Family

Child care shortages could be addressed by a combination of actions to help families with subsidies and help providers work through what is currently a daunting bureaucratic process, according to a new task force report released by the Alaska Department of Health.

Recommendations to expand child care options came in the second and final report of a task force established last year by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The Governor’s Task Force on Child Care report, released on Dec. 27, follows an earlier report released last year.

Altogether, they contain 56 recommendations for action.

“The recommendations put forward are not only responses to immediate challenges but also a roadmap for a resilient infrastructure that serves both working parents that need reliable, safe care, and the licensed facilities that provide that care,” Heidi Hedberg, commissioner of the state Department of Health, said in a statement. “Removing barriers, especially in rural areas, and supporting the child care workforce, are other areas we expect to see long-lasting improvements, as a result of this important work.”

Child care shortages and costs have been cited by businesses as a major workforce challenge. The problems became more severe after the Covid-19 pandemic, when Alaska lost 10% of its licensed child care providers, according to state officials.

Dunleavy created the task force as he declined last year to support more funding in the state budget for child care.

A study conducted by McKinley Research Group that helped guide the task force revealed varying gaps between the actual costs borne by families and the subsidies they receive, ranging from under $100 to several hundred dollars a month, depending on the type of child care received.

It also revealed cost differences based on geography. For example, monthly preschool costs per child in Anchorage averaged $1,186, while in northern Alaska the average was $1,749, according to the study.

To help address the problem of affordability, one recommendation is for geographical cost-of-living adjustments to be applied to parents’ income, said Leah Van Kirk, a department health care policy adviser. Living costs are higher in rural Alaska than in urban Alaska, and the McKinley Research Group report showed that child care costs in rural areas are particularly high.

Currently, a geographic cost adjustment is applied to subsidies paid for child care costs, but that does not extend to the income levels that are used to determine subsidy eligibility.

“Your income would have been considered the same whether you lived in Bethel or whether you lived in Anchorage,” Van Kirk said. The new report “recommends that we acknowledge the cost of living that’s different in some of the more rural areas of the state where we know cost of living is higher.”

Another recommendation focuses on making child care jobs more attractive. “It would be so when a parent works in a child care facility that they would qualify for a subsidy for their own children to attend child care,” Van Kirk said.

Some of the important information revealed in the study concerned the cost differences between home-based child care and that provided in child care centers, Van Kirk said.

“One of the things that was confirmed for us is that for child care providers, having a home-based licensed child care is a stronger business model, or more affordable,” Van Kirk said. “The cost of delivering care is less.” Because of that, home-based child care could be encouraged, especially in rural areas, she said.

Still, there are some potential cost-saving solutions that involve centers, according to the task force report. One of the recommendations is to explore the possibility of providing child care in schools or school district buildings. Sites like vacant classrooms could be assessed for use by providers who might want to open up new child care centers, potentially lowering costs and making the service more feasible, Van Kirk said.

“We know that, above staffing, the cost of a facility definitely is one of the highest costs for child care providers,” she said.

The Anchorage School District, which has struggled both with employee recruitment and with declining enrollment, is already considering setting up such a system. Care for school employees could be provided in school buildings, according to the district.

The task force also recommended that the state consider establishing what is known as a Tri-Share system, with government, employers and parents sharing costs. That system was pioneered in Michigan and has since been adopted in other states.

Other recommendations focus on streamlining the process for licensing child care providers and hiring child care workers. Some of the solutions involve modern technology. For example, safety screening of potential workers required the creation of physical fingerprint images that were mailed to law-enforcement agencies to use for background checks. To speed that now time-consuming process that can delay the hiring of staff members, the state just acquired digital fingerprinting equipment, using American Rescue Plan Act funds to do so, Van Kirk said.

The Department of Health has already taken action on several recommendations in the two reports. The acquisition of digital fingerprinting equipment is one example, Van Kirk said. The department is also developing an online Child Care Information System to help streamline licensing, employment, notices to families and other bureaucratic processes.

Some action has come in the form of new regulations.

One new set of regulations that went into effect on Oct. 9 allows for designated caregivers to be in charge when administrators of child care facilities are off-site.

Another new set of regulations, aimed at lowering hurdles to hiring child care workers by broadening qualifications, was published on Oct. 9. Public comments were mixed, with some that were supportive and some expressing concerns about unqualified workers.

Additionally, the Legislature earlier this year passed Senate Bill 189, that expanded families’ eligibility for subsidies and offers tax incentives for employers investing in child care. Those provisions were originally in House Bill 89, which passed that body, but they wound up merged into the wider-ranging Senate bill.

Since the Valdez child care center Stepping Stones closed two years ago, working parents like Brianne Skilbred have had to scramble.

“[My kids’] current child care provider that they have is their fifth in two years,” Skilbred said.

Stepping Stones was the only licensed facility offering all-day care. The only other licensed provider is a preschool that offers half-day classes a few days a week, and even that is near capacity.

Like many communities around the state, Valdez is struggling with a lack of child care — for many of the same reasons that child care providers are struggling across the country.

Skilbred is an executive assistant with the city and a mother of two young children. All things considered, she said, she’s lucky: Her boss lets her skip lunch breaks and come in early so she can pick up her kids at 3:30 p.m. during the summer. Her last babysitter gave Skilbred a two-month heads-up that she would be moving out of town.

“Some people only gave us a week,” Skilbred said. “That was a little bit harder.”

A few years ago, Skilbred said, she was asked to join the board of the relatively new nonprofit that had formed to keep the doors open at Stepping Stones. At her first board meeting, she said, they elected her president, giving her an up-close look at the challenges that led to its closure.

The main problem was staffing, she said. The center was offering hourly wages from $14 to $24 an hour, depending on experience, but in the wake of the pandemic, Skilbred said, they needed more than wages to attract employees.

“People were looking for medical benefits more than pay,” she said. “We just we can’t we couldn’t afford that. We wouldn’t be able to swing that.”

So when the director left for a better job in the Lower 48, and no one with the state-mandated credentials applied to replace her, Stepping Stones closed its doors.

And now, it’s not just that daycare is hard to find. For many people, it’s simply not available.

Susan Love, a college administrator and the chair of a city child care task force, said the lack of licensed providers sharply limits who has access.

“We don’t have any location where individuals can use state subsidies for low income or other needs or military assistance to access paid and licensed child care,” Love said.

Along with Valdez’s housing shortage, Love said it’s part of an interrelated economic puzzle that’s holding the community back in some important ways: Child care centers can’t find staff. Workers can’t find a place to live. And people who do find housing often can’t find or afford child care.

Valdez’s struggle to address the issue says a lot about just how intractable it is, Love said. After all, not every community has the trans-Alaska pipeline providing the city with more than half of its annual revenue.

“If we are trying to pull all the many resources of the town together to help solve the problem, and we’re struggling with it, I think it speaks to the complexity and the the depth of how challenging the problem is,” she said.

Still, in years past, people and businesses have made it work. But Elise Sorum-Birk, the deputy city clerk for Valdez who worked closely with the task force, said things have changed.

“I think it’s very well understood that child care as a business doesn’t really pencil out,” she said. “It might have, maybe 20 years ago, [but] it doesn’t in the current economy, and it’s just very hard to pay a living wage if you’re a child care business.”

Sorum-Birk said standards of care are higher — state regulations set minimum requirements for buildings and staff. Inflation has pushed the cost of living higher, so workers are looking for higher pay. And parents don’t always have money to spare.

“It’s just this very sensitive time of life, and there’s just not a lot of value put on it economically,” she said.

It’s a big task for a city to solve a decades-old economic problem, but Valdez is trying. Valdez is considering whether to rework part of its city-owned elementary school into a child care center. City officials are also working on a program with the local college to reduce the cost of getting certified to run a child care center.

Next up is finding someone to run the center and a sustainable funding and management model. That’s definitely easier said than done — but work is underway.

On Tuesday, Issac Benson crouched down to help his two-year-old son Silas take off tiny purple rain boots. Then he scooped Silas up and carried him through the doorway of a classroom at Juneau’s former Floyd Dryden Middle School.

“I’m back,” Silas Benson said, as he entered a room full of other toddlers. But he seemed shy and confused as he looked around. Silas has been coming to this day care since he was just a baby, but the room, with its soft rugs and bins of toys, was unfamiliar.

“Let’s ease our way back in, it’s okay,” Issac Benson said. “I know it’s a big transition and change, isn’t it?”

The Bensons’ regular day care, Glacier Valley Kids, flooded during last week’s record-breaking glacial outburst. Flood waters rose up to their house too.

“We stayed up all night and watched it happen, and luckily we were just high enough to not get totally inundated,” Issac Benson said. “It was still really scary.”

Their garage and crawlspace took on water. The family spent the week drying things out and helping their neighbors who were worse off, all while juggling other responsibilities. Issac Benson said it was nice to spend time with Silas at home, but seeing the Glacier Valley Kids staff on Tuesday morning was a relief.

“My wife and I were trying to still work full-time and full-time parent and I mean, those things are incongruent, right?” he said. “Without day care, without them, our lives don’t really function.”

The opening day of this emergency child care center marks some return to normalcy for Benson and the other parents. It’s a big day for child care provider Carolina Sekona too. She’s been running Glacier Valley Kids, a state licensed day care for children under five years old, out of her home on Emily Way for years.

Last week, more than two feet of water surged in and soaked wooden furniture, blankets, rugs, toys and stuffed animals. At least half of the stuff had to be thrown away, and it was clear that the house itself was uninhabitable. 

“I was crying, I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what we were going to do,” Sekona said. “All I could see was my home destroyed, and my child care destroyed. And I knew it was going to be months before that could be built back up.”

It looked like Glacier Valley Kids was going to be out of commission. That wasn’t an option, said Blue Shibler, the executive director of The Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit focused on supporting early childhood caregivers and educators. 

“In general, we can’t afford to lose any child care spaces. There aren’t any open spaces in child care programs,” she said.

Parents that rely on Sekona have nowhere else to go. Child care in Juneau is stretched thin under normal circumstances, and even before the flood Sekona was turning parents away. She cares for twelve Juneau children, and she had at least twelve more families on her waitlist. 

“If she wasn’t able to reopen, that would be 12 families that had to leave the workforce,” Shibler said. “That’s all there is to it.”

So Shibler’s agency pitched in some emergency money to replace the toys and other supplies. Sekona picked out a new plush campfire and a miniature wooden kitchen playset, among other things. Other day cares and schools around town donated cubbies, bookshelves, books and spare toys. 

And the City and Borough of Juneau offered up the former Floyd Dryden Middle School building, which served as an emergency shelter for people who evacuated their flooded homes just last week. Then Alaska Department of Health and Social Services issued Sekona a temporary license to set up shop there. 

She was grateful that it all came together so quickly. 

“I need to be back at work. I have a family to support,” Sekona said.

Sekona is a single mom of four. Luckily, she moved her family into a new house this summer, one that wasn’t touched by rising water. But the house that flooded supported Sekona’s livelihood, and that of the three people she employs. 

Over the weekend, they transformed two of the school’s empty classrooms. One is for mealtime and play. The other is for movies and naptime. Ever since the school building was vacated this spring, the city has been eyeing it for child care, so Glacier Valley Kids will be a trial run.

From one side of the room, Sekona watched the kids as they explored and rediscovered some of the familiar things that she was able to salvage.

A few favorite toys were spared by high shelves. The plastic tables and chairs that were designed to withstand toddlers held up pretty well against flood waters too. And on one wall, there’s a painting of a smiling lion with a rainbow mane. Sekona stopped by her gutted house on Emily Way to retrieve it.  

“The kids are so visual,” Sekona said. “They’ll see it. They’ll remember: this is us.”

A half dozen women — in their 30s, 40s and 50s — gather in a classroom in Phoenix for a few hours on a weekday morning.

They are all caregivers of young children.

There’s Yosbri Rojas. When her own 8-year-old is at school, she takes care of two younger children, whose father works with Rojas’ husband installing fiber optic lines.

“I like that the children feel happy with me,” Rojas says in Spanish.

Graciela Cruz is also here. She works early mornings in a warehouse, from 4 to 9 a.m. During the day, she parents her own 2-year-old daughter and also watches her neighbors’ 1-year-old while the child’s parents are at work cleaning houses and offices.

Cruz and Rojas are participants in an Arizona state-funded initiative called Kith and Kin. The 12-week program aims to give family, friend and neighbor caregivers the kind of training and support that licensed caregivers are required to have.

Licensed or not, caregivers make work possible

While most federal and state funding for child care in the U.S. goes to licensed settings, Arizona is one of a number of states that have long recognized the importance of informal caregiving arrangements that are allowing millions of parents go to work.

Such arrangements, which can be paid or unpaid, are especially common in immigrant communities and communities of color, where many parents hold jobs with nontraditional hours and prefer caregivers who share their language and culture.

A study in the south Phoenix area found that 60% of children from birth to 5 years old were being cared for outside of licensed child care settings.

That study led the nonprofit organization Candelen to launch Kith and Kin in 1999.

“There was the high need to provide both training and support” in communities where families with young children live, says program director Angela Tapia.

Now, 25 years later, programs like Kith and Kin are getting renewed attention in the wake of the pandemic, which put a spotlight on the fragile state of the child care industry.

There’s increased urgency from federal and state policymakers and businesses to ensure communities have access to affordable, high-quality child care, paving the way for parents — especially women — to work, an essential element of a robust and well-functioning economy.

A crash course in caregiving fundamentals

The aunts and grandmothers and neighbors who attend the Kith and Kin classes often don’t think of themselves as caregivers, says Tapia, much less as contributing to the economy.

“It’s more something they do out of love and to help their family and friends,” she says.

But caregiving requires more than love, and that’s where the program come in.

Over 12 weeks, the caregivers, who are predominantly women (though they do see the occasional grandfather or uncle) undergo training in basic health and safety, including CPR, as well as more advanced topics such as child development, positive discipline and injury prevention.

The women share personal challenges, ask for advice and offer comfort and support.

Funding comes from Arizona’s tobacco tax

The sessions are paid for in part by Arizona’s tobacco tax. Candelen estimates it trains about 1,000 caregivers a year.

Melinda Gulick, CEO of Arizona’s early childhood agency First Things First, says the funding is recognition that all children, regardless of where they spend their first years, deserve a high quality early childhood experience.

“Being ready on the first day of Kindergarten is the biggest indicator of academic success and success in life as well,” she says.

Gulick points out, in some rural parts of Arizona, there is no licensed child care, and even where there are options, Arizonans are known for wanting choice.

“This is a liberty and freedom state,” she says. “For many parents, the best place for [children] to be is with their auntie or their grandmother or in a co-op in their neighborhood.”

Keeping caregiving in the family

That’s certainly how Cynthia Diarte felt when she had her son Esteban. He’s now two and a big fan of Bluey, the beloved children’s television character.

Diarte, a teacher, grew up on the Texas-Mexico border, cared for by her grandmother while her mother went to work at an airport restaurant.

Diarte says it was never a question who would watch her children when she became a mother herself. Her mother, Elvia Elena Nunez, insisted she be the one, carrying on their family tradition.

“As his grandmother, my love is different from any other caregiver,” Nunez says in Spanish.

As a Kith and Kin participant, Nunez has appreciated learning new ways to keep Esteban entertained without screens. She also cherishes the community she’s built with the other caregivers and the enrichment Esteban has gotten through the program.

While class is in session, Esteban is with other toddlers, singing songs and playing games in the child care room down the hall.

“He’s bringing more vocabulary. He’s starting to speak up a little bit more,” says Diarte. “He really needed that social aspect, the relationship with other kids.”

And she expects those relationships to endure. A side benefit of the Kith and Kin classes is how close the caregivers become.

“They end up becoming like the madrinas, like the godmothers, the godparents, to each other’s children,” says program director Tapia. “They stay connected throughout the years.”

State officials have alerted foster parents that Alaska health and community services agencies will take over the costs of a federal program that fully funds their child care after the pandemic-era money ends in July.

The news is a boon to the foster system, which foster families and child care providers say has struggled to find families that can afford to foster because child care costs are so high in the state.

Ashli Mackey is one of those foster parents, who currently cares for two foster children in addition to her five adopted and biological children. Without child care covered, she said, she would not be able to afford being a foster parent.

“I would no longer be able to continue fostering kiddos in need or supporting reunification. For long-term planning, it would also impact my ability to adopt kids,” she said.

Four of Mackey’s children need child care, two of whom are her foster children. She is a teacher for the Anchorage School District and said that child care costs for the other two is 35% of her paycheck.

“Doubling that would be impossible. So if there’s a lapse in full childcare subsidies for foster parents, I would anticipate that homes such as mine would need to close their licenses,” she said.

Mackey said the change means her foster children will continue to get an early education. If the money had run out at the end of this month as it was set to do, she would have had to hire a nanny — depriving her kids of the socialization with other children that teaches basic skills that they need to be successful as future students and community members.

The state has long subsidized child care for foster families, but during the pandemic it used federal relief dollars to pay the entire cost of care. A spokesperson for the Department of Family and Community Services said the state will dedicate $350,000 to the effort over the next fiscal year, which equates to full funding for about 530 families.

Advocates say the change means that more families will be able to take care of the state’s most vulnerable children, which improves health outcomes and keeps siblings together. And they are applauding the coverage of the full cost of care, rather than the “market rate,” which is typically lower and often doesn’t pay the full bill, leaving parents paying the difference.

Christina Eubanks, the director of Hillcrest Child Care Center in Anchorage, was one of the providers who brought the issue to public attention. Hillcrest serves several families with foster children, including Mackey’s, and Eubanks had to warn parents that they would be responsible for part of the $1,850 a month it costs to enroll a child at her care center.

“The cost was way more than what the reimbursement rate was,” she said. “If it goes back to how it was before, you’re going to start looking at paying five to $600 a month in child care costs.”

She said she was worried fewer people would foster, leaving more children in state custody, if the state did not act.

Rabbi Abram Goodstein of the Beth Sholom congregation is an advocate who amplified her message. “A lot of us kind of got together and realized we should really push the state to support what I would say is the most vulnerable Alaskans in our state,” he said. “These are children that are under six who don’t necessarily have stable child care, who don’t necessarily have a stable home, who could really benefit from a quality early education — and if it were free for them, that would be an incredible boost to their success in life.”

Advocates rallied around the issue when it was raised at a listening session sponsored by the Alaska Children’s Trust. ACT Director Trevor Storrs said state officials took ownership of the issue once advocates pointed it out.

“This really happened because of the leadership of our commissioners, and we thank them for their continued support of children and families, because they really made it happen,” he said.

Storrs added that the solution underlines how important it is to invest in families.

“This is just a small step towards really universal child care, which is the ultimate solution to dealing with their child care crisis,” he said.

The letter to foster parents said the state agencies would seek to continue the funding further into the future.

Correction: This article has been updated to correctly state the name of the Department of Family and Community Services.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Alaska’s U.S. senators split their votes earlier today over a bill to protect in vitro fertilization. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins of Maine were the only Republicans to vote in favor of advancing the Democratic bill.

Sen. Dan Sullivan joined all other Republicans in voting to block the bill. He signed onto a Republican letter accusing Democrats of “false fear-mongering” about reproductive issues. A Sullivan staff member says Sullivan supports IVF treatment. She did not provide a reason why he voted to stop the IVF bill. It fell a dozen votes short of the 60 needed to advance.

The Senate dynamics echoed a vote last week on contraceptive rights. Murkowski voted for that one, too, while Sullivan didn’t vote. He hasn’t said why he was absent for it.

In vitro fertilization has been drawn into the abortion debate because it often produces more embryos than parents choose to implant. Typically, embryos are frozen for possible future use or destroyed.

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution Wednesday opposing the destruction of “frozen embryonic human beings.”

Senate Democrats are highlighting their support for abortion and other reproductive rights, drawing a contrast with Republicans in an election year. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said the IVF bill wasn’t a mere show vote but a “show us who you are” vote.