19 September 2024
DULUTH — “I can’t sleep at night.”
Emily Lepisto’s sleepless nights are fueled by the daunting challenge of finding day care for her children in Duluth. Two years ago, she moved from Minneapolis to Duluth with her husband, sister, and two young children, seeking relief from the high child care costs in the Twin Cities.
What Lepisto didn’t anticipate was a new challenge in her new city: the severe lack of available child care.
Duluth has been grappling with a child care crisis for years, but the situation worsened significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as federal funding dried up. Now, Lepisto faces the tough reality that finding child care in Duluth is not just a matter of cost but of availability.
Her struggle reflects a larger problem in Duluth, where the gap between supply and demand has left many families without care.
From 2023 to present, at least eight child care centers in Duluth have closed or are on the verge of closing, according to YWCA director Morgan Beryl.
The deepening crisis
Unable to keep up with staffing shortages, regulatory barriers and high costs, the city might see three more child care centers close in just months: the YWCA Education Center, Observation Hill and the Building Blocks Learning Center.
Beryl helps oversee two programs at the YWCA: the early childhood education center and the young mothers housing program. Both will be shuttered unless the YWCA finds another organization to take over ownership. Their deadline is Nov. 1.
At a press conference Tuesday, local child care professionals and city employees presented findings from the mayor’s Child Care Task Force.
Here’s the problem they set out to tackle in their report: “The current and projected child care needs of the community exceed local capacity. How can the city of Duluth and the community as a whole create new child care resources to advance development of the child care sector at greater than current rates?”
Impacts on families and potential solutions
Elissa Hansen, CEO and president of Northspan, a nonprofit consulting group based in Duluth, presented a new report from the Child Care Task Force at the press conference. According to licensing data, Duluth has 3,668 children from newborn to age 6 with all their parents in the workforce. But only 2,737 slots are available.
Almost 1,000 children are left without a place to go while their parents are at work. On top of that, 3% of the slots aren’t available to infants. Nor does this data include demand for child care for children over age 6 or new residents moving into the city, Hansen said.
Lepisto is one of those new residents. She’s left considering two options if she can’t find alternative child care. Either she poaches a YWCA staff member to become a full-time nanny for her three children, or she, her husband and her sister consider leaving one of their jobs to look after the kids during the day.
“Any outcome of the day care not being open would be really terrible,” Lepisto said.
Hansen listed four priorities that the task force recommended to Mayor Roger Reinert: “Increasing community education and support, developing a sustainable workforce, creating opportunities for current and new facilities, and improving financial support for providers and parents.”
The task force’s report outlines plans to draw new employees by supporting training programs, creating an ongoing source of substitute teachers, and even expanding Jump Into Child Care, or JUMP, a free training program for individuals interested in becoming child care professionals.
Financial and workforce challenges
Child care centers face an additional challenge of retention. As the individual burden grows on veteran employees in the field, some have become subject to burnout. As child care centers close, some employees retire with no intention of returning. This creates a vicious cycle as fewer employees result in less capacity, which means that adult-to-child ratios become unmanageable.
Some employees at Observation Hill have been working in child care for more than 30 years. For them, it’s time to take a step back and reflect.
“We’ve been doing this our whole lives. I have one employee that has never filled out a job application and we have choices to make,” said Kimberly Bartlett, director of Observation Hill. “We are probably all done with child care.”
Recruitment programs and new child care centers ease the disparity somewhat — but what child care really needs is a long-term investment from the state.
At the press conference, Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce President Matt Baumgartner issued a plea for government subsidies.
“The financial model for child care is broken,” Baumgartner said. “We don’t have the ability to charge the consumer anymore.”
Child care centers are forced to cover high overhead costs caused partly by skyrocketing property taxes. Without any positive profit margin, centers are losing money while providing one of the most important services for the community.
Loni Stallsmith, director of early childhood at the YWCA, broke it down. Between building, food, supply costs and employee salaries, the center barely has money left for routine maintenance. But she can’t raise rates because parents can’t afford it.
Bartlett also noted that the transition of funding sources for Early Learning Scholarships has had a significant impact.
“The funds we receive changed vendors from the Northland Foundation to the United Way, and now it’s taking up to four weeks to get paid,” she said. “That’s a huge part of our bi-weekly payroll, and without substantial savings, it has pushed us toward the brink.”
Stallsmith believes the issue has been allowed to snowball simply because people haven’t noticed. “Our systems are run by people who can afford nannies, and so this situation hasn’t affected them yet,” she said.
A call for immediate action
At the conference, Baumgartner issued a call to action for building bipartisan support to subsidize overhead costs for child care centers through advocacy. Reinert pushed for the Duluth community to “lend its voice” to upcoming legislative sessions.
“We need the state to take action,” Reinert said at the press conference. “We need the federal government to take action because this is not sustainable, and that is unfair to our kids.”
A $316 million investment by Gov. Tim Walz into child care has done little to stem the flow. In 2023, Walz announced the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program to support wages and benefits for child care educators and facilitators.
Nancy Thomas, former director of the Happy Time Day Care Center, said the program led to an hourly wage increase of just 75 cents for her employees.
State Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, has positioned himself as one of the state’s leading advocates for investment into child care and has proposed a bill called the Great Start Child Care Affordability Program. It aims to ensure that no family puts more than 7% of their income toward child care by providing subsidies directly to child care facilities.
He believes it is important to approach the issue by chipping away at it piece by piece.
“This is a titanic issue that requires all methods of support and solutions, and my bill is sort of one key piece of that, but it’s not everything,” Hauschild said.
Even while city and state officials hunt for solutions, the future feels bleak to people who need the support more immediately. With three major child care centers in the city closing, parents have been left scrambling.
“Honestly, I’m just kind of shocked that this is happening and that nothing is being done to stop it from happening,” said Kaitlin Reinl, who has two children who attend the YWCA. “They’re working on the problem, but it really doesn’t do anything for parents right now, and we really need something to be done right now.”
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