Childcare Team to Explore Regional Strategies Next

Surveys conducted in April will inform 4-county child care action plan due in December.

Approaching retirement, Mark Dawson is not someone you would think is concerned about child care. It is top of mind, however, in his job as Economic Development Director for the city of Clinton in Henry County, Missouri.  

“Our labor force participation is low, and child care is a factor,” he said. The low rate of people working, and looking for work, in Henry County tells him that families are having to choose between jobs and children, and that local businesses struggle to get the employees they need.  

It’s why Dawson and local leaders last year organized a committee to focus on childcare, and why this spring they joined a larger 4-county effort now underway to build a regional response to childcare challenges.  

From Surveys to Strategies

The west central Missouri Early Childhood Education Community Planning Team covers Henry, St. Clair, Cedar, and Polk counties. It is part of a statewide initiative sponsored by Kids Win Missouri. The New Growth Women’s Business Center, based in El Dorado Springs, serves as coordinator.  

The 4-county west central Missouri team recently conducted surveys to gather on-the-ground information and perspective from parents, employers, and childcare providers. The team will in June take a closeup look at what the surveys showed, after data analysts at Kids Win pull the information together.

The next step will then be to prioritize issues that rise up from the data. The group will also explore strategies for addressing them.

Strategies already on the table address two core issues at the heart of what is a chronic child care crisis in Missouri and the nation: Affordability and availability.  

Affordability. Child care is expensive. In fact, the cost of child care in the United States ranks highest among developed nations, at 32 percent of an average couple’s income, according to the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A 2022 study of Missouri’s child care costs found that the annual amount needed for child care is greater than housing or college tuition.

Availability. At the same time, child care businesses struggle to survive, let alone grow their businesses to serve high demand. Providers are unable to charge the true cost of care; their workers are among the lowest paid occupations. In addition childcare regulations, though important, are tough for the vast majority of small, often single-person businesses to manage.

Affordability and Availability  

To address affordability, the west central Missouri team will explore the possibility of setting up a Community Child Care Exchange for the region.

Such an Exchange could support families with the cost of child care by adding funding from local employers that are willing to join, and from the state of Missouri and other donors. The Exchange model can be an efficient way to pool community resources because it includes a local organization in the middle to serve as an intermediary. The intermediary organization processes paperwork and payments and provides communications and other administration.  

Kids Win is working with communities in Missouri to develop locally based Community Child Care Exchanges as one part of the solution. The Exchange model is based on the experience of Michigan and a handful of other states that are building this approach to addressing child care affordability.

Raising money to cover child care costs is just half of the battle, however. It does not help if there is not enough child care available.

To address availability, another strategy to explore is an approach that many communities and states are taking to help small child care businesses start, sustain, and grow their businesses by sharing common costs.  

The “shared services” approach focuses on reducing costs and improving capacity by providing back-office support. Back-office supports include bulk purchasing of common supplies and shared staff to help with common job needs, such as filing regulatory paperwork.

The recent New Growth Women’s Business Center report, Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle, offers insights and examples from a growing national shared services movement in early child care and education. It also provides the context of Missouri initiatives and investments that local and state leaders could align and advance for development of shared service support to small and home-based child care providers.

The Community Child Care Exchange model is one of those initiatives that could align well with work to build shared back-office services for child care providers. The local intermediary in place to facilitate the Exchange could also serve as a hub working with area child care providers to develop and access shared services.

From Desert to Oasis

Each step toward solutions, no matter how tiny, is part of getting to solutions for the high cost of care and low supply of child care for rural west central Missouri families.  

The west central Missouri Early Childhood Education Planning Team is getting started in Cedar, Henry, St. Clair, and Polk counties.  

Its purpose is to shift the region from child care desert to child care oasis, a place where families, employers, and communities no longer struggle with lack of quality child care options.  

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