By Clayton Henkel

NC Newsline

It may feel like a lifetime ago, but Ariel Ford remembers fondly when she worked as a preschool teacher with a room full of rambunctious and creative two-year-olds.

“It is my favorite job I have ever had by far.”

Ford, who now serves as the director of the Division of Child Development and Early Education for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, said there was only one problem with the best job ever — she couldn’t make ends meet even working full-time.

“I always had a part-time job. I almost always had a side hustle whether it was cleaning houses or walking dogs or anything like that,” Ford said.

But Ford almost found herself homeless when her roommate at the time decided to move, leaving her with just 30 days to come up with enough money to have a deposit on a new apartment.

She shared those memories last week with members of the Child Fatality Task Force’s Intentional Death Prevention Committee as their discussion turned to the current child care crisis in North Carolina.

Across the state, there are just under 600,000 children who are under the age of 4 and another 885,000 children ages 5 to 11. And 65 percent of children who are under 5 live in households where all of the available parents are working.

Some 65,000 children per year receive a child care subsidy, providing the working family with financial assistance for their child to attend high-quality child care. That currently supports 15 percent of eligible families.

North Carolina’s Pre-K program, which helps four-year olds get ready to go to kindergarten, serves about 30,000 kids a year. That’s a little more than half (52 percent) of the four-year-olds who are eligible.

Delaying life’s big purchases to pay for child care

What all those number mean is that thousands of parents not only must find child care in order to go to work each day, they’re struggling to pay for it.

“For many families, this means that they are putting (it) on credit cards. They are delaying purchasing houses. They are delaying upgrading their cars. They are living in a smaller apartment building,” said Ford. “Families are having to do anything they can to pay for child care.”

Child care is one of the biggest expenses that families face. If you haven’t had a little one in child care recently, it may come as a surprise to learn that the average cost of infant care in North Carolina is almost $10,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That’s more than in-state tuition at many of North Carolina’s four-year public colleges.

Ford said that while state lawmakers have steadily increased their investment in K-12 and higher education, investments in child care have essentially flatlined.

“We are a state that put investments into early childhood a long, long time ago. What we have not done is continue to make increased investments over time to meet the needs of our growing state.”

A stabilizing force that’s about to come to an end

One bright spot coming out of the pandemic was an influx of federal dollars to support the system as the COVID-19 crisis hit North Carolina.

The Division of Child Development Early Education and the Department of Health and Human Services put a number of programs into operation to support the state’s child care centers, to support the families receiving child care and to support teachers.

Policymakers knew that for the state to truly recover economically from the pandemic, parents would need child care services before they could return to work. The same was true of teachers. Without child care for their own children, teachers could not make their way back into the classroom.

“What that looks like is we have had about 4,400 or 4,500 programs who have received almost a billion dollars in stabilization grants since 2021,” said Ford. “It has supported about 40,000 teachers across the state.”

But the Child Care Stabilization Grants that came from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) are coming to an end this year. Child care centers that used the funding to pay their workers more and retain their staff won’t have that safety net. Without that funding stream, it’s unclear whether the child care centers can make ends meet or whether parents will be asked to pay even more.

Members of the Child Fatality Task Force say beyond the immediate worries of this financial cliff, there is a very real concern about the stressors parents face when they can’t find a safe place for their children to be when they have to go to work.

“One of the things that we see repeatedly in child abuse homicides specifically that I can speak to is frustrations within the family, financial frustrations, child care frustrations that end up being taken out on the youngest children,” said Whitney Belich, a child abuse resource prosecutor with the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys.

If parents can’t afford child care and don’t have anyone else available to watch the kids, there’s no outlet for a young mother or father.

A safety valve for parents, critical for foster families

“We talk about one of the main reasons for child abuse is crying, and that sort of frustration and that sort of violent outburst. A lot of times that comes from not having an outlet to be able to let the child go to child care so that people can work jobs, so that people can make money, so that people can have a break, so that they can run errands and do things like that,” Belich told the committee. “There’s just so many things that play into child maltreatment that come from a lack of ability to get child care and quality child care.”

Lisa Cauley with the North Carolina Division of Social Services said another problem with the shortage of child care openings is the ripple effect on foster care. Even with willing foster parents, if they can’t find viable child care solutions, there are delays in the foster placement.

“What I worry about is we have a whole system of protection that is not working if they can’t find the slot for the child,” offered Cauley.

Without better pay will they stay? 

Child care workers were called the “workforce behind the workforce” during the pandemic — essential personnel that needed to be in place so nurses, doctors, EMS workers and teachers could return to their respective jobs.

But pay has not kept up. And with federal stabilization grants ending, turnover in the child care industry is expected to rise.

“Costco is paying $17 an hour. Verizon is paying $20 an hour. Child care is paying no more than $14 an hour for the people who have the most impact on a child’s brain development outside of their family,” said Ford.

The median child care worker’s salary is $21,450 a year.

One-third have needed some form of public assistance despite working full-time.

Half receive no employee-sponsored health insurance.

The situation is so dire, the committee passed a resolution urging the state to support an expansion of investments in the early child care system, including an expansion of subsidy funding.

Rep. Ashton Wheeler Clemmons (D-Guilford) told N.C. Newsline earlier this month that other states that have already hit the child care cliff and lost their stabilization subsidies have seen 30 percent of the child care workforce move on.

“We cannot afford to not take action,” said Clemmons.

Still, it’s unclear if Republican legislative leadership will take up the issue when the General Assembly reconvenes for the 2024 short session.

“The conundrum we’re in is that we know that our kids need great teachers and great programs, but our child care programs cannot afford to pay enough for teachers to stay. Our families cannot afford that full cost of high quality child care,” explained Ford. “Our early childhood teachers, even though they want to stay in the jobs that they love, they have to find other work so that they can take care of their own bills and their own families.”

Communications Coordinator Clayton Henkel manages the N.C. Newsline website and daily newsletter, while also producing daily audio commentaries and the weekly News and Views radio program/podcast.