A Conversation With ... Jennifer Crouch

The U.S. Bureau of Labor data say the average wage in Missouri for child care workers is $13.50 an hour. What are the challenges in recruitment for OTC and providers?
As our community has been talking for really at least a couple of years now really seriously about the child care crisis, that is the issue: wages. Child care businesses cannot recruit and retain staff at the wages they can afford to pay with what families can afford to pay. That has to be solved for us to see any improvement. You can make more money doing just about anything else in our community. It’s certainly rewarding and fun, but it’s a hard job, too. We don’t have trouble recruiting students to the program. There’s a lot of interest in working with children and families. But I think the breakdown occurs when they go to find a job and realize that I can’t pay my bills.

To help make child care more affordable and accessible, the Missouri Legislature is considering tax credits to taxpayers who donate to child care centers, employers who invest in child care needs and child care providers. What impact would those have if passed?
It’s certainly something that’s going to help. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. One of the challenges is that tax credits are something you have to have the capacity to sell to people. Here at OTC, we have a foundation. But your average small child care business, they don’t have the resources to recruit donors to take advantage of those tax credits. So, we’re looking at how we can leverage those tax credits and make them to where child care providers really can use them. I think the language in the bill allows an intermediary, maybe an organization like Community Foundation of the Ozarks or United Way, to collect the tax credits and then distribute the funding.

Are there models in other states that are addressing the wage challenge for child care workers?
In Kentucky, all child care workers automatically qualify for child care subsidy. If you work in child care, the state pays for the full cost of your child care. That’s a huge incentive. Michigan is doing something that they’re calling Tri-Share. So, child care costs are split. A third is paid by the employer, a third by the state and a third by parents. So, it’s providing more revenue for child care businesses so they can provide higher quality and recruit and retain staff, but also keeping the costs a little bit lower for families. Right now, we are one of six communities in Missouri participating in the child care community planning grant through Kids Win Missouri. That is really helping us identify the gaps in our child care services, and then start to identify possible solutions. One of the things that came out of that is that less than 1% of our philanthropic funding in Springfield, which is over $111 million, is being used for early childhood care and education. We really have some opportunity to leverage more of our philanthropic dollars to solve this issue. The chamber is involved in this work, and they’re really hearing from our business community members that this is a workforce issue. They cannot find people to work because they don’t have child care. The business community has to be a part of the solution.

A study by the Mayor’s Commission for Children said nearly half of students locally who did not attend a high-quality early childhood center were not ready for kindergarten. When you talk about child care, you’re not just talking about a spot; you’re talking about the programming around it, right?
There is child care that is, you could think about it sort of like warehousing children or parking lots for children; that’s not what we want. We really want high-quality experiences for young children that are going to impact them throughout their life because it is a two-generation workforce issue. It’s our current workforce having child care so that they can work, and we’re laying the foundation for our future workforce and our community. So, 90% of brain development occurs by the age of five. That’s where we really have our funding model in our country backwards. We invest a lot in K-12 and even higher education, but we invest very little in the birth to 5 years when the bulk of brain development is occurring.

The Missouri Independent and Muck Rack did a deep dive into public records and found there are 200,000 kids in Missouri living in a child care desert. That is now predicted to be further exacerbated by the ending of pandemic-era subsidies for child care centers. Are we seeing that in our community?
Absolutely. The pandemic funding is just winding down, so I really think in the next year we’re probably going to see a lot more closures in our community. Greene County is not actually designated as a desert, but we are in a lot of ways a desert because we have so many people that drive into work in our community that people from outside counties are taking up some of our child care slots. In our community, only 59% of kids birth to 2 years old are being served. That data is based on assuming that 70% of age-eligible children might need care. And then, even if there’s a slot, can they afford it? The median income in Springfield is a little over $41,000. The average annual cost for infant/toddler child care is over $13,000 a year. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that child care costs not exceed 7% of a family’s income. Child care subsidy is available, but the threshold for families to apply is so low for a family of four, you have to be making less than $31,000 a year. Until we figure out how to offer the child care workforce a competitive wage, it’s not going to get better. There are too many other jobs offering just so much more compensation. The field has to be professionalized.