We're trying to make this switch from calling it daycare and even child care to early childhood education because that is exactly what we're doing," Gale said. "We have qualified staff, we have educated staff, we have staff with degrees in early childhood education. And so, we have to be compensated as educators, because we are educators."

With the cost of higher education continuing to increase, Gale said that no one wants to graduate from college with an associate's degree or bachelor's degree to make $10 an hour as a child care worker.

In West Virginia's case, breaking out of one child care catch-22 might help break the state out of the other ones. The state is fortunate in that it receives plenty of child care subsidies, Ritz said. The bottleneck is making sure there are enough providers. Thanks to pandemic-era emergency spending, child care providers are currently paid through the enrollment based system. However, that system is due to end in 2024.

There have been two previous attempts to make the enrollment basis permanent, but neither attempt made it through the state government. Ritz said that the West Virginia Association for Young Children is going to try again this year.

The stakes in getting the enrollment model to be permanent are large. Gale said research shows that children who participate in early childhood programs perform better in elementary school. Considering the low place on education lists the state inhabits, it makes access to early childhood education all the more important.

"The first 1,000 days of a child's life is when the most brain growth happens," Gale said. "What you teach them can affect them for the rest of their lives. We are quite literally making an impact on the lives of young children every day, which leads into adolescence, adulthood and ultimately making an impact on the future of our communities."

Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com