Staffing Shortage in child care worsens
It seems that every industry is suffering from the labor shortage as large corporations and small business owners alike, are struggling to fill open positions. High turnover and staffing shortages have long been a potential pitfall of early childhood education, but for many child care providers, the difficulties have picked up considerably during the pandemic and continue today.
Many owners simply can’t find teachers, and as a result, have to limit the enrollment as these centers are still trying to recoup losses incurred during the pandemic. With most states having lifted their capacity restrictions on child care centers, many centers have yet to return to full operations due to not being able to find teachers. Many owners express their frustration as they are ready to get back to normal operations but since reopening, they aren’t able to build back the staff. The biggest issues owners are facing now is not the virus, but finding staff.
Child care providers all over the country, regardless of their state or setting, are experiencing the strain of being understaffed. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a nonprofit that represents the full spectrum of early childhood educators, surveyed 7,500 providers from mid-June to early July and found that more than half of respondents are experiencing greater difficulties with recruiting and retaining staff now than before March 2020. Among providers who work in center-based settings, the survey found 80 percent are currently experiencing a staffing shortage, which NAEYC defines as having at least one role open and unfilled for a month or longer.
Of the providers that NAEYC surveyed who said they were experiencing staffing challenges, 50 percent said they were serving fewer children as a result, a third said they have a longer waitlist or are unable to reopen all of their classrooms, and about a quarter have had to reduce operating hours. Over the past year, the challenges for providers have been magnified—in part because the options for potential applicants have improved. Prospective early childhood educators understand how hard the work is and the amount of effort needed to perform the job and are turning to other options. Many educators are looking to their local K-12 School Districts where substitute teachers are earning up to $150-$200/day, making it impossible for many child care owners to compete. Even retail and service jobs are pulling away teachers with minimum wage increasing. When given the option, owners are finding that staff finds it much easier to make $15/hr. cooking nuggets and being polite than to work in child care. Tracking with NAEYC’s findings, 71% of child care providers said their local public school was the most common alternative to jobs in early childhood education.
The reality in many programs is much more dire. We have personally seen this in centers all over the US, for example, 4 centers in the mid-west employed about 62 teachers before the pandemic, and now the 4 centers are hovering at 38. Three of those nine are recent hires, and two of them have no experience in early care and education settings. This is not uncommon as owners scramble to meet demand, but the applicant supply just isn’t there.
To meet this demand, many unlicensed facilities are starting to pop up and families have no choice but to drop their kids off and hope for the best, cheerleading gyms and martial arts centers for example. The issues with unlicensed facilities are countless. For starters, they are not required to run criminal background checks on their staff nor do they have the policies and procedures in place to run a safe, effective child care program. In many instances, one individual could be left responsible for supervising up to 15 children, much higher that the state-required rations for licensed programs. In addition, many of these facilities are “free-for-alls” with no way to control allergy exposure or general safety for the kids. Not to mention that at this point in a child’s life, a child should be developing their motor skills and brain development but instead, parents have no choice but resource to options that could potentially have a negative impact on their child’s growth.
President Joe Biden has proposed the American Families Plan, which would invest in teacher training and ensure a $15 minimum wage for workers in the industry, a needed boost with current average pay hovering around $12. Meanwhile, the Child Care for Working Families Act, co-sponsored by Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, who reintroduced it a few months back, is designed to make pointed investments in the wages of child care educators and ask states to develop models to figure out what they should pay child care workers to get a minimum level of quality, says Rasheed Malik, senior policy analyst for Early Childhood Policy for the Center for American Progress (CAP). “Quality was suffering because the best people couldn’t afford to work those jobs,” Malik said.
An analysis by CAP found that more than 76% of families, covering nearly 10 million children, would be eligible for free or reduced-cost child care if the act passes; 2 in 3 families would have their costs capped at less than 4% of household income, and more than half of eligible children being covered for free.