Infant child care cost near me: Cost of Care – Child Care Aware MN

Опубликовано: July 29, 2023 в 12:17 pm

Автор: alexxlab

Категории: Child

Cost of child care shuts out many who need it most, leaves workers behind

Two Oregon proposals to invest public money in early learning would change the trajectory of children living in poverty and increase earning potential of child care workers and parents

Few investments in the lives of low-income and at-risk children have the proven ability to brighten young futures as much as quality preschool.

As Street Roots examines what it will take to prevent today’s youths from becoming the next generation of people living in extreme poverty, access to early learning opportunities stands out as crucial to achieving this goal.

While it’s no secret early childhood learning opportunities could set today’s most vulnerable youths on a better trajectory, preschool remains out of reach for most 3- and 4-year-old Oregonians. Now, as state and federal investments in early learning continue to fall short, backers of two separate initiatives promising universal preschool are hashing out a plan to put before Multnomah County voters in November.

Privately run early education in Oregon, as well as in many other parts of the country, has become a luxury that only the most affluent can comfortably afford.

Meanwhile, earnings of workers in the industry are at or near minimum wage.

Growing Seeds Learning Community preschools in Portland illustrate this trend well.

Tuition for five days a week among the company’s three centers ranges from $1,310 to $1,705 a month, depending on age. Workers at Growing Seeds, who teach children ages 6 weeks to 6 years a curriculum often focused on social justice, earn about $14 to $18 an hour and are offered health insurance that workers told Street Roots many cannot afford.

“At least half the employees pick up babysitting gigs on the side and make more after putting the kids to sleep and watching TV than they do in the classroom,” Growing Seeds employee Nat Glitsch said.

These conditions prompted unionizing efforts among staff, including Glitsch, who sits on the union organizing committee, but the gap between worker pay and tuition at Growing Seeds is far from unique in the Portland metro area.

Oregon is the fourth-least-affordable state for preschool in the nation, according to a Multnomah County task force report released in September, with the average preschool tuition costing substantially more than the annual tuition at the state’s public universities.

Meanwhile, the median preschool teacher is making less than $14 an hour and many early learning educators can’t afford pre-K classroom exposure for their own children.

And it’s not just preschool. Child care for a toddler at a center (as opposed to in-home child care) in the Portland metro area would take, on average, 65% of a full-time minimum-wage worker’s annual income in 2018, according to research from Oregon State University.

The high cost of child care and the housing crisis have combined into a perfect storm that’s pushing working-class Oregonians over a financial cliff.

“What we hear from families is that it’s housing or child care right now. It’s one or the other, but they can’t afford both,” Miriam Calderon, the Early Learning Systems director at Oregon Department of Education, told Street Roots.

And even when parents can afford the high cost of care — or are low-income enough to apply for subsidized care — it’s scarce. There are three or more preschool-age children for every available slot in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties, according to a report from OSU’s Oregon Child Care Research Partnership. The report’s author, Megan Pratt, told Street Roots, “Providers can charge higher prices because there is such a demand, that there is somebody out there who will pay it.”

She said some providers ask for cash only, because they can in the current high-demand environment, but cash-only “is really a disadvantage for our most vulnerable populations who are relying on the child care subsidy.”

Miriam Calderon holds a child at Albina Head Start in North Portland on Aug. 28, 2019.

Photo courtesy of Oregon Department of Education Early Learning Division

The scarcity of available slots Ren Johns faced when trying to find care for her infant daughter five years ago prompted Johns and her husband to create the PDX Waitlist website (pdxwaitlist. com) to help parents navigate Portland’s competitive child care market. In addition to operating the site, Johns, who is also a high school math teacher, offers a premium service of locating child care or preschool slots for parents who don’t have the time and know-how to do it on their own. With all her prowess, she said it still takes her about a month or two to locate a market-rate, five-day-a-week infant care slot, which is about $1,250 a month, on short notice.

“But most of what I find is more in the $1,500 to $1,800 range,” she said, adding that if Portland parents want to pay less than $1,250 a month, they will likely have to find a small, unlicensed in-home provider.

“It’s really clear to me that we have problems at every level,” Johns said. “We don’t have enough supply, the majority of the supply we have is unaffordable, it’s hard for most people to find it, it’s incredibly opaque as to whether something is quality or not, and in general, we have mediocre quality across the board. We have some incredible providers, and we have some really unsafe ones. For an average parent, to put in the time to figure all that out is quite daunting.”

It’s substantially more difficult for parents of children with special needs such as autism or insulin requirements. There are very few providers who will serve those children, she said.

Infographics: Oregon Early Care Education Profile 2018 from Oregon Child Care Research Partnership at Oregon State University

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, a large body of research has emerged showing early-education programs like Head Start can reduce a child’s likeliness of incarceration and unemployment in adulthood while increasing the likelihood of high school graduation, college enrollment and better health outcomes. And now, some of the newest research shows preschool can actually disrupt the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

James Heckman, Nobel laureate and economics professor and researcher at the University of Chicago, revisited the at-risk preschool subjects of his earlier research — which greatly influenced early childhood education today — as older adults. What he discovered was that not only were gains made in their personal outcomes, such as marriage stability, but also in the outcomes of their children.

In a paper released in May, Heckman and his co-author found a substantial decrease in high school suspensions, criminal involvement and substance use disorder among the children of those original preschoolers when compared with a control group living in similar low-income neighborhoods. They were also more likely to be gainfully employed.

Heckman’s earlier work produced what’s known as the Heckman Equation, which found investing in a child’s preschool education yields a return on investment of 7% to 10%. More recently, he discovered investment in quality education starting even earlier — at birth — and up to age 5, bumps the societal return on investment up to 13%, emphasizing the importance of early education throughout a child’s first 2,000 days of life.

But most regional governments in the U.S. aren’t funding early education the way they fund K-12, and while subsidized slots are available, many vulnerable kids first experience a classroom setting in kindergarten.

Those kids often have a harder time adjusting to kindergarten and can exhibit behavioral problems that negatively affect the entire classroom, said Suzanne Cohen, president of the Portland Association of Teachers.

“Nationally and statewide, and certainly in Portland, we’ve seen high incidents of disrupted learning,” Cohen said. “It can be throwing, kicking, punching, biting, and this takes place in the younger grades. And very often, it can be a child that didn’t have a preschool opportunity.”

She pointed to a report from Oregon Education Association released last year, titled “A Crisis of Disrupted Learning.”

Among other factors, the study noted that educators reported students who had access to high-quality preschool and early education programs entered kindergarten more prepared in regard to their social and emotional health and their academics.

Hearing about the possibility of universal preschool in Multnomah County brought tears to the eyes of some kindergarten and first-grade teachers working for Portland Public Schools, Cohen said.

EARLY-LEARNING EXPERTS Street Roots interviewed for this story agreed: It’s impossible for quality preschool to be affordable for all families without public funding — especially if preschool teachers and their support staff are paid living wages.

“The economics don’t work out,” Calderon said. “If there isn’t a financing strategy, far too many families will be pushed into lower-quality environments or have to make really, really difficult choices for their families, in order to work.”

But with prices in excess of $1,000 a month per child, where does all the money go?

“Child care businesses run on very small margins,” said Pratt, who studies child care costs and pricing at Oregon State University. She said most of the revenue goes “straight to their employees, who are not making a lot.”

About 70% of revenue pays for labor, and in Oregon, labor can cost more than other states due to laws requiring a lower ratio of children to caregivers: one adult for every four infants and toddlers or for every 10 preschoolers.

“It’s really a conundrum,” Pratt said. “It takes a lot of human labor.”

Add insurance costs, high rents, licensing fees and in many cases thousands of dollars for conditional-use permits in residential zones, the cost of supplies and other business expenses like employee benefits and janitorial services, and there isn’t a whole lot left over.

Pratt said expenses mirror those of grade school; the only difference is it isn’t receiving the same level of state and federal support.

The low supply versus the high demand in Oregon then drives prices even higher. Meanwhile, wages haven’t kept pace with child care rates, which have more than doubled for most ages and types of care over the past two decades.

“It’s an issue that’s affecting our most vulnerable populations, absolutely, but it doesn’t stop there. It affects nearly everyone,” Pratt said. “ I know personally, I work and my husband stays home, because financially that makes the most sense.”

But has child care always been this expensive? Pratt said one theory on cost increases could be related to the shift of attention to regulated, center-based care, and due to the cultural shift to more dual-earning parents and single parents.

“This is an industry that women have subsidized with their low wages,” said Calderon, of Oregon’s Early Learning Division. She also noted that those women have been “primarily low-income women and women of color and immigrant women.”

AS DIRE AS Oregon’s child care landscape is, momentum to expand preschool and quality care for infants and toddlers is building.

Increased federal funding in the form of block grants has recently helped Oregon and other states expand access to include additional low-income families. And in 2019, the Oregon Legislature made an investment of $200 million per year that will go toward funding more than 1,000 slots for infants and toddlers in Early Head Start and support additional slots for preschoolers, including culturally specific opportunities, and to ensure services for kids in the state’s Early Childhood Special Education programs with the Student Success Act.

Additionally, Oregon’s Early Learning Council, which the Legislature created in 2011 and is charged with coordinating a unified and accessible system of early learning, has created a strategic plan for expanding birth-to-5 opportunities across Oregon.

Calderon credits Oregon’s past and present governors, John Kitzhaber and Kate Brown, for making early learning a priority.

But, she said, even with these combined investments and existing programs, “we still fall short of meeting the eligible families that would qualify.”

She’s referring to families across Oregon who earn 200% of the federal poverty level or less. Her department estimates Oregon will fall short roughly 20,000 slots for preschool children in these low-income families, “who still won’t have access,” she said.

For access to be fully available, Calderon said, it will take a combination of federal, state and local funding efforts. And she should know — she played a key role in implementing universal preschool in Washington, D.C., before coming to Oregon. Now, she said, 80% of 3-year-olds and 90% of 4-year-olds in the District of Columbia are enrolled in publicly funded preschool. She said this has led to better outcomes in K-12, narrowed disparities in achievement and an increase in women’s participation in the workforce, which benefits entire families.

“I believe that this is possible. It is possible to do this,” she said.

IN MULTNOMAH COUNTY, two separate initiatives for universal preschool are underway. Both seek to increase workforce wages drastically, expand access to all 3- and 4-year-olds in the county by investing in new and existing providers, and pay for it by taxing the rich.

The Universal Preschool NOW! campaign is aligned with Portland DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), and Portland Association of Teachers President Suzanne Cohen is one of the chief petitioners. Its plan aims for 80% participation after a 5-year roll-out beginning with high-need neighborhoods and paid for with a 3.9% tax on the county’s top 5% of earners — individuals making $200,000 or more and couples making $225,000 or more.

COMMENTARY: The real impact of universal preschool and a tax on the 5%

The other preschool initiative, Preschool for All, is the result of a county task force that’s been studying the issue since 2017. Leading the effort, County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson said the main difference between her initiative and the one brought forth by Universal Preschool Now! is the deep community-based work and engagement that went into creating her proposal.

Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson leads the preschool initiative Preschool for All. A county task force has been studying the issue since 2017.

Photo By Emily Green

Vega Pederson said the task force’s conclusions take into consideration work force, infrastructure, finance and administrative needs and draw from the perspectives of not only parents, but also people with housing, health care, business and philanthropy expertise.

“And that’s a huge difference. That there’s been a lot of thought put into what it would take to make a preschool program in Multnomah County that reflects the needs of families.”

Vega Pederson’s Preschool for All campaign’s polling suggests voters would be most favorable toward a tax of 1% on household incomes above $500,000 per year, but she has not committed to a specific tax rate just yet.

Preschool for All would also roll out at a slower, undisclosed pace.

“In the first five years, eight years, you can’t get to 100% just because of the pipeline: the workforce needs and the provider needs,” she said. Her task force estimates an additional 2,300 preschool workers would be needed.

“So ultimately, we want to get to it, but we want to grow out the program in a smart and realistic way.”

She said coming back to voters with a larger ask once the program has been proved is the best way to get there.

Backers behind the two initiatives are involved in ongoing discussions as they attempt to merge their proposals into a single measure to put before voters this fall. Neither side wants to see two competing universal preschool measures on the same ballot.

“We’ve had some really good conversations,” Vega Pederson said. “We have lot of things that are shared in common.”

The Preschool for All task force estimated an additional 260 classrooms would be needed for all of the county’s approximately 19,000 preschool-age children to attend preschool.

Teachers with Preschool for All students in their classrooms would need to be paid on par with kindergarten teachers, and support staff would have to be paid a minimum of $18 an hour. These pay floors were also set by the Universal Preschool Now! campaign.

Cohen worries that the county’s plan of subsidizing classroom slots for low-income kids but not others would inadvertently segregate students based on class.

“I think we’d definitely want to provide opportunities for the kids who don’t have access to preschool right now, to have that access,” Vega Pederson said, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to have separate classrooms. It’s actually providing additional capacity at existing providers so that they can be a part of the existing classrooms.”

Research examining Head Start programs has shown children in poverty and who are otherwise at risk gain the most from attending preschool. While it can benefit all children, it can have a life-altering impact on at-risk kids who begin kindergarten vulnerable to disciplinary and academic barriers due to racial and class inequities.

In Multnomah County, there are a lot of kids who fall into this category, according to the Preschool for All task force’s findings.

Nineteen percent of preschool-age children in Multnomah County are living in families with incomes under the federal poverty level. That’s $25,100 for a family of four. Access to preschool could also be potentially life changing for the 66% of the region’s preschool-age children in families that are Hispanic/Latino, African American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Native or Alaska Native, Asian and Slavic that are living below 200% of the federal poverty level.

But only 15% of preschoolers in Multnomah County are receiving a subsidized preschool education, leaving most parents with few affordable options.

UNTIL SIGNIFICANT PUBLIC FUNDING is used to subsidize child care, parents can expect continued high-price child care and preschool tuitions across the board — prices that force even financially secure families into making difficult decisions.

For Lee Ann Moyer, who was working as a speech pathologist at a local hospital, child care was at one point costing her family close to $2,500 a month, with two of her kids attending Growing Seeds and one in elementary school with before- and after-school care.

“We actually just looked at our numbers and said this doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “So I pulled my kids out and had them in there a couple days a week, left my full-time job and took a different path so that I could be home with them more and not have everything I made be sent to some version of child care.” Now, Moyer is the owner of Portland Moms Blog and runs an event space in North Portland.

Another local mom who spoke with Street Roots on condition of anonymity said she left a higher-paying profession to work in child care just so she could get the discount for her own children. Now, she works at Kindercare, which charges non-employees close to $1,800 a month for full-time toddler care, and earns about $2 more than minimum wage. She said she often purchases needed classroom supplies out of her own pocket, although she is not required to do so. And while the career change has come at a cost savings to her family, she believes it has put her career ambitions and long-term earning potential in jeopardy.

ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, Growing Seeds employees across the company’s three locations voted in favor of joining Portland’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 5. The results showed 90% to 100% of staff at each location voted in favor of unionizing, despite ramped-up discouragement from ownership just 36 hours before the vote.

Despite fears that higher wages could result in increased tuition, many parents had been supportive of their efforts, organizers told Street Roots. Some even sent their children to preschool wearing little pro-union buttons on their shirts.

“Kids are full humans that deserve respect and good treatment,” said Kate Stubblefield, Growing Seeds employee and union organizer, “and the people that care for those children and are responsible for those children deserve that also. ”

Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.

The Next Generation is a Street Roots series that focuses on the well-being and housing stability of children and young adults, locally and nationally, and explores the work being done to prevent another generation from becoming homeless. Street Roots received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust’s Housing Advocacy Portfolio to develop dedicated reporting for The Next Generation series.

Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.

© 2020 Street Roots. All rights reserved. |

To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots. org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404.

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