Liv Price said she knows not every child has a safe, trustworthy person to confide in.
For Price, a Madison High School student, a childhood teacher was someone she felt comfortable talking to. She said it’s one of the reasons she’s decided to pursue a career in early childhood education.
“For me, one of the biggest safe people in my life when I was younger was my teacher,” Price said. “I figured, I could probably be like that to somebody in my life if I follow through with it (education).”
But high school students like Price, who is enrolled in Madison’s Early Childhood Education career tech program, are also faced with the realities that child care workers typically earn low wages with minimal benefits.
Child care is a job many say is undervalued and misunderstood. For a career that is both physically and mentally demanding, child care workers are among some of the lowest paid professionals in the state.
According to Policy Matters Ohio — a non-profit policy research institute — the median hourly wage for child care workers in Ohio is $13.57 — which equals an annual salary of about $28,000 for those working full time.
Retaining workers in the field is unsurprisingly difficult.
In 2024, 58 percent of Ohio child care programs faced staffing shortages, according to Groundwork Ohio — a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization.
The number of child care workers in Ohio declined by about 32 percent from 2017 to 2023, according to Policy Matters Ohio. The biggest decrease of nearly 5,000 workers happened between 2019 and 2020.
The effects of low child care staffing levels — paired with affordability and several other hurdles to accessing child care — are impacting providers and parents alike.
Localized estimates show that north central Ohio is short thousands of child care slots.
“I have been struggling to staff my program,” said Tiffany Wilson, administrator at New Beginnings Christian Preschool in Loudonville. “I feel like there’s less people willing to do our type of work.”
The reality of preparing, training and convincing workers to enter a profession ripe with challenges is not a simple one. But starting early with local high school students is an approach Pioneer Career and Technology Center and Madison Local School District have taken.
Preparing high school students to enter the child care workforce
Pioneer Career and Technology Center, a public vocational school in Shelby, offers a vast catalog of programs to students from its 14 partner high schools, which span across eight counties.
Among those is PCTC’s Early Childhood Education program, designed to prepare high school juniors and seniors for a career in the care and instruction of infants, toddlers and preschool-age children.
PCTC Superintendent Greg Nickoli said the program has been around for more than two decades, providing hands-on experiences and classroom instruction. He said the maximum number of juniors who can enroll in any program at Pioneer is 25.
“It (the Early Childhood Education program) has been at or at least near capacity for several years, probably the past seven, eight or nine (years),” Nickoli said. “We’re either full or close to full. Typically, most of those juniors return for their senior year.”
Pioneer’s program also gives enrollees the chance to work towards earning their Child Development Associate credential.
This program readies students to immediately enter the workforce upon graduation as a child care aide, preschool aide, home based child care or elementary aide, among other positions. It also prepares students to further their education after graduation.
What is a CDA? Why does it matter?
The Child Development Associate credential is the “most widely recognized credential in early childhood education,” according to the Council for Professional Recognition.
It is based on a core set of competency standards. To obtain a CDA, individuals must train in CDA-approved subjects, work a set number of hours with children, take the CDA exam, build a portfolio and complete a verification visit.
Some of the major benefits of obtaining a CDA include:
- Career advancement
- Quality of care
- Credibility and confidence
Nickoli said the program’s biggest impact is the ability to send students into the workforce each year who have already received training and have earned credentials to begin working immediately. He said providing students with hands-on experiences can help reduce turnover once they enter the workforce.
“Most of the time it lights a fire that, ‘Yeah, this is really what I want to do. It’s what I thought it was and I want to keep going,'” he said.
The superintendent said it would be difficult to give an exact figure on the number of program graduates who entered the early childhood education career field.
“I do know that a lot of those kids have continued that service to our communities,” he said.
Something Nickoli has noticed recently is the number of Pioneer alumni current students have encountered while placed in local elementary schools for internships.
“That’s kind of neat when we can place an intern with one of our former students who’s gone on. That’s just kind of happened recently,” he said.
Madison sees alumni return to local child care jobs
About 20 miles south of PCTC, the Madison Early Childhood Learning Center is also working to prepare students to enter the child care workforce.
Melissa Brandt leads the district’s Early Childhood Education career tech program, which she said enrolls on average about 20 juniors and seniors each year. Brandt said she’s continued to see growth in the program.
These students meet inside the Madison Early Childhood Learning Center, which also houses a preschool and child care program for children ages 6 weeks to 12 years old.
Once seniors in the career tech program graduate, Brandt estimated roughly 50 to 60 percent of them continue down a path in early childhood education. She said some of those graduates also land jobs as social workers.
Similar to the program at PCTC, Madison’s career tech program provides high school students with opportunities to learn necessary skills to work with children from birth to age 12. These students also develop a portfolio for the CDA credential evaluation process upon successful completion of the two-year program.
Other industry credentials students can earn include CPR, first aid, child abuse and neglect recognition and communicable disease prevention.
Brandt said she’s had discussions with her students regarding the pay differences between working in child care versus an elementary school.
“It might not be the greatest starting out, but you do climb that pay scale eventually,” Brandt said. “But I think the pay does deter people, a lot.”
Despite the elements that often scare potential workers away from child care careers, Brandt’s group of students this year all seemed to agree that the joy they find in working with young kids outweighs the negatives.
Former alumni of Madison’s Early Childhood Education career tech program, and a few current students, are proof that those jobs can also be found in their own community.
Brandt said last year, eight of the 24 staff members at Madison ECLC were her former or current students.
“That’s kind of a cool number,” she said. “There is a lot of staff that is here (Madison ECLC) that are either current or former students of mine. Some are seeking college degrees as well and still working here while going to college for early childhood education.”