Local research confirms child care reality, spurs innovation and action
Strategies include cost sharing, back office services, and helping families access benefits
Imagine you own a small business in rural west central Missouri, and it is taking off. Now you need to staff up for growth. A young woman working on the production line would be the perfect project manager; she knows the product and the customer, and she is really good with details and people.
But she cannot take the promotion. The daycare she uses for her two children, one and three years old, just closed. There are hardly any other child care providers in the rural area. All have yearlong waiting lists.
This may be a fictional scenario. But it is a daily truth in west central Missouri.
Recent surveys of families, employers, and child care providers in Cedar, Henry, Polk, and St. Clair counties confirm it. Lack of child care options, and high out-of-pocket child care costs, limit the health and success of our rural region’s families, businesses, and communities.
Do Something
Groups of people are coming together across Missouri to learn about local child care needs and build innovative solutions for breaking through persistent barriers to increasing the supply of high quality, affordable childcare.
New Growth leads a west central Missouri team of 50 volunteers from rural Cedar, Henry, Polk, and St. Clair counties. Kids Win Missouri is an organization that supports this group and its participation in an emerging statewide network of local strategic planning efforts.
West central Missouri planning team members recently reviewed results of their research into the local child care landscape, including 200 survey responses from area parents, employers, and child care providers.
Team members will now work on priority issues from this research. Their goal is a strategic action plan by December, with implementation starting in 2026.
Priorities and Strategies
Priority issues the group identified include the need and opportunity in west central Missouri to:
1. Build public-private partnerships that can help cover the cost of care.
One example is the opportunity to participate in the Missouri Community Child Care Exchange. Governor Mike Kehoe just approved $2.5 million in initial state funding to pilot this cost-sharing model, by which the state matches local employer and philanthropic contributions toward employees’ child care costs.
This “tri-share” model, with states and employers contributing along with parents, is gaining traction as way to spread the cost of an essential service. In west central Missouri, the amount families currently pay for child care is nearly three times what most can afford.
Weekly local tuition here ranges from $155 per week for pre-school (3-5 years) to $225 week for infant-toddler care (0-3). This amounts to 17% to 19% of the region’s median income of $51,404. The actual affordable cost level for child care is 7% of median income, or $3,598 per year in west central Missouri.
“I have not found a daycare that I can afford to put both children in, yet I do not qualify for State assistance,” said one Polk County parent.
This is a problem that the Missouri Community Child Care Exchange is also designed to address; it can expand assistance to cover workers at participating businesses who are caught in the bind of earning too much to benefit from a subsidy system that covers too few.
West central Missouri employers are concerned. Half of those surveyed said employees’ access to child care affected their businesses greatly or significantly, from their ability to set schedules and operate at full capacity or to hire and retain staff. This happens when employees must take time off to fill gaps (said 81%) and change work hours permanently or temporarily (52% to 56%), and even quit or decline employment offers (41% to 44%).
One local employer explained that employees’ “child childcare needs vary from day to day. They often do not have a backup plan. Childcare is expensive, so many times childcare for them is based on the availability of a family member or friend.”
One Henry County parent said via the local survey that their everyday normal is: “Cutting back hours at work in order to drop off in the mornings. As well as leaving early to pick up, resulting in shorter hours at my job.”
2. Stabilize existing child care providers so they stay in business, and help new child care providers start up and grow.
The community cost sharing strategy must, however, go hand in hand with building the supply of child care available. There are not enough providers and slots.
The need for infant-toddler care is most pressing; the region currently has slots for only one in four children 0-3 years of age that need outside child care.
(The local study assumes 70% of the region’s children ages 0-5 need outside child care; that friends, family, and neighbors take care of the other 30%.)
Building a supportive and responsive system for child care providers is one part of helping them stay and grow in business. The fact is, child care rates do not cover most providers’ costs even as those rates are too high for most families. Child care business owners typically cannot pay themselves or staff well, and many lose money every day.
“We operate at a $10,000 deficit yearly,” explained one west central Missouri child care provider.
One part of the solution is to recognize and remedy the fact that most child care providers are just one or two people. They not only care full time for children but must also keep the books, clean the floors, and manage extensive regulatory hurdles and paperwork.
An innovative and promising approach is to support providers in sharing common business services, from bookkeeping and tax preparation to group health care plans and purchasing discounts.
New Growth recently explored the growth of such “shared services” approaches nationwide and provides an overview and examples in its 2024 report Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle.
Organizing shared services is like building a back office for child care providers who need more capacity for everyday business operations. This includes child care specific management concerns, such as working with state funding programs for parents.
3. Ensure families and child care providers access and use all currently available supports and resources.
Currently west central Missouri families and child care providers have little assistance navigating the complicated child care landscape.
A major gap is the fact that state subsidy benefits that exist for some families (150% of federal poverty level) are not being used in the west central Missouri region. Subsidy accounts for just 5% of child care tuition paid across the four counties.
More than 1,000 children in west central Missouri could be covered by state child care subsidy if every eligible family knew about the benefit and how to access it.
However, finding providers that accept subsidy is a challenge. Very few of the limited number of child care providers in the rural region accept subsidy because the state’s system is dysfunctional and burdensome.
Out of 2,286 total child care slots available in the four-county region for ages 0-5, only 217 slots are at child care locations that accept state subsidy.
One west central Missouri child care provider shared the frustration of many with Missouri’s system: “No one can answer your questions, [it’s] a pain to get payments and no communication. They all have different rules that interfere with each other.”
Such provider comments are common because Missouri’s child care crisis is chronic.
Missouri already ranked near the bottom nationally (45th) in a 2018 review of states’ child care support systems. The situation in Missouri worsened in 2024 when a wave of providers shut their doors or limited services after technology troubles with state subsidy payments left many in debt.
4. Increase supportive policy and public investment in child care at all levels.
The current system is not working. It also does not come close to addressing the true cost of making sure high-quality child care is accessible and affordable for all west central Missouri families.
Building and supporting a quality child care workforce is a critical part of addressing this challenge. Existing child care providers struggle to find enough staff to operate let alone staff up for providing the enriching care they know children need and parents want.
Of the west central Missouri providers surveyed, 36% said there were not enough applicants available for open positions. Another 29% said applicants were not qualified for the work. Fully 36% said they had to let staff go for performance issues.
Attracting quality staff and keeping staff on board are issues in large part because providers are not able to pay competitive wages or provide health care and other benefits. Fully 36% of providers said staff have left to take positions elsewhere.
“My biggest challenge is hiring quality candidates and paying them,” said one west central Missouri child care provider. “I'm not able to offer $16 or $17/hour to attract the right candidates with the experience I am looking for.”
That puts parents in a tragic bind. One St. Clair County parent said: “I have given up quality of care just to be able to find something affordable and conveniently located for my job.”
Next Steps
The west central Missouri child care planning team will meet again in September to explore and develop strategies to address these issues.
Team members are committed to making progress. Helpful are the support of Kids Win Missouri and the opportunity to work with others statewide through the emerging statewide network of such community planning efforts.
- Stay tuned by signing up for child care news from New Growth.
- See also the full child care research report for the west central Missouri region.