Escalating expenses, limited choices spark child care crisis

Published 5:00 pm Thursday, April 3, 2008

Cary Velder waited nearly a year to secure a spot for his 2-year-old daughter at Gearhart Day Care Center.

When he switched to a graveyard shift, he mounted an even bigger challenge: finding someone to watch his child past 6 p.m.

It’s a problem shared by many working parents in Seaside, where the last day care center closed in 2004, and where no one is registered with the state to provide care in their home.

“It’s difficult all the way around with child care,” said Velder, who eventually found nighttime care for Carley, now 3, in Warrenton, a half-hour drive there and back to work at Seaside Safeway, which is normally a 10-minute walk from his home. “Child care is just a nightmare.”

It’s not just in Seaside.

Across Clatsop County, families struggle to find care for their kids so they can work.

Today, The Daily Astorian begins a three-part series highlighting the problem.

Between 1998 and 2004, available child care plunged from 22 spaces for every 100 children to 14 spots per 100 – or from 1,326 spaces to 810, a 35 percent drop. The latest data show Clatsop County has 710 spots, enough to serve just over one in 10 children.

The North Coast may be worse off than some areas, but it’s not alone. Low wages and a lack of benefits have driven a “crisis-level shortage” of providers statewide, and low levels of training, combined with high staff turnover, threaten the quality of what’s available, according to the Child Care Research Partnership, part of the Family Policy Program at Oregon State University.

Caregivers don’t always watch the maximum children they’re allowed, or babies, or children whose low-income parents pay with subsidies from the state.

State law limits providers’ ability to watch sick children. Some facilities only offer after-school programs, and preschools aren’t considered care options because they’re open less than four hours each day.

Clatsop County lost almost 40 spaces in January when Gearhart Day Care lost its lease and closed. Since then, multiple home-based providers have also dropped off the list.

To make matters worse, renters or those living in government-subsidized housing often can’t enter the business. Opening new facilities in Clatsop County has grown especially expensive because of the high price of real estate, said Alice Beck of the Clatsop County Children and Families Commission.

No major employers offer on-site care. Although Clatsop Community College once hosted a program, it closed in the 1990s because of weak enrollment and escalating expenses.

Meanwhile, like the rest of the state, more people are working in Clatsop County.

About 60 percent of families with children younger than 13 are headed by a single working parent or by two parents who both work. Children spend an average 31 hours in care each week.

Suzie Whalen, whose agency, Caring Options, recruits providers and offers referrals for parents seeking them, says child care supply hasn’t kept pace with demand.

“We’ve gained a thousand jobs in this county in the last couple of years, but the majority of them have not been family-wage jobs,” said Whalen, director of resource and referral services for Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties. “As our community is growing, as we have more jobs, we’re needing more care. But the care isn’t keeping up with the demand.”

As a result, for parents calling Caring Options, the outlook is bleak.

“You get a list of people to call, and most of them are full,” said Arta Dahms, a student parent at Clatsop Community College. “Good luck finding someone who has openings for three kids.”

Without reliable child care, parents can’t work, creating long-term hassles for employers and putting a damper on economic growth.

Beyond child care availability, the quality of care has long-term implications for children.

Research has shown that up to 90 percent of brain growth occurs before a child even enters school. Additional studies indicate that brains are developed from the bottom up, with early experiences building the scaffolding necessary for later learning. Of about 6,000 children in Clatsop County, one in three is younger than 5.

With one in three children in paid care, the attention they receive in those settings provides their earliest education, preparing them for school and creating a path for their future development.

Gaps in the care system are biggest where demand is the greatest: care for infants, for high-needs children and during odd hours for U.S. Coast Guard families, shiftworkers, community college students and a growing hospitality and service industry.

Timing is everythingLora Baker, who teaches classes for caregivers and those interested in the business through Caring Options, said she always begins the first session the same way: “I always tell them people in our community don’t need 9-to-5 care.”

“The evenings and weekends are one of the areas we need more providers for, because we are such a service-driven area,” Baker said. “A lot of our jobs aren’t over at 6 o’clock. But there are no centers in Clatsop County that do weekends or evenings.”

Outside of the service industry, shiftworkers at major employers like Georgia Pacific’s Wauna Mill and at seafood processing facilities grapple for options early in the morning and past 6 p.m., as do members of the Coast Guard, which employs hundreds of people in the area. In some sectors, work is seasonal, while others run on schedules that vary by day or by week.

“One of the biggest obstacles for child care is the changing routine of the active-duty person,” said Tori Gimple, whose husband is the commanding officer on the Astoria-based Coast Guard Cutter Steadfast. “We need different care depending on if the (Coast Guard member) is under way on a ship, because they can cover certain hours when they are home, but the routine changes when they leave.”

Home providers draw the lineWhile most home-based providers say they’re willing to accommodate the occasional evening or weekend shift, few, if any, provide care during those hours on a regular basis.

Their reasons for sticking to weekday routines vary. For Shelly Price, it’s about life outside of work. She has considered extending hours, “but I really wouldn’t be able to keep the house for a family,” she said. “When my husband comes home, it’s nice to be able to sit down and have dinner.”

Others agreed. With jam-packed days throughout the week, they need their evenings and weekends to relax.

Brenda Karr started a day care business in Hammond to supplement her family’s income while staying home with her own children. She is firm with her clients about hours, because “I want time for my own family.”

Laura Worwood, who offers care in the Youngs River area, said even with limited hours, she’s always filled to capacity.

“I know there aren’t enough of us,” she said. “I’m listed with Caring Options, but I’ve never taken a child from Caring Options; every time they’ve called me I’ve been at my limit. Day care is crazy around here. Everybody who calls says there just isn’t anybody.”

Low pay is a limitOregon Child Care Division Administrator Tom Olsen said because child care is typically a low-paying profession, people drawn to the business are usually looking for a job that supports their lifestyle, rather than a primary source of income.

“The people who tend to go into it are folks who have children of their own and want to stay home with them,” Olsen said. “We put a lot of emphasis on trying to recruit new providers, and we do that through child care resource and referral agencies around the state. But it’s really hard when people working in fast-food places make more money and have better benefits than child care providers do.”

He called the situation “a catch-22.”

“It would be nice if providers, really good ones, could charge what they’re worth,” he said, “but if they do they lose their clients, because parents are strapped for cash.”

Although the state offers some scholarships toward providers’ professional development in hopes of bettering care quality, there isn’t enough money to create incentives for them to improve, Olsen said. Limited funding also prevents establishing incentives for those willing to work nontraditional hours.

“There just isn’t much funding in the child care system in Oregon,” he said. “A lot of states are in the same position.”

Cost hurtsWhen it comes to weekend and night arrangements at larger child care centers, licensed providers are less worried about lifestyle and more focused on cost.

They say meeting their bottom lines and complying with state standards limit flexible scheduling.

Coryell’s Crossing, a childhood education center in Warrenton, opened in 1995. Able to accept up to 100 children, it has the largest capacity of facilities in Clatsop County.

Even so, owner Diana Coryell said the company has operated at a loss in some years, though she has taken only minimum wage. And while the center once offered care in the evenings and on weekends, as well as hourly arrangements, it eventually dropped those services.

Some days, too few children showed to pay for the necessary staff, while on others, so many came the center was pushed to the limits of its allowed child-staff ratio.

“It didn’t pay. If you had only two or three kids, you were losing money,” Coryell said. “It was really hit or miss. When parents need it, they need it really bad, but you need a huge population to support it.”

On the other hand, switching to half- and full-day booking led to higher quality, she said. “We try to get kids into routines.”

Coryell’s Crossing is now one of just two centers countywide providing infant care, which is more expensive because of stricter limits on the number of children allowed per teacher. The facility has enough space to take more infants, but so far, Coryell hasn’t seen enough demand – at least not enough steady demand during the available hours, or at the set price.

Whalen, of Caring Options, said although centers are allowed more infants per adult than home providers, they usually feel a bigger pinch with the added space needs and costs.

“Centers can’t make it because of the ratio of teachers to infants; they can’t afford to hire the staff,” Whalen said. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve lost infant care in the county: It’s because of the cost.”

Long waiting listsEven when they don’t accept babies or offer extended hours, child care businesses countywide struggle to break even, much less turn a profit.

“It’s been hard to make ends meet,” said Peace Learning Center Director Lisa Berry. “We’ve had to increase our rates. We really have had a difficult time.”

She said Peace once accepted infants, but with only four allowed in the available space, “it didn’t really pay to have a full-time teacher in there.”

Now, class wait lists stretch months and sometimes years for all but the school-age program. For the eight-child toddler class, Berry said, “They start at 12 months and don’t leave until they’re 21/2. Rarely do I have any openings.”

The past year in particular has strained many centers’ budgets for food and for electricity.

“Everything has gone up recently,” said Hazelann Cole, director of Astoria Community Child Care Center. “The costs of food, the costs of utilities and water in Astoria, keep jumping. And of course we have all these kids so we have a lot of toilets being flushed, and hand-washing before snack, after snack, before nap time, before lunch and after lunch. There’s also a lot of paper towels and tissues, as well as heat and rent – those are the biggies.”

She said the area’s older buildings present special challenges for meeting health and safety codes, a problem also experienced in Cannon Beach, which weathered significant roof damage in recent windstorms.

Damages to the nonprofit were offset by fundraising efforts, along with a $45,000 annual grant from the city government. Typically used for operations, the grant grew to $65,000 last year because of unexpected building repairs. Vacancies in the preschool program and generally high costs make running Cannon Beach Preschool and Children’s Center a constant struggle, said director Carol Lynch.

Still, the center stands out to many others, whose directors say they can only dream of being able to provide their employees with the higher wages and health benefits Cannon Beach caregivers receive.

When Peace Learning Center increased rates this month, it meant employees got a raise, with the lowest pay now starting at $9 an hour. They have some paid vacation time, but no health coverage, which makes it difficult to recruit providers, the center director said.

“It’s hard to get someone who has a degree, who’s gone to college, who wants to come in and work for $9 or $10 an hour,” said Berry. “It’s really hard to live off that wage. Most of the people who do it are from two-income families; we have very few single parents who try to work here. That’s just the nature of the business.”

Unfortunately, she said, a lack of health care coverage is also an industry standard.

“There’s no doubt everybody who works here deserves it,” Berry said. “People who work in this business are here because we love children, and we have some excellent teachers here. We’re really lucky.”

? Employee compensation has direct links to child care quality. For more on that topic, read Monday’s edition.

In a three-part series beginning today, The Daily Astorian looks at North Coast child care.

In Part 1 today, we examine the problem;

In Part 2 on Monday, we look at how parents are coping;

In Part 3 on Tuesday, the series will conclude with an overview of what solutions are being proposed, as well as a reminder about why residents should take the challenges seriously.

In addition to material in the printed edition of the newspaper, there is a host of additional material in (Childcare Section), including video of a conversation featuring key business leaders.