THIS STORY RAN IN THE PRINT EDITION OF THE NEWTON KANSAN ON AUG. 16, 2008:
Parents in Newton are struggling to find affordable child care, and their pursuit got a little tougher last year as more independent providers left child care than started businesses.
The child-care business is a difficult industry says independent center and home-care providers. Providers deal with competition from non-profit providers, parents who can’t pay, complicated state paperwork and regulations, low wages and lack of benefits.
In 2007, 24 child-care homes and centers closed their doors, and 17 were opened in Harvey County.
As of Tuesday, there were four child-care centers, four child-care group homes, 48 licensed providers and 32 registered providers in Harvey County, but parents, health officials and providers say we need more.
Competition
Kristine Mitchell of Newton ran Little Hands Child Care Center for 13 years.
Mitchell recently closed the center, which served up to 60 children.
Mitchell said the biggest part of her business was school-age children.
The center banked on the earnings from the summer school-age program to help support the center throughout the rest of the year.
“Child care is just not a money making business,” she said.
The center made more money on the school-age program because a center can have a higher student-to-child ratio for school-age children — 1 to 16 compared to 1 to 3 for infants and 1 to 5 for toddlers.
“Once you pay the teachers, there is no money left over,” she said.
The center went from having a waiting list to not having a full program. Mitchell attributed the decline to the opening of a summer latchkey program by the Newton school district.
Mitchell said she had difficulty competing with the school district because the district provided the latchkey program with facilities.
Newton Superintendent John Morton said the latchkey program is self-sustaining. It operates the building in which the program is located for summer school, therefore the cost of providing a facility for the program is minimal.
Half of the 74 students in the summer latchkey program were in summer school.
“We see this as a service we can provide our patrons for students who are already at the elementary school,” Morton said.
He said he sees latchkey as a successful program that provides needed child care in the community, and the district intends to keep the program.
Mitchell said she was stunned to find Newton Medical Center was giving its child-care center a more than $300,000 per year subsidy.
The center is set to be taken over by a not-for-profit group speared headed by parents and concerned residents in September. NMC still will provide the center with its building.
“It is almost like the playing field is not level,” Mitchell said. “If other programs paid rent, there wouldn’t be a vast difference between the charges. People would have the opportunity to send their kid to where they wanted to go. It would be more fair.”
Expansion
Christina Heisler, owner of Newton’s Tots N Tikes, bought the building from Mitchell to open her own center. She said she is getting a lot of calls for preschool care and would like to expand, but finances are an issue.
She is licensed for 24 children but is getting daily calls for more slots.
“I already have a loan out for the building itself,” she said. “I hate to take more out to build something else.”
She said because she is a for-profit center, some grants and opportunities for funding are not available.
“All the money comes out of my pocket,“ she said. “It is hard to offer the same things as other centers. We try to keep our rates comparable.”
Mitchell too said she struggled to keep rates affordable. She said she understood the desperation of parents trying to afford care.
She is pregnant with her second child and said her family can’t afford to pay for care for both of her children.
“Right now with a second child, it would cost more for me to put the children in day care than I would make,” she said. “I tried to keep that in mind at the center. I don’t know how some people were able to write that check every week. I tried to keep my rates fairly low.”
Parents struggle
When it comes down to paying for rent, food or child care, some parents just can’t write the check, said Janet Soukup of Newton, a longtime child-care provider.
In her 14 years as a home child-care provider, she, on a number of occasions, had parents who did not pay their child-care bills.
Soukup said she always has parents sign a child-care contract, but parents often do not honor the contracts.
Soukup is a grandparent now. However, when she was younger and also cared for her own children, missed payments were a hardship.
Soukup said you have to run your home as a business, tracking all your tax deductions and keeping a detailed budget.
“If you are willing to do the paperwork, you can make a good living,” she said.
Regulations
The state recently revised the regulations for school-age child care. It was supposed simplify the regs, but Margaret Goering and Val Goerend, Harvey County child-care licensing inspectors, said the new regulations were the longest of them all.
“Some regulations are repeated. They could have been gotten rid of. It’s frustrating when the intent was to stream line and provide regulations that were easier to understand,” Goering said.
The regulations for younger children are supposed to be up for review. The hope of the inspectors is those regulations would be simplified.
High turnover
Goering said Kansas has ranked low in national reviews because of the number of registered home child-care providers.
These providers do not have to have child-care training, need to meet only minimal safety and health standards and are not inspected on an annual basis as are licensed providers.
The department is constantly trying to get more providers to become licensed, the inspectors said.
“A lot of people don’t want someone coming into their home and telling them how to do things,” Goerend said.
She said the county has a high turn over rate in home providers, as they choose to do home care while their children are young and go back to work as their children enter school. Goering said many parents are eager to reenter the workforce where they can earn more and receive health-care and retirement benefits.
Goering said the state could benefit from a system that would collectively offer health-care benefits and liability insurance to child-care providers.
Programs to help
There are programs to help independent providers, such as the Child and Adult Care Food Program sponsored by the Kansas State Department of Education.
The program helps pay for well-balanced meals and snacks for children in child care.
However, Heisler said she is struggling with all the paperwork for the program.
Food program sponsors offer training for child-care providers on working through the system. The Kansas Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies also offers training in the business aspect of child care for home-care providers.
Providers also can seek help from Communities in Schools, which offers a four-week class on Conscious Disciple. The organization also has a program to assist with discipline problems with specific students in the child-care system.
The Harvey County Health Department offers an orientation once a month for individuals who wish to begin home child care and will provide the individuals with the rules and regulations for becoming a licensed or registered child-care provider.
Child care providers in the county seem to have a good informal network of support, but Goering said she thinks a formal support group for home providers also could be helpful.
