Jackson County has added 89 child care slots this year. What can other counties learn from their success?
While perhaps most known for its forested landscape, Jackson County is also making a name for itself with its rigorous efforts to increase quality child care options within its borders.
In the past 10 months, nearly 90 child care slots have been added in Jackson County largely due to the multifaceted efforts of the Jackson County Child Care Task Force and its network, which consist of child care providers, business leaders and employers, elected officials and more.
The network is also getting recognition from the state, as it recently won an award from the Wisconsin Economic Development Association.
These successes, industry experts say, can serve as fertile ground for other communities to learn from as they navigate their own child care woes.
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Lack of child care costing $2.5 million a year in lost productivity, study found
Years before the pandemic, Jackson County businesses began noticing a common problem: Employees were missing work due to not having consistent, quality child care. In fact, 2018 data from the Center for American Progress showed the majority of the county's census tracts are child care deserts, or areas with more than 50 children under age 5 that have either no regulated child care options or three times as many children under 5 per each regulated slot. Such conversations led to the formation of the task force in 2018 to further examine the scope of the problem.
The task force worked with the 7 Rivers Alliance, an economic development agency in La Crosse, to put a dollar figure on the damage lack of child care was causing businesses between employees missing work, being late for work and losing focus at work: $2.5 million a year in lost productivity.
“(Employees) weren’t able to work to their full potential because of the impact the lack of child care was having on their family,” said Marianne Torkelson, a longtime task force member, current chair of the Jackson County Child Care Network and vice president of business development and training at Co-Op Credit Union.
The lack of child care in the area is so much of an issue that some families are wary of taking jobs in − and relocating to − Jackson County. Torkelson said she has heard of people turning down jobs in the county once they realized providers can have yearlong waitlists.
As the task force and its broad membership base continued to assess the scope of the county’s child care landscape and potential solutions, they recognized having a separate, but interrelated, nonprofit entity would give them access to many grants and other resources. Thus, the Jackson County Network, which Torkelson is the chair of, was formed by the end of 2019.
About three years later, in September 2022, the network received a Community and Economic Development Award from the state’s Economic Development Association, which recognizes innovative efforts to help grow communities in Wisconsin. Torkelson said this accolade is a testament to the collaboration of the entire community on these child care solutions.
For Chris Hardie, CEO of the 7 Rivers Alliance, who nominated the network for the award, the recognition speaks to just how interconnected child care is to a community's economic growth.
“A lot of times people think of economic development as ‘you developed a business park’ or ‘you brought in this company’ or ‘you did this project,’” Hardie said. “(The network) is really about how we can make existing businesses in Jackson County more successful, because having more child care will lead them to more employees, and businesses cannot be successful unless they have workers.”
Wisconsin Early Childhood Association’s Kelly Matthews, who is co-director of WECA’s shared services network, said there are two main components to Jackson County’s success: Everybody is included in the conversation and they explore multiple solutions.
“Nothing is off the table,” Matthews said. “They are considering multiple things at once. They’re not hanging their hat on one solution; they are being really broad in how they are looking at this issue and who might be able to help them.”
Communities must look at how they can support existing providers so they are less likely to leave the field as well as how they can attract new ones, Matthews said.
Grants help new centers get up and running
Thanks to the support of the Jackson County Child Care Network, Thereasa Holman was able to open Tiny Tots Daycare out of her Hixton home, and she did so during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a full-time employee working outside the home and a mother of five children, Holman found that between struggling to find consistent child care herself and having to leave work at times to take care of her children, fulfilling both duties was nearly impossible. Once the pandemic hit, she said it became “obvious” she needed to help the myriad of other parents in similar situations and open a regulated day care.
“During the pandemic, the primary motivation for me to open a day care was so that I could be home with my kids during the pandemic shutdown … but the real motivator for me was my mom," Holman said. "My mom worked in a hospital, and I would talk to her a lot, and there would be so many days where I would be so frustrated, and she would say ‘Have you thought about going back to work?'
“I’d say, ‘I can’t do it. Do you know how many people are out there right now who absolutely have to be at work and have no other option for child care? These essential workers have nowhere to go with their kids. How do the nurses and doctors do their jobs if they don’t know their kids are taken care of?’”
It wasn’t easy to get Tiny Tots up and running, Holman said. Like any provider, she faced regulation standards and their corresponding start-up costs. She said start-up grants the network provided allowed her to clear the biggest hurdle: installing an outdoor fence, which the Department of Children and Families requires of regulated providers.
“Honestly if I didn’t have (the network’s support), I couldn’t have become regulated. (Regulation) is important because once you become regulated, you can accept funding from the state that helps … people who otherwise can’t afford child care," Holman said.
As a family child care provider, Holman was eligible for reimbursement of start-up expenses up to $2,500 under the network’s grant. Those starting larger centers can receive up to $5,000, Torkelson said. She explained the network funds the grant through a combination of other grants it has received, as well as county-allocated American Rescue Plan Act dollars, which are pandemic recovery funds.
“It doesn’t necessarily cover 100% of the cost, but it helps,” Torkelson said of the start-up grants.
Retention bonuses offer a much-needed incentive for employees
Once providers are in business, the network offers a variety of support, such as quarterly retention bonuses.
Also funded through ARPA money the network received from the county board, the network offers full-time child care workers at regulated centers and family child care centers $500 each quarter and offers part-time employees $250 each quarter.
As child care workers notoriously make low wages and usually do not receive job-offered benefits, such bonuses can make a world of difference.
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Torkelson found the average family child care provider in Jackson County makes just above $7 an hour — below the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Early education researcher Alejandra Ros Pilarz reported the average center-based provider in Wisconsin makes $12.99 an hour.
According to studies done last year, 18% of family providers and 28% of early childhood education teachers planned to leave the field in the next two years. One of the major factors − and also a reason why individuals are reluctant to enter the field − is the low job compensation and lack of advancement opportunities.
The staffing shortage, industry experts say, is directly tied to why so many communities are facing child care deserts.
“We have heard time and time again across the state ‘We have three rooms that are closed because we can’t find the staff. We could be taking care of 150 kids, but right now we can only do 75 because we can’t find the staff,’” Matthews told attendees at a recent child care discussion in Marathon County.
This is all too familiar for Black River Child Care Center. Hannah Prince, its business administrator, said that while the center is licensed to serve 71 children, it currently can only serve 51 due to staffing shortages.
It’s not that child care centers want to pay their employees such low wages or that family providers want to take home less than minimum wage. Even though the cost of care is steep for many families, it is often providers’ only source of funding. By the time costs of care − all of which have been compounded by inflation − are taken out, little is left to pay child care workers.
“Our only income is tuition (and fundraising),” Prince said. “That’s not only paying wages, that’s paying the lights, the food, utilities, insurance, everything. Over the last three years, we’ve only raised tuition rates $5 a week because you have to think of the kids at home and their families at home … we can’t charge too much to where they’re struggling.”
Prince said that with wages being pretty much locked in by what families can afford, retention bonuses offer a much-needed incentive for Black River Child Care Center employees. The employees look forward to the bonuses every three months, she said.
A new home for Tadpoles Daycare
Together, the Jackson County Child Care Task Force and Network ensure local providers are aware of all possible help − even those opportunities not provided by the network itself.
Ann Smetana, who owns the licensed family child care facility Tadpoles Daycare in Black River Falls, said she tapped into the expertise of the task force to help her secure $25,000 in ARPA grants from the county. The task force made her aware of the opportunity and offered her support when developing her request, she said.
This helped her accelerate the time it took to move her child care business from the house she lives in to another house. The ARPA funding helped expand the backyard play area and parking, rebuild ramps, replace the furnace and air conditioning and other updates necessary to get the new house ready for Tadpoles Daycare.
Smetana said the move made it possible for her to continue to operate the business.
“I’ll be honest — I don’t know how much longer I would have lasted if I had to be ‘stuck’ in my home and seeing my work 24/7,” Smetana said, explaining the COVID-19 lockdown severely limited the outside activities Tadpoles could do. “Even though I do work (long) days, I can at least leave my work when I go home …if I would have had to stay at my house, I probably would have lasted maybe five years because I would’ve been burnt out.”
The new site of Tadpoles Daycare offers another opportunity: Smetana is considering refinishing its basement into a space for a separate family child care, where another provider could rent the space for a small fee and run their own business. Depending on whether this new provider is certified or licensed and on the ages of the children enrolled, this could add a maximum of six to eight regulated slots in Jackson County.
Personalized coaching a highlight of shared services model
With many communities across the state beginning to discuss ways to address the child care crisis, "shared services" is becoming a buzzword. These networks aim to cut providers’ costs and save them time by pooling resources and information.
The Jackson County Child Care Task Force and Network encourage local regulated providers to make use of WECA’s shared services model, the Wisconsin Early Education Shared Services Network. Currently, all regulated providers in Wisconsin have access to the first two tier levels of support, but only 21 counties — including Jackson — have access to the highest level of resources. Previously, the task force even paid to bring WESSEN’s highest level of support to Jackson County until WECA was able to foot the cost with COVID relief dollars.
In doing so, regulated child care providers in Jackson County have access to all the support WESSEN offers, including software that helps with tuition collecting and billing and mental and physical health support.
For many of the providers in Jackson County, the personalized coaching the network provides − the coaches are like mentors who meet with providers on a regular basis − are highlights of WESSEN.
“They’re amazing, I love them,” Smetana said. “It’s like having a personal assistant. Whenever I have questions, whether it be about grants or opportunities, or even if I have questions about policies, (I talk to my coach).”
An 'audacious' goal to add 500 child care slots
Smetana said while the solutions the network has put forth are vast, they are all driven by the needs specific to Jackson County.
“No two communities are the same, and no two solutions are the same, so in Jackson County here, while we can look at other counties and see what they’re doing, we’re still going to have to tweak it for our county,” she said.
At the beginning of 2022, the network set what Matthews calls an “audacious” goal: to add 500 regulated child care slots in Jackson County in five years. With 89 regulated slots being added since January, the network appears on pace to meet this goal.
“It’s a lofty goal, but we’re certainly not going to give up. The biggest hurdle is staffing. The No. 1 priority we need to figure out is how to get more people into the child care workforce. We have to figure out a way to provide appropriate wages and benefits,” Torkelson said. “We’re going to look at innovative staffing solutions, and innovative child care models.”
Madison Lammert is a Report for America corps member who covers child care and early education in Wisconsin for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. Contact her at mlammert@gannett.com or 920-993-7108. Follow on Twitter @MadisonLammert0.
You can directly support her work with a tax-deductible donation online at http://bit.ly/Appleton_RFA or by check made out to The GroundTruth Project with subject line Report for America Post Crescent Campaign. Address: The GroundTruth Project, Lockbox Services, 9450 SW Gemini Dr, PMB 46837, Beaverton, Oregon 97008-7105.
This article originally appeared on Wausau Daily Herald: Jackson County sees success with efforts to combat child care crisis
