Could home-based child care remedy high cost? 'Confusing, rigid' policy at issue: report
Child care centers in Asheville costs an average of $186 a week, according to a search on Care.com, but some centers can charge up to $400 a week, some of the highest rates in North Carolina.
The state also saw a massive growth in child care center cost between 2018 and 2020, according to a report by Lendingtree published in March, and saw the second highest increase in toddler child care center costs in the country. It is one of the issues business leaders have said is preventing job growth. Limited child care options limit the pool of workers in any city or state.
At least one local group in the Emma neighborhood may have found a remedy, and it is not only affordable, according to the group’s spokesperson, but it is close to home, flexible and fosters an environment that shares the families culture.
"Home-based care also gives parents confidence and peace of mind—the caretaker is their relative, neighbor or another personal acquaintance. These caretakers also know the culture and language of the children they are caring for and parents can communicate with the care provider to closely monitor the health and development of their child," said Geny Hernández López, spokesperson for PODER Emma, a cooperative network of child care providers. She thinks the model could help curb Asheville’s high cost of child care.
Currently, Poder Emma has nine home-based care providers who care for around 30 children between ages zero and four.
“There are families within the community who cannot afford the high costs of child care centers in the city, so they turn to home-based child care as it is more affordable and economical,” López said.
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However, North Carolina’s child care industry, specifically home-based care, is hindered by policy, according to a new report commissioned in part by Poder Emma. The report, authored by 30-plus year industry veteran Louise Stoney, shows only 4% of child care in North Carolina is home-based, much lower than other states with similar populations. Issues around obtaining licenses, essential for both businesses and parents looking to obtain government assistance, are to blame, the report says.
Home-based child care, also called family child care, is defined by the study as being “child care delivered in a home-like setting for small groups of children.”
Rather than individual homes serving a few children trying to go it alone, many across the county are forming provider networks that identify common needs, create support systems and advocate for public funding, and the report says these networks are the key to growing home-based health care. Poder Emma, in addition to its nine providers, has five assistants and 12 bilingual young people who are training to provide babysitting services, López said. The network also provides training in early childhood skills development, CPR and, soon, child abuse prevention.
Licensing restraints, however, make it difficult for prospective home-based child care business owners to start what could otherwise be a fairly simple process, Stoney said.
"Think about it. The idea of finding a building, renovating that building for it to be a child care center. Very complicated. A whole bunch of facility rules and licensing and all that because you're really running a big facility versus running a small program. In a home-based setting with mixed age groups, and you know, one or two caregivers, that's different, that's a much more viable small business to open fairly quickly," she said.
Home-based care can also be much more "nimble," Stoney said, as she saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents were much more willing to send their children back to home-based programs versus center-based ones, she said, with home-based care showing historic numbers of children served.
Kelly Connor, spokesperson for the state's Department of Health and Human Services, said that while child care costs are typically driven by staffing costs, high costs do not always equate to higher pay for child care workers, which drives businesses to close early and teachers to leave the field.
"The child care business model has long been a broken and unsustainable one — with families of young children paying large portions of their weekly budgets for child care and child care providers earning poverty wages. We need to work together on long-term solutions that make child care affordable for families and provide living wages and benefits to child care providers so they can afford to stay in the field," Connor said.
Barriers to growth
Fear of breaking the law is "(p)erhaps the biggest barrier to growing the supply, and improving the quality, of home-based child care," the report says, which leads to many providers staying hidden and isolated from the child-care community and from potential customers except those that are reached through word of mouth. This fear stunts the growth of providers and may prevent new providers from starting up, according to the report.
"HBCC providers across the state can share stories of providers who were threatened with prosecution, publicly shamed, shunned or maligned in some way for a perceived failure to comply with regulatory requirements. Even in cases where the accusations proved false, the damage was done. When faced with judgement and potential prosecution, trust is shattered, and providers go underground to avoid exposure," the report says.
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Licensing was a major issue for each of the three networks studied by the report: Peletah, a faith-based organization in Craven County that is working to develop a network of family and faith-based child care homes; Westside Network, one of four family child care networks in the Charlotte area and Poder Emma, a network of primarily legally-exempt providers due to licensing barriers, particularly because of immigration status.
"Most providers in one network are undocumented and therefore ineligible to even apply for licensure. Other Networks, while serving providers who are U.S. citizens, have experienced significant challenges and report that current licensing laws, policies and procedures are confusing, rigid, inconsistently interpreted, and fail to acknowledge the reality of providing child care in a home-based environment rather than a child care center," the report says.
For communities of color, obtaining licenses can be even more difficult because of internalized racism and white supremacy, López said.
"There are Black communities that are unable to obtain licenses due to requirements related to felonies that the system has created to control said community," López said. "In the case of the immigrant community of Latino origin, not having a social security number, and from there all possibility of access to a license closed. There are currently no avenues or will to change the laws as other states have done."
Licenses exist, Connor said, to establish minimum standards to protect children. Requirements include things like ensuring toxic substances are out of children’s reach, ensuring staff have background checks and have training in things like preventing communicable disease spread and CPR.
"North Carolina’s five-star rating system allows child care programs, including family child care, to meet additional quality standards designed to ensure young children get rich learning opportunities that give them the best start for later success in school," Connor said.
Stoney was quick to point out that no one is looking to loosen regulations, only to make them more clear and easy to understand.
"We want to make it easier, not lowering standards, but making the process easier for programs to apply to become home-based child care. We want to create supports, we want to make the rules easy to understand, we want to have have websites so that providers can click and learn how to do this. A wide range of things," Stoney said.
In order to receive state assistance to pay for child care, parents must enroll their children in centers with at least a three-star rated license, which means that the program must comply with stricter staff and program standards. While this is a "well-intentioned strategy that aims to increase early learning opportunities for children," the report says, it actually makes it harder to find child care for low income families as three-star or higher licensed child care centers are relatively limited.
"(N)early 300,000 of North Carolina children under the age of six are likely cared for in informal (likely home-based) settings not included in the regulatory system. Alternative pathways to quality child care are not only possible but can potentially meet the needs of children and families, especially for families seeking care providers that speak their home language or have a shared cultural background," the report says.
What will help?
In order to support the growth of home-based child care, Stoney's report recommended the North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early Education take a number of steps:
provide amnesty for unlicensed providers willing to license
create education materials about the amnesty and family child care licensure
share materials with professionals enforcing local building, fire and sanitation codes or inspecting facilities to ensure compliance with local rules and regulations
create a collaborative, step-by-step toolkit to help networks guide providers through the licensing process
provide funding for technical assistance, provided by network leaders, aimed at boosting licensing.
secure funding for networks to help participating providers with licensing costs.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education is committed to growing home-based child care, Connor said, and has already committed $4 million over the next two years to the cause. That money will go towards "providing technical assistance, coaching, mentoring and professional development to family child care homes with the goal of increasing the supply of providers, retaining current providers and improving the quality of services," she said.
More than 1,000 home-based child care providers also received funding through NCDHHS's Child Care Stabilization Grants, Connor said, which helped keep them open during the pandemic. Additionally, she noted that technical assistance providers, trainers, coaches and licensing consultants are available throughout the state to help programs through licensure.
North Carolina’s T.E.A.C.H. program, she added, provides scholarships for early childhood online classes for all early educators working in child care in the state.
The report suggested that growing home-based child care should be a priority for those outside of government, too, by recognizing that home-based child care businesses can begin with just two full-time children, which does not require a license, linking existing provider networks, exploring new business models and encouraging networks to pilot child assessment tools, among other recommendations.
Financial resources would help Poder Emma the most, López said, allowing the organization to expand its network and reach all Spanish-speaking child care providers in Buncombe County.
"It would also help to have access to decent housing where both providers and parents can provide well-being opportunities to the children of the community. Although in our network we share resources such as materials and training focused on child development and stimulation, we would like to be able to have access to professional training, where people from the community who wish to be teachers or educators can study and have the opportunity to be part of an early childhood education center or school," López said.
The pandemic highlighted North Carolina's need to strengthen child care, López said, something it has not focused on enough.
"In the most difficult time of the pandemic, some of the partners who are part of our network had to close their home-based care to protect their own families, which harmed the families of the community who suddenly had to leave their jobs because there was no one to take care of their children. Others continued to offer their care, following the new safety and care protocols, which allowed the production chain in the city of Asheville, which depends on immigrants, to continue without pause," López said.
Christian Smith is the general assignment reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times. Questions or Comments? Contact him at RCSmith@gannett.com or 828-274-2222.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville child care affordability, expansion held back by policy
