Child care: It's everybody's business
by Susanna Graham-PyeThere is growing recognition that working parents are leaving the Cape because they can’t find or afford day care. Some businesses, like Seamen’s Bank, are investing to keep their employees.
Kathleen Morris was on maternity leave when she learned that the local child-care provider she planned to use when she returned to work had gone out of business. Morris was left with two options: Drive to an Orleans day-care center and then all the way back to her job in Provincetown each morning, or stay home during the day and find a night job so that her husband could watch their daughter.
Morris’ plight illustrates the dilemma facing Cape Cod’s workforce, employers and child-care providers. How the scenario plays out will affect everyone with a stake in the peninsula’s future. That’s because it will determine whether there are enough workers to fill the jobs needed to sustain our economy.
For more than a decade, discussions about barriers to attracting a viable workforce to the Cape always have come down to a handful of issues – affordable housing, public transportation, a livable wage and child care.
Even though employers and employees, town planners and county officials repeatedly recognize the problem, the Cape, as a region, has failed to find long-lasting solutions.
That failure is magnified by success stories elsewhere, including right beyond the Sagamore and Bourne bridges. As close to home as Plymouth, all along the Route 495 corridor, throughout the South Shore, and on up into Boston, companies are successfully offering child-care options to their benefits menus – from flex time to reserving spots in local day-care centers to offering on-site care.
So why then on Cape Cod, where so many parents juggle two and three jobs, are there so few options for child care?
Answers aren’t easy in a place so geographically, demographically, economically and philosophically unique, but some factors are obvious:
• Providing child care is an expensive business where costs – from insurance to energy – often outweigh what customers can pay. As a result, day-care centers and private providers fail to stay in business.
• For the Cape’s employee base, finding child care is often impossible and always difficult. Child-care costs can tip the balance for those weighing whether they can afford to live here or not.
• Business owners suffer when employees leave, taking with them experience and the investment of training.
Inevitably, all these factors comprise a vicious loop that feeds on itself, accelerating the forces that stand before new answers. Yet solving the child-care dilemma can be far less expensive for Cape businesses than finding housing for employees or investing in public transportation to help lower-income workers commute from off-Cape.
Despite a sense of paralysis at the macroeconomic level, there are examples of modest successes involving individual businesses. These models could inspire other companies to duplicate that success.
Consider the recent partnership between Seamen’s Bank, with headquarters in Provincetown, and the Cape Cod Children’s Place in Eastham. Together they established a unique child-care center in Wellfleet called Children’s Place’s Sea-babies to accommodate the growing number of Seamen’s employees, including Morris, who are facing the stark choice between their jobs or their children.
“This is huge,” beamed Morris. “There’s just nothing [for child care] at this end of the Cape. If they hadn’t been so willing to work with me, I would have had to leave and work nights. They’ve been amazing. It really makes me feel I’m valued here, that they’re willing to help.”
Morris’ supervisor Lori Meads, a Seamen’s vice president, is a working parent herself. Meads appreciated the problem and could professionally calculate the costs and benefits for her employer.
“I was lucky,” Meads said. “I had my family here to help with child care. But I also had other friends, women I worked with here, who didn’t have that support, and who ultimately had to leave their jobs.”
Seeing coworkers forced to quit, after both they and Seamen’s had invested so much in their careers, hurt both personally and professional, Meads said. So when the Children’s Place first invited her to a workshop for businesses on how to increase child-care options for employees, Meads immediately accepted.
From that initial workshop came the Wellfleet Sea-babies center.
“We’re a small institution. We put a lot of time and training into our employees,” said Meads. “It’s hard to replace them, especially those in managerial positions. Child care is pretty much the main reason people were leaving,” Meads said. “Our bank’s philosophy is that we are community-oriented. This was really hitting home with us. We’ve been aware of how it’s affecting us, and we finally decided if we had a means to do it, we were willing to step up to the plate.”
Elizabeth Aldred, the grants and outreach coordinator of Cape Cod Children’s Place, said Seamen’s has been an “absolutely committed partner from the beginning” of the discussions about making child care more accessible to its employees. The 10-year-old nonprofit family resource organization, which also is licensed to oversee state and federal assistance for child care on the Lower Cape, said it invited more than half a dozen businesses to the initial meeting. Representatives from Seamen’s Bank and Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank attended.
The Lower Cape satellite day-care center is located at the Wellfleet senior center, adding another critical partner to the child-care solution – town government. The involvement of municipal property is a unique and creative approach to the problem, Aldred emphasized.
“In order to facilitate this place, they needed a [financial] break-even point. The way [the Children’s Place] presented it to us, they had to have at least three year-round children for the Wellfleet center to sustain itself,” Meads said. “When we came into the discussion, we were asked if we would like to subsidize one or all of these slots.”
Investing in keeping people at work also keeps the Lower Cape community alive, Meads said. The combined costs of living on the Lower Cape demand that most families have a double income. “And we don’t want families leaving here for the wrong reason,” she added.
“We consider ourselves a close-knit organization, almost a family,” she said. “We’re doing this in response to the community at large, alongside the needs of our employees”
By setting up the center, other working families in the Lower Cape community will benefit, said Catherine Macaulay, executive director at Cape Cod Children’s Place.
Child care is the second highest expense for a family
Finding child care is not a problem unique to Cape Codders. For 48 percent of the nation’s working families who pay for care for children under age 13, it is the second largest budget expense, according to an Urban Institute national survey. In Massachusetts, the cost of child care is much higher than the national average, said Susan Halloran, president of the Massachusetts Child Care Resource and Referral Network.
What is particularly challenging on the Cape is the cost of child care compared with wages, which are, on average, about 20 percent less than in Boston.
The Child Care Network of Cape Cod estimates that the annual average cost of child care for a preschooler in a private center is just under $10,000. Care for an infant approaches $12,000. Bear in mind that many families have more than one preschool child, which means that the daycare tab could reach $20,000 to $30,000 per year – much more than many jobs pay after taxes.
The average income on Cape Cod for a household with two full-time working parents is approximately $65,000, according to Wendy Northcross, executive director of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.
As of June 30, the number of children on waiting lists for child care across the entire Cape was approaching 500. That number is down in recent years, but not because there are more day-care options; it’s because more families are giving up and leaving the Cape, warned Mary Pat Messmer, director of Cape Cod Child Development, with headquarters in Hyannis.
Those are precisely the workers needed to serve the growing numbers of wealthy Cape Codders, including second-home owners and retirees, who expect state-of-the-art health care and impeccable service at stores and restaurants, she noted.
With this exodus of younger people, the day-care industry itself suffers from a lack of qualified providers. “The real concern is our ability to attract good staff,” said Messmer. “As the Cape loses young people, we lose staff.”
Macaulay agreed. “It’s a huge issue – trying to find staffing. It’s almost impossible for day-care centers to pay living salaries.
“We have some of our people here who work three jobs – they work here, then they waitress and clean houses too,” she said. “They do this work completely out of a commitment to working with children.”
Teachers working at day-care centers “subsidize” what consumers pay, said Ginger Thauer, the owner of Growing Investments, a child-care center in Yarmouth. “Most [day-care] businesses survive because teachers are supporting the business with their low salaries. Programs are here because [teachers] care for young children.”
Thauer has been in the child-care business on Cape Cod for more than a quarter-century. She opened her first small center in West Yarmouth, and a few years later, another bank, Sentry, saw the need to help its workers with day care and approached her to operate an employee-supported center, but when Sentry Bank was bought and merged, the contract for the center was withdrawn.
Thauer survived, even if a company-supported day-care model did not. Today, she is licensed for 10 infants, 18 toddlers and 80 preschool children. Her customers range from single mothers working low-wage jobs to families whose parents are both professionals working full time.
“A lot of families no longer look for the second salary to pay for luxuries,” she said. “They need the income to pay everyday bills, like health insurance.”
The cost of living on Cape Cod, particularly housing, is a “big concern” for Thauer when it comes to her employees. “When I started working in child care, the average teacher was married, and this was a second income for the family,” she said. “Now, most of my staff are single adults who need to make ends meet. Salaries in child care are approximately 75 percent of our budget. We can’t pay more than we do because families wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. Yet these teachers can’t find affordable housing and are moving off-Cape.”
A challenge for the entire business community
What frustrates those in the child-care industry is the failure for the entire business community to appreciate the need for its involvement.
The issue of finding and retaining employees on Cape Cod belongs to every business, whether they have parents working for them or not, said Christine Johnson Staub, chairman of the Barnstable Council for Children, Youth and Families.
“If we want to keep families on the Cape, this is a lynchpin issue,” she stressed. “If you don’t have child-care choices, families don’t have options. It really threatens economic stability.”
At the county level, child care has been noted as a critical issue. “And now we’re recognizing the number of different stakeholders in the issue, including businesses and providers. This issue cuts across all of the Cape’s demographics. And we are at the point of thinking how we can mobilize all of the stakeholders to find solutions,” said Johnson Staub.
Solutions will not be easy to come by.
“This is a market failure, and you can’t solve that overnight. When you talk about affordability, it translates into needing to change the market so private payers are paying less, but are still receiving good quality,” said Johnson Staub.
Although the state and federal governments subsidize child care, fewer and fewer dollars are available for the assistance. And when private centers accept children whose fees are subsidized, regulations kick in as to how they can bill private payers – an economic factor that ultimately limits spaces, Johnson Staub said.
The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce’s Northcross said the matter is a perennial worry that ebbs and flows with the Cape economy. Since the tail end of the last decade the chamber has sponsored a task force looking at the issue of child care and its impact on the economy. “We came together when we were at the peak of an economic cycle, and getting employees was difficult,” she explained.
Too often, the issue as seen purely as the parents’ problem, she noted. “But this is an employer issue. It’s about a viable workforce.”
The chamber group has surveyed employers and employees and lobbied the state for more. But then “the bottom fell out of the economy” in 1999, and finding employees was less of a problem. “It’s been hard to get traction on the issue since. We continue to chip away at it.”
Believing that smaller businesses might follow if larger employers could create models like Sea-babies, the chamber task force has asked companies such as Cape Cod Healthcare, Cape Cod Community College and The Christmas Tree Shops to create their own programs.
For a variety reasons, however, efforts so far have failed.
Cape Cod Healthcare conducted a survey of its employees to find out if child care was a benefit employees wanted. David Reilly, its director of communications, said employees agreed there was a need, but “most were older parents, with older children. When it came down to it, most preferred to see benefit dollars go in other directions.” Not surprising given the double-digit increases in health insurance premiums in recent years.
The issue is one Cape Cod Healthcare would be willing to pursue again, Reilly added.
Facing the same challenges as other businesses on the Cape
“We need to keep looking for models to see if we can replicate them, and, somehow keep building capacity,” Johnson Staub emphasized.
But building capacity means opening more child-care centers, and that brings growing challenges. In addition to finding qualified staff – the same problem plaguing other business owners on the Cape – day-care centers are coming under increased regulatory pressure.
“Centers are now under the guidelines of a new [state] department of Early Education and Care, following strict guidelines on not only health and safety issues, but also curriculum development and implementation,” said Thauer. “We’ve always covered these areas, but now we have to offer more documentation.”
Early education and after-school programs have become highly regulated, “which is good,” Johnson Staub said. “We all want safe, healthy centers and the best experiences for our children. But with the increased licensing standards, we increase the cost of operating a center. You have to have trained staff; you have to provide a certain amount and kind of space. To make a go of it as a business, you wind up having to charge more than most people can afford.”
Messmer agreed, noting that while the costs of running centers have increased, “what people can afford to pay on the Cape has not.”
What are the solutions?
The Seamen’s model is viewed by many as an ideal private-public partnership. The town of Mashpee has a similar arrangement. It has had a part-time preschool for 26 years, according to Gus Frederick, the town’s leisure services director. This year, the program has been expanded to take in more toddlers.
“There’s a real dearth of employees, though,” Fredrick said. “We’ve been cognizant of the training that’s required and are trying to help teachers with their education where we can."
Cape Cod Child Development was able to partner with an affordable housing project in Barnstable, creating after-school care for many school-aged children in the project, Messmer said.
Partnering is “the ultimate solution” in Johnson Staub’s mind, but other options exist. If more businesses and business organizations were to lobby legislators to provide more financial assistance for those in the early education field, they might have success, Northcross said.
Past attempts on the Cape have failed. “But I think if more and more people recognize the need, we might have greater successes,” said Northcross.
Other options include:
• Offering employees flex time.
• Permitting employees to work at home, especially with growing access to broadband technology.
• Providing tax breaks for child care.
“Somehow this isn’t always recognized as the significant issue it is,” Messmer said. “It’s perceived as something that isn’t connected to business, to the economy, at all.”
The benefits of helping employees with the issue are tangible, Meads said. “You’re protecting your investment in the person, but you’re also sending a message. Customers develop a comfort level with employees. Losing employees over and over, you lose some of the comfort.
“You wind up with an attitude from customers that ‘If they were such a good employee, why didn’t you help them?’”
Northcross and Johnson Staub agree that child care needs the same kind of attention other significant issues, such as health care, affordable housing, and transportation, have received. “It needs to be taken to a policy level at this point, but we need businesses on board,” Northcross said.
“There needs to be more recognition from employers. This is definitely a business issue.”
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