photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The former site of One of a Kind Progressive Early Education, 4640 W. 27th St., is pictured on Tuesday, May 28, 2024. The child care facility abrutply closed in late April.

On a sunny afternoon in late May, the playground at One of a Kind Progressive Early Education is silent.

There are no shouts or sounds of laughter echoing through the neighborhood around the building and no parents or guardians waiting in the parking lot to pick up their children.

This isn’t the first quiet day for the child-care facility at 4640 W. 27th St. in southwestern Lawrence; it had closed abruptly about a month earlier. Local early-childhood education professionals like Cecelia Courter, the executive director of the Children’s Learning Center, say that left dozens of families without care. It also left other providers in a bind to meet the sudden increase in what’s already a significant need.

According to Child Care Aware of Kansas, Douglas County’s current early-childhood education capacity meets just 46% of the potential demand for child care slots. The agency estimates that Douglas County needs an additional 2,810 child-care slots to meet the need for parents in the labor force with children age 6 and younger.

But that’s not a new issue for Lawrence and Douglas County, or even across the state of Kansas.

Lawrence’s Community Children’s Center has been working since 2022 to launch a new resource, the Early Childhood Community Center, intended to help fill the gaps in part with 140 new child-care slots. In 2022, the data indicated an even higher potential need for nearly 3,000 early-childhood care slots locally.

The numbers tell a similar story statewide. Kansas on the whole has a similar ratio of 46% in the extent that desired child-care capacity meets the potential demand. Across the state, there’s an estimated need for nearly 80,000 more child-care slots.

The Journal-World has spent the past month learning more from local child-care providers and professionals about how they’re affected when neighboring providers close their doors and what it will take to fill those significant gaps. The message from that group is clear: The solutions to the challenges affecting early-childhood education will take much more than simply asking providers to take on more child-care slots.

What happens when a child-care facility closes?

Courter, the director at the Children’s Learning Center in the Pinkney neighborhood, gave the Journal-World a tour of her facility shortly after One of a Kind closed. It’s a Tuesday morning and the building is abuzz with activity, which is no surprise since it has the capacity for 140 kids. The Children’s Learning Center’s second location in south Lawrence, which just opened at the end of 2023, covers another 22 child-care slots.

Yet despite that expansion aided by a partnership with DCCCA and ECKAN Early Headstart, Courter told the Journal-World that the Children’s Learning Center has a waitlist 20 names long just for infants, with only six slots for the taking between them. There are hundreds more kids in Lawrence in need of early-childhood care, Courter said, but their parents can’t find or afford it.

“There’s a disconnect in what’s available,” Courter said.

One of a Kind’s closure was not an isolated incident. Courter said it’s actually one of three larger-scale centers that have closed in Lawrence during the past year or so. Courter said it’s her understanding that about 80 kids were enrolled at One of a Kind, and their parents didn’t find out the center would be closing until the evening after its last day in business.

For the Children’s Learning Center, that meant an immediate flood of phone calls and a quick decision to hire more staff so classrooms weren’t being bumped all the way up to their maximum capacities. Courter said about eight to 10 children from the shuttered facility were starting their education with her staff later during the week of the Journal-World’s visit.

“It is just … organized chaos trying to do tours, trying to accommodate as many children as we can, and also make sure that we’re educating the families that we can’t help with ‘Hey, you should be asking programs that you’re touring if they do background checks and if they do CPR and first aid training,'” Tara Moore, the program director at the Children’s Learning Center, told the Journal-World. “If we can’t actually help by providing care for their children, we can at least help and be a resource for them so that their child does have quality care with the education that they will be receiving.”

The Children’s Learning Center is by no means the only agency to be inundated with calls from families looking for help when another facility closes. Stephanie Duncan, the director and lead teacher at Lawrence Community Nursery School, said she usually receives plenty of frantic phone calls asking about openings.

Duncan’s facility starts at age 3, and she said one of the most common questions she hears from families looking for a child-care provider is whether LCNS accepts infants. Duncan said she thinks that’s an indicator that there aren’t enough child-care slots for infants and toddlers in Lawrence, an issue that’s exacerbated by the difficulties families have with affording child care in the first place.

Duncan said she and other providers want to help, but doing so would mean raising their rates so they’d be able to pay more educators a living wage.

“It has to be so hard for families to find care quickly when a center closes,” Duncan told the Journal-World.

‘The system itself is really broken’

The challenges early-childhood educators face don’t start and end at community demand, though, nor with the knock-on effects of other facilities shutting down. For one, administering quality early education often results in significant costs both for providers and families.

Courter said rates at the Children’s Learning Center are about average compared with other facilities, but costs quickly start piling up when the rate in the infant room, for example, is $1,200 per month.

On top of that, the Children’s Learning Center is a nonprofit, and Courter said the only way it’s able to break even is by tapping into grants. The last time the center raised wages for employees, it created a $90,000 budget deficit.

Infant care rates are similarly costly throughout Douglas County, according to the leader of another Lawrence provider, Positive Bright Start. Executive Director Marie Taylor told the Journal-World that infant rates can cost between $1,200 and $1,500 per month.

That results in a tricky balance for providers. Taylor, Duncan and Courter all expressed concerns about wages that are already too low for early-childhood educators and, for now, only can increase if they’re accompanied by higher tuition rates for families.

“So the idea that teachers can’t get paid any less — you’re not going to get high quality with low pay, we all can’t live in this world of we’re doing it because we know it’s good for a child if we can’t afford food for ourselves, right?” Taylor told the Journal-World. “You also can’t ask parents to pay any more. The system itself is really broken.”

Taylor said that means it’s only possible for a provider to be profitable if it maintains higher ratios of children to adults — and “it’s just about herding cats at that point,” Taylor said, or rather guiding kids just to “get to the next thing” instead of quality, one-on-one instruction.

That’s not a viable approach for Positive Bright Start, which Taylor said is geared toward kids who have struggled in other early-childhood education settings. Taylor’s agency purposefully operates with a lower ratio of children to teachers in order to provide more hands-on social and emotional development.

Then there’s the issue of teacher quality. Courter said the early-childhood education field is home to many young or inexperienced employees, and educators who do have more experience are leaving the field. At some facilities, that revolving door might cause a compounding issue — like educators having not completed mandatory trainings like CPR, or lacking the experience and qualifications necessary to provide quality child care.

Courter said running a child-care facility doesn’t take a degree, which can also lead to a significant learning curve for educators who exit the classroom and step into an administrative role. She’s had to teach herself how to handle payroll, taxes, budgeting and finances.

Not having a close eye on those parts of the operation can quickly lead to going out of business. But there isn’t a large amount of oversight for nonprofit facilities, Courter said, which leaves more room for mistakes and can potentially even lead to financial misconduct like embezzlement.

Having a greater level of oversight, Courter said, could end up being what helps a child-care facility stay afloat. Otherwise, a director might find that their agency’s finances will only get them through another month — or even just days.

“If there’s someone overseeing that, you see it coming before a month,” Courter said.

Rich Minder, the executive director of the Success By 6 Coalition of Douglas County, told the Journal-World that from his perspective, one of the biggest challenges for the field has to do with selecting, designing, implementing and evaluating investments in early care and education.

Minder described the way that child-care professionals must decide how to invest their scarce resources as a “child care trilemma” between quality, availability and affordability. For example, he said choosing to implement a policy that increases the availability of child care slots might simultaneously reduce educational quality.

Finding the answers to all these problems is further complicated by the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moore, the program director at the Children’s Learning Center, said child-care providers are playing catch-up with kids between 2 and 5 years old who missed early intervention services.

Courter said the answer pushed to Kansas legislators, “mainly driven by corporate CEOs of non-education fields,” has been increasing caps on the number of kids that can be in a classroom. Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a bill during the 2023 legislative session that would have loosened standards for child-care providers, including reducing employee training requirements, lowering the minimum age of staff and increasing the ratio of children one adult can supervise.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Care sets out standards for staff-child ratios that call for no more than three infants per one adult and no more than four toddlers per one adult, for example. Recommended classroom sizes are only double the number for each age group — 16 at the highest, for the top end of the infant to 5-year-old early childhood range — and all have a requisite corresponding ratio of adults to kids.

“There’s a bit of a gap there from what the corporate world sees to what needs (there are for) a quality education program,” Courter said. “Early intervention, statistically, the research shows that we’re going to lower poverty (and) homelessness, up graduation rates; people being incarcerated is lower from an early education program because of the amount of brain development that happens in that time.”

One common refrain from the providers who spoke with the Journal-World was that standards for early-childhood education shouldn’t be lowered just for the sake of taking on larger class sizes. Courter and the group at the Children’s Learning Center said requirements for educators should actually be raised.

What providers say they need

What, exactly, are the solutions to that long list of challenges? Local providers have plenty to suggest.

Duncan, at Lawrence Community Nursery School, suggested more financial assistance from the local or federal level both to help pay educators a living wage and to support families in paying tuition.

Minder, meanwhile, said it might be helpful if policy-makers and folks who select and design interventions in the child-care market would acknowledge that employment practices like paid parental leave for the first year post-pregnancy would be more economically efficient than “attempting to stand up an entire infant care subsection.”

“In other words, we need to start thinking of employment policies and practices as a big part of the solution and not rely exclusively on the child-care market to satisfy the workforce needs of other sectors of the economy,” Minder said.

One answer may lie in a relatively new resource that serves not just Douglas County but 14 counties throughout Kansas: Customized Early Education. Essentially, it’s a substitute agency for early-childhood educators founded by Robin Hansen, a veteran of more than four decades in the field.

Hansen started the agency two years ago, initially in an effort to mitigate staffing shortages at the two child-care facilities she runs in Abilene. A grant from the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund’s Child Care Capacity Accelerator program allowed Hansen to build the substitute program further.

Hansen told the Journal-World in mid-May that the program had provided 197 “bookings,” or substitute days, for different providers across its current service area in April. Customized Early Education partners with all five of the state’s regional Shared Service Network hubs, one of which is Douglas County’s Community Children’s Center. Those hubs are lead child-care agencies tasked with streamlining administrative programs for the other agencies in their region.

“Those are keeping classrooms open, giving them more help,” Hansen told the Journal-World. “…We can have meetings and discuss options about what to do for child care in the future, but unless you actually have action plans and something tangible that is actual help for them, all of the other plans kind of just went to the wayside. This is working for early-childhood programs, not only in Douglas County but there’s a huge movement in Johnson County and the Kansas City area.”

Hansen said the need for more workforce is the biggest challenge for early-childhood education, which could be aided via pay assistance or subsidies to supplement employee wages and allow agencies to accept more kids.

Providing some substitute relief for classrooms that need it gets at that solution at least a bit. And Hansen said that Customized Early Education employees undergo more of a process than just showing up when there’s a need for a substitute, ultimately aiming to add consistency at the agencies they work with.

Hansen said that typically her substitutes will start with an orientation day at the agency they could be working with — cost-free for the provider — where they’ll take care of licensing, a background check and, most importantly, getting to know the other teachers and the kids in the classroom. That all happens before a substitute is ever placed in a classroom to work, Hansen said. They’ll ideally be working alongside another regular employee, and if not are supervised a bit more closely by a director.

She added that a substitute might get familiar with two or three different providers and become a “common face” to their programs. Employees at Hansen’s agency also typically live in the community they’re working in.

“It’s never my intention to have somebody just ‘cold turkey’ go into a classroom; that’s not best practice,” Hansen said. “I wouldn’t do that in my own centers, so I wouldn’t expect somebody else to do that in theirs. Plus, it causes stress for the substitute, too.”

The service has been a bit slower to catch on in Lawrence compared with other communities, Hansen said. Two child-care centers are currently working with Customized Early Education substitutes, and others have approached Hansen to learn more.

“Child care is just so difficult, because you have the kids show up whether the teachers do or not,” Hansen said. “You have to have a certain number of employees every day to be able to do it. It’s different than restaurants, (which) can just add another section to that waiter or waitress, but we can’t; we are limited to the number of children we can take care of, so you have to have that number of people show up every day.”

One of the agencies in Lawrence that currently works with Customized Early Education is Taylor’s Positive Bright Start. Taylor said she’s been impressed with the “front-loading” of the orientation process for substitutes, which leads to their feeling much less like strangers.

But scarce funding is yet again a factor that Taylor said makes it challenging to rely too heavily on a service like this one.

“I love that someone’s trying — we know it’s a need,” Taylor said. “It will then need to be, for all of us, a creative way of (figuring out) how do we pay for that?”

Customized Early Education’s substitute pool also has a contract with the Community Children’s Center, whose aforementioned Early Childhood Learning Center will include not just additional classrooms but numerous other resources for families and early-childhood educators, many of which are targeted at developing additional professionals to add to the workforce.

‘Profoundly meaningful and rewarding’ work

Despite all of the challenges, the early-childhood education professionals who spoke with the Journal-World thought highly of the work they’re doing.

Minder with Success By 6, for example, said that work — both the maintenance of diapering and feeding kids and educating them to teach emotional self-regulation and social skills — functions to maintain society and lay the groundwork for the future.

“This dual role is simultaneously mundane but profoundly meaningful and rewarding,” Minder said.

Much like the folks at the Children’s Learning Center, Duncan at Lawrence Community Nursery School stressed how crucial early-childhood education is in brain development and helping kids to become successful in their later years. She said the field is rewarding and gives a firsthand opportunity to see kids grow and make new friends.

And Courter — who has been in the early-childhood education field since age 17 — said she’s never regretted her career path.

“Even when you’re having a bad day, there’s something in early childhood — like we dress up as dinosaurs or superheroes and get to just live in the magic of childhood for longer than most people get to,” Courter said.