(Dubois, WY) – When the only daycare in Dubois closed earlier this year, local parent Sammi Robinson said she had to scramble to find childcare for her 1-year-old son, Jarren.
Robinson works for the Dubois school district as a special education teacher, and she said her husband had just moved to Washington State to start a new job when the daycare closed in March.
“I (didn’t) even know who to contact,” she said. “I had only come back to Dubois in February of last year, so I didn’t have a whole lot of connections like other parents did. (So) with three days left to spare, we just started texting everybody and going, ‘Do you know who could take care of my son?’”
Eventually, she found someone – a church member who said, “Absolutely, I’m homeschooling my two kids. I can take him.”
“I was like, ‘Bless you,’” Robinson recalled. “Within three days he was starting to go with her.”
Dubois Town Councilmember Amanda Ysen said other community members stepped up to provide childcare after the daycare center closed, too.
“Everybody essentially had to find somebody to watch their kids,” Ysen said. “Our entire community kind of came together, and people who normally didn’t do daycare were helping take care of kids for families that needed it, which was pretty neat – (because) it did work out. Everybody found a place for their children to be. … Our community, as it always does, has really stepped up in a big way to help our families.”
Nonprofit daycare
Meanwhile, Ysen was organizing a group of volunteers to focus on developing a more sustainable, long-term plan to provide daycare for young families in the area.
Lack of childcare has “historically been a problem in Dubois,” Ysen explained, with local daycare centers starting up and then closing “every few years.”
One operation did manage to stay open for about a decade, however: Over the Moon, a nonprofit daycare center.
“It was the longest-lasting daycare in the last 20 years,” she said.
Over the Moon only had a three-member board of directors, though, and Ysen didn’t think that was enough people to handle all of the work involved in overseeing a nonprofit daycare.
That’s why the board of directors for the new nonprofit, Little Lambs Childcare Center, consists of seven people, she said: Ysen (President), Nancy Dixon (Vice-President), McCall Brown (Treasurer), Charne Kenyon (Secretary), Julie Splichal, Sara Domek, and Margaret Chantry.
Ysen estimated that the group has been spending a combined 40 hours a week, “if not more,” preparing for the new daycare to open.
“It is time-intensive, (but) this group is so committed,” she said. “It was like the right combination of people to get the job done. … We’ve made significant progress.”
Progress
Little Lambs already has a lease to use the old daycare center space, Ysen said, and their nonprofit status was confirmed this month – a “super important” step that has generated “a lot of community support” from local donors.
“We are just really leaning on our community for support,” she said, inviting people to attend the Little Lambs Scramble for Child Care fundraiser at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 13, at Antelope Hills Golf Course in Dubois.
The new organization also received a $5,000 emergency grant from the Wyoming Community Foundation, Ysen said, and they have applied for $10,000 in local economic development funding.
Now, they’re working on meeting state licensure requirements – a process Ysen called “time-consuming.”
“I understand why we have the process we have,” Ysen said. “But it is not conducive to being able to start, quickly, a daycare, because there are so many rules.”
For example, she said, Little Lambs can’t be licensed until it has a staff in place, so the board is now working on conducting interviews and looking for applicants – preferably from the local community.
The new daycare plans to hire two full-time employees, plus a part-time substitute to “fill in” when needed, Ysen said, pointing to another regulation that caps the number of children each employee can be responsible for at seven.
The rule makes sense from a safety standpoint, Ysen said, but it also makes it “extremely difficult” to serve clients if a staff member calls in sick, for instance.
“I mean, if I have a daycare, and I hire another person, and I’m licensed for 15 kids, if my helper is sick, I have to call those families, and seven kids don’t come to daycare that day,” she said. “It’s not real conducive to (success).”
‘Access issues’
Over-regulation is one reason “daycares don’t stay in it like they used to for years and years,” Ysen said, suggesting that Wyoming could do more to “help these daycares provide the service” that local communities need instead, perhaps by providing startup funding, or financial assistance based on the number of children served.
The state has been working to address some of those “access issues,” Department of Family Services Senior Administrator Roxanne O’Connor told the Wyoming Legislature’s Education Committee this month.
For example, she said, her agency is developing a “toolkit to help providers become licensed and reduce any barriers to becoming licensed within their communities.”
DFS is also taking “a really rigorous look at our rules and our requirement from a regulatory perspective” to see where they could be “loosened” or “negotiated a little bit” to “ensure that we have really strong health and safety for children (while) being as provider-friendly as possible,” O’Connor said.
Specifically, DFS is re-examining the requirement that 50 percent of training hours for childcare providers must be completed in person, she told the legislature’s Labor, Health and Social Services Committee last week.
The agency is also looking at ways to address the amount of time it takes to complete background checks for childcare employees, and they are considering options for making staff-to-child ratios “easier to apply in practice,” she said, noting that the “vast majority” of daycares “do not operate at their full license capacity due to staffing constraints.”
“I’m hoping that we might be able to see some pretty significant improvement for providers in those areas,” O’Connor said. “We are working very hard on our rules review to make sure the provider voice is elevated (and) reflected.”
As part of that effort to incorporate provider feedback, O’Connnor said DFS recently sent out a survey to 300 people who have closed their daycare programs over the past five years.
Thirty-four of those former providers responded, she said, and of those, 38 percent said licensing and regulatory rules contributed to their decision to close their programs – a number Wyoming Rep. Sarah Penn, R-Lander, said is “too high.”
“We have a lot of room to improve,” Penn, a Labor Committee member, said.
Another 38 percent of respondents said they closed their programs because of increased operating costs, O’Connor reported, while 35 percent cited low profitability.
She said DFS is working with the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services, and the Harvard Growth Lab to address the profitability problem by looking at child care “from an economic development standpoint.”
For instance, she said, the WBC could offer “small business supports” to daycare providers, facilitating “shared services, or administrative functions, or marketing (to) help programs be a little bit more economically feasible in their industry.”
The state could also facilitate “startup grants” for daycare providers, O’Connor said, noting that the number of licensed childcare providers in Wyoming has “declined over the years.”
“We’re just not seeing a pipeline of individuals who are interested,” she said.
Wyoming Women’s Foundation Associate Director of Policy Micah Richardson suggested that people could be incentivized to enter the childcare industry if they received student loan forgiveness, or subsidies to help cover their own childcare needs.
Another idea is for local communities to create childcare funds that businesses and individuals can contribute to and that local sales tax revenues could be diverted to, she said, adding that county governments can also levy mills to support childcare.
“This is an economic issue,” Richardson reiterated. “If you don’t have childcare, you don’t have folks being able to go to work.”
Little Lambs Board Member Sara Domek, who attended the Labor Committee meeting remotely, agreed with that assessment, pointing out that there are “several” young teachers in Dubois who “have to make a decision if they’re going to be able to keep their jobs come August if we aren’t able to open our doors by (then).”
“There’s just a lot of effects to our larger community when childcare is in such an urgent crisis,” she said. “We appreciate your attention to this and certainly hope some changes can be made moving forward so that we can provide care for our kids.”
Little Lambs plans to open for business before the school year begins, Ysen said.
The facility will serve children ages 0-3, she said, noting that older children can take advantage of the school district’s preschool and pre-K programs.
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