Research, gubernatorial letter highlight struggles of childcare industry, workers

[This story has been updated.]

Gov. Roy Cooper led a group of Democratic governors in delivering a letter to Congress on Tuesday that calls for preserving and expanding federal investments in childcare. The letter states that the childcare industry has long been under-resourced and is currently “strained to the breaking point,” with numerous childcare workers struggling mightily to make ends meet.

Cooper’s letter comes just two weeks after researchers at the Raleigh-based Hunt Institute and the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy hosted a webinar that painted a similarly sobering picture of the childcare landscape in North Carolina. 

Among the startling facts lifted up during the webinar (which was based on a detailed report the two groups released last November): early childhood educators are seven times more likely to live in poverty than public school Kindergarten teachers.

The November report — “North Carolina Birth to Five Needs Assessment Update” — highlights steps that the state is taking to provide quality childcare and to maintain the state’s eligibility for a national preschool development grant. Information from the initial 2020 report is included in the updated version that was released in November 2022.

“This also provided a unique opportunity for us to better understand what sort of systemic challenges there were before and after the pandemic, but importantly from the perspective of those who were most impacted- families and providers,” Emily Chavis, a policy analyst for the Hunt Institute, said. 

The Hunt/Duke research shows that low wages and a lack of benefits for early childhood professionals are deterring people from entering the field. Researchers suggested several long-term solutions for childcare workers, including enhanced state support, and establishing new ways to enter and advance in the workforce. And since 2020, the onset of the pandemic, childcare providers, children, and families have needed additional behavioral and mental health care.

North Carolina lost about 3,000 early childhood workforce professionals between 2020 and 2022. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2019 North Carolina Workforce study indicated that 19% of center-based providers and 13% of home-based providers had already planned to leave the profession within the next three years because of low pay.

The average North Carolina childcare teacher makes $11.93 an hour.

“Centers were losing providers to the K-12 schools system because they can provide better benefits and better pay,” Chavis said. 

The industry’s numbers began to rebound after receiving stabilization grants from the American Rescue Plan Act. 

“We really found that enrollment in childcare, similar to the number of teachers, really declined throughout the pandemic. But similarly, it did start to rebound after those stabilization grants began in November 2021,” Dr. Elizabeth Snyder-Fickler, a research scientist at the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, said.

The grants were geared toward helping providers cover unexpected expenses that were caused by the pandemic. Businesses also used these grants to keep up day-to-day costs.

Staff could receive additional compensation and families who were going through financial hardship could receive tuition assistance, the report states.

According to the report, parents were concerned about the quality of care their children received. “Center-based staff voiced significant concerns about being able to maintain their star rating given the staffing challenges they may face,” Snyder-Fickler said. 

Snyder-Fickler said this caused a high turnover rate, which concerned families and providers.

The report quotes one Rural Head Start provider focus group participant as saying “The staff that we are hiring are not qualified, but we don’t really have a choice at this point. Some of them have no experience working in an early childhood classroom. So that’s another challenge because the training that we normally provide is just not enough to really place them in those classrooms and get the quality services that we want to provide.”

Pending budget proposals at the General Assembly would do little to address the situation. The House budget currently includes no compensation grants which are used to expand teacher wages. There are also no plans to expand WAGE$ — a childcare worker salary supplement program. Meanwhile, the Senate budget says that any enhanced allotments for childcare should come from the funding the state has left from the American Rescue Plan Act.

As reported by EdNC, those funds are not expected to last the entire fiscal year.

“We’ve heard a lot from families regarding disparities in access to high-quality care, this was also supported by administrative data. It’s particularly true for families of color, those living in rural areas, those of tribal affiliation, and especially those with infants and toddlers,” Snyder-Fickler said.

The full report can be read here.

[Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote from a focus group participant cited in the North Carolina Birth to Five Needs Assessment Update to Dr. Elizabeth Snyder-Fickler. It has been updated. We regret the error.]