MOUNT VERNON — Payton Fletcher knows first-hand how a lack of child care can negatively affect a family’s income.
After moving back from Washington state, the Mansfield mom earned nearly $100,000 her first year selling cars at a Mansfield dealership.
When Fletcher looked for child care for her 4-month-old son, she found excessive waitlists. One location estimated a wait time of eight to 12 months.
Fletcher found care at a center in Mansfield, but also had to find secondary care for the days the center sent her son home due to illness.
Between the two, she paid nearly $2,000 a month. She also had to provide formula, diapers and wipes.
After four or five months, she placed her son full time with the secondary care provider, a stay-at-home mom.
Then Fletcher got pregnant with her second child. Meanwhile, her stay-at-home mom had to return to work full-time because she couldn’t afford to stay home.
“Infant care has just been so, so hard to find, and expensive, and I knew I would not be able to afford full-time child care for both of them,” Fletcher said.
“So I have the dilemma of staying home completely or finding something that I could do just part-time.”
Luckily, Fletcher found an hourly work-from-home job. However, she’s making $60,000 less than she made selling cars.
Fletcher also found a family member who babysits.
“She watches my oldest about four hours a day while I work, and I keep my infant home with me because I can’t afford infant child care,” Fletcher said.
Her oldest child is now 3, and her youngest just turned 1.
“I don’t qualify for subsidies or discounted child care or anything like that, which definitely deters me from being able to work a better job because I can’t afford child care,” she said.
“If child care was more affordable, I would still be selling cars to this day.”
What’s causing the shortage?
Tiffany Wilson has been in child care for 23 years. For the past 12, she has been the administrator at the privately-funded New Beginnings Christian Preschool in Loudonville.
“Many families come to me and want their kids in our program and tell me how much they’re struggling to find all-day programs or programs for after school,” she said.
Wilson accepts 22 kids each year into her program. The first few years, she rarely had a waiting list. The last three, she said she’s had “a pretty decent” one.
Wilson attributes that to more children needing placement and fewer people interested in providing child care.
“I have been struggling to staff my program,” she said. “I feel like there’s less people willing to do our type of work.”
Rick Carfagna, senior vice president for government affairs at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, said he spoke with a child care provider in northeast Ohio who was licensed to serve additional children, but couldn’t because they can’t find enough workers.
“It’s a low-wage job. And some of these fast casual restaurants — and I’m not disparaging — the state of our economy right now, there are lots of jobs that are paying pretty good wages for people. So that’s what you’re up against,” Carfagna said.
Operating costs, staffing and cash flow
Olive Tree Care in Loudonville offers before- and after-school care. The center restarted its two-day-a-week summer camp this year after closing it when COVID-19 hit.
According to Administrator Kristy Spreng, the cost of opening and operating a program is one reason for the child care shortage. Another is cash flow for publicly-funded programs: those that accept families receiving child care assistance from the state.
“Those centers are waiting for money to get reimbursed from the state or county. It’s hard to operate that way because there’s not necessarily always a consistency with receiving those public funds,” Spreng said.
State data also reflects the shortage of providers and staffing.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services reports that during State Fiscal Year 2024, Ohio had 7,005 licensed programs, down from 7,890 in SFY 2018.
According to the Century Foundation, child care employment levels declined by 26 percent between 2019 and 2023.
In some areas, the shortage is so severe that the area qualifies as a child care desert.
Are Knox, Ashland, and Richland counties child care deserts?
The Center for American Progress (CAP) defines a child care desert as any census tract with more than 50 children under age 5 that contains either no child care providers or has so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots.
CAP calculates a child care score by dividing the number of children in a census tract by the capacity (number of licensed child care slots). A score of more than three indicates a child care desert.
According to CAP, much of Knox, Ashland, and Richland counties qualify.
Child care needs are often more pronounced in urban areas
Mapping the scores shows that the child care deserts are predominantly located in rural areas.
Susan Martin, data manager for the YWCA of Northwest Ohio, confirmed that trend exists in Richland County.
“We are mostly lacking in our rural communities,” she said. “We have many areas that either have very limited individuals who take publicly-funded children, or some of them have none at all.”
Martin said there are different reasons for the disparity, including the income of individuals living in an area, the age group needing care, or the parents’ desire for child care near their workplace.
Analyzing CAP scores countywide shows that Knox County is a child care desert, with 3.51 children for every available child care slot.
As a whole, Ashland and Richland counties are not child care deserts. Richland has an overall score of 1.68 children per child care slot. Ashland has a score of 2.63.
These scores suggest that some rural parents place their children in urban care centers.
Spreng sees that at her center.
“In the summer, some of our families that come before and after school through the school year, if they don’t have family or people to help, will take their kids wherever they work,” she said.
“In Ashland, they may take them to the Kroc Center; in Mansfield, to the YMCA.”
Julia Suggs, economic development coordinator for the Knox County Area Development Foundation, agrees.
“A lot of people that work in Mount Vernon live in the county. There is child care in the villages, but we know it is not meeting the need for child care,” she said.
What type of child care do we need?
Fletcher isn’t the only parent struggling to find infant and toddler care.
Brandy Scheetz is the director of Foundations Community Childcare in Ashland. She said she does not know how many child care spots Ashland County needs, but she considers the area a desert in terms of care for children 6 weeks old to age 3.
“We seem to have a lot of spaces in the community for just straight-up preschool or children who are already potty-trained, but in this area there are really not many ODJFS-licensed child care facilities that accommodate large numbers of our infants and toddlers,” she said.
Foundations opened in June 2024 as the result of the Women’s Fund Childcare Initiative at the Ashland County Community Foundation. Its initial capacity was 150 children, infants through school age.
“What I have noticed in opening our facility is that our infant spaces were the very first to fill,” Scheetz said. “When we first opened and after we filled our infant room, we had probably a 30-deep waiting list.
“So you can definitely see the need is out there.”
According to the facility’s statement of need, there were 3,000 children in Ashland County under age 5 in 2020. However, there were only three licensed child care centers for infants and toddlers.
Those centers provided 26 spaces for infants and 56 for toddlers.
“To think there were that many children out there and to only have 82 licensed infant and toddler spaces in the entire county, the need is definitely there,” Scheetz said.
A 2022 Knox County Area Development Foundation child care survey showed a similar lack of spaces for infants and toddlers.
Of the 986 available child care spots countywide, only 73 were for infants and toddlers.
How much child care do we need?
Parents, child care providers and employers agree that Knox, Ashland and Richland counties need more child care. Data and anecdotal evidence support that.
Acknowledging Ohio’s need for increased access, Gov. Mike DeWine introduced the Child Care Access Grant program. The $85 million initiative is designed to stimulate capacity by expanding programs or creating new ones.
Carfagna agrees that Ohio needs more capacity.
“You need more centers, you need more actual day care-type facilities. But you also need — especially in the rural areas — you need more in-home family child care options,” he said.
“I mean, you can’t expect to just go out into rural Ohio and build a bunch of KinderCares. It’s just not realistic. It’s not going to happen.”
Carfagna said the opportunity to train people to be entrepreneurs or welcome children into their homes, get them licensed, and have their houses retrofitted to care for children is doable.
“So we need to develop both of those options to grow the number of providers,” he said.
It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many more child care spaces a community needs to bridge the gap, but several methods can provide a starting point.
Center for American Progress formula
In addition to reporting the number of children under the age of 5 and child care capacity for each census tract, the Center for American Progress tracked the percentage of households that had all parents in the workforce.
Child care experts can use that information to help determine the potential number of child care spots needed for these households. The calculation for each census tract looks like this:
Using this method, Knox County needs an estimated 1,211 additional child care spaces. Ashland needs 599, and Richland needs 621.
However, adding these spaces only satisfies the need for households where all parents are in the workforce. Estimates do not account for single-parent households that struggle to find care.
These estimates also do not account for the number of households that have someone at home who wants to enter the workforce but cannot due to a lack of child care.
Additionally, the number of children under age 5 includes Amish families who traditionally do not require child care.
Knox County Area Development Foundation formula
In the Knox County ADF survey, 58 percent of respondents reported having a family member in the household who cannot work full -time due to child care demands.
Julia Suggs, ADF’s economic development coordinator, said the organization used that figure to estimate the need for child care in Knox County.
“Our survey was statistically relevant, so we applied that 58 percent to the county,” she said.
“However, we know that not everybody wants to be working.”
Suggs noted that a 2021 Groundwork Ohio survey revealed that 60 percent of non-full-time working parents would work if they had child care.
For its study, the Knox County Area Development Foundation calculated the child care need this way:
Using this formula and numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, Knox County needs 1,538 additional child care slots to accommodate parents who would enter the workforce if they could access care.
Ashland needs 1,059, and Richland needs 2,869 to accommodate parents who would enter the workforce if they could access child care.
“We have excellent child care providers, and we’re grateful for the work that they do. But we need way, way more,” Suggs said.
‘If there’s no child care, somebody has to stay home’
Suggs said that, according to data from the 2023 American Community Survey, the development foundation estimates Knox County needs a total of about 2,600 child care spots.
“The really clear data we have through our assessment and anecdotally is that (the need) has grown. We feel like this is making a really good assumption,” Suggs said.
“We still hear from companies saying their employees are struggling, or they lose their employees, due to child care.”
Suggs emphasized that, in addition to more spaces, the spaces must span all ages.
“We specifically need an even amount of spots for infants, toddlers, and preschool,” she said.
“There is a significant demand for infant and toddler spots because it’s the most difficult child care to provide due to the very low ratio of teacher to child requirements. If there’s no child care, somebody has to stay home.”