The Marathon County child care crisis might have a new fix

The plan would funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to helping centers retain employees.

It’s not the first time The Wausonian has written about the Marathon County child care crisis.

And it likely won’t be the last. The number of available slots in Marathon County for parents who need someone to watch their child while they work has continued to decline. And that decline has been pretty dramatic.

Since 2012, Marathon County has seen a 60% decline in the number of child care facilities located here. Check out the chart from Childcaring, a non-profit aimed at assisting child care facilities, below:

In central Wisconsin, that’s been the same: According to a child care report by financial firm Baker Tilly, the central Wisconsin region went from 691 providers in 2010 to 184 in 2022.

Their chart coincides with the introduction of the YoungStar rating system, meant to help warn parents away from poorly run or even scammy facilities. (It was a particular problem in Milwaukee at the time.)

I worked at the Stevens Point Journal at the time the rating system was being implemented. Many family-run child care facility owners told me they were concerned because the ratings seemed to favor larger facilities, and said at the time that it would make it nearly impossible for smaller facilities to obtain a high rating. Some of those metrics seemed only tangentially related to the actual quality of a facility. (For instance, the owner’s and employees’s education level gained points - something that gives a larger facility a huge advantage over smaller child care providers.)

Many of those kinks have now been ironed out since the YoungStar system was implemented, child care experts say. And correlation doesn’t equal causation. Explained in the report, as well as by Borchardt and other child care experts, trouble finding staff has been a major issue. Child care is hard work and it generally doesn’t pay very well.

Couple that with a major change in employment - 2012 was still in the fallout zone from the financial crisis (markets had recovered but Main Street was still struggling). Many people were still desperate for work and hiring was more of a problem of attrition, of dealing with far too many applications.

That trend began reversing and by the end of the 2010s employers started telling me they couldn’t find workers to save their businesses (literally). A cleaning business owner I spoke to told me that he could be expanding if he had the workforce, since they had more potential clients than they had employees to work. Instead, he was downsizing to adjust to a diminished workforce.

That hit the child care industry especially hard. Childcaring now says it has a new solution.

A crack at the problem

Borchardt in a meeting at the county’s Economic Development, Extension and Education Committee earlier this month proposed a new solution — helping business owners defray the costs of hiring employees. Borchardt says with all the education and certification a new employee needs, starting a new employee can cost nearly $3,000.

To help assist hiring, Borchardt proposed a program that would use $200,000 of grant money over two years to fund the start-up costs of onboarding employees.

Borchardt in her presentation says that would bring on 30 new child care professionals which would open up 240 slots for parents to bring their children.

Borchardt believes that defraying the costs would allow the facilities to pay their employees more, which would help retain them longer. Because so far, that’s one of the problems.

Challenges with the solution

Does the math add up? That’s not entirely clear. While it might help child care facilities fill empty spots they have now, it’s not entirely clear that it would help add new positions, and which is what the new child care slot calculation comes from.

But, if there are a significant number of open slots, helping fill those and keep them filled could help provide additional child care openings that might not have happened had those position remained open.

Wausau Child Care had two openings listed when I searched “Child Care Jobs.” The YMCA didn’t pop up on my search.

I reached out to Stephanie Daniels at the YMCA and to Jake Schalow at Wausau Child Care, as Borchardt had brought both of them up in her proposal. Together they represent two-thirds of the child care openings in the Wausau area.

Schalow says Wausau Child Care is in a better position than it was 12-18 months ago, but that the organization is still searching for teachers.

I asked Schalow if he thought the grants would make a difference:

I think the biggest thing is that it is a challenging but very rewarding job. This is not just a child care issue, there are many school districts across the state of Wisconsin (and the country) that are facing teacher shortages. I do think additional support and resources would help to get teachers into the profession.

It’s unclear how those funds would help smaller child care providers, who might not have employees. And other solutions will be needed to help invigorate new child care businesses to set up shop in Marathon County.

Statewide solutions

Rep. Pat Snyder says that he is working with democrat Jill Billings politician to find statewide solutions to the child care problem.

Snyder says that last session after American Rescue Plan Act funding ran out, he tried to find a bridge solution and proposed $100 million toward child care solutions. That was dead on arrival at the Joint Finance Committee, Snyder explained.

Snyder says that child care needs to be a three-legged stool — the parent puts some money in, businesses should then match that contribution to child care and then the government could help match those funds. Some businesses, he says, are even considering opening their own day care centers for their employees. “Some of my colleagues see it as ‘paying for babysitting.’ No it’s not, it’s the most important time in a child’s life,” Snyder told the EEE Committee. “It’s an investment into the future.”

He says he and Billings are looking at programs similar to those in Indiana and Michigan. Michigan did a similar program to that being proposed for Marathon County, plus helps guarantee some of the early child care payments for low-income folks.

He says one thing that is happening is that schools are starting to offer day care for children as young as three years old - but that would put pressure on private day cares because three-and-four-year-olds are where day cares make back the profit they lost on infants.

Something happening

A story I’ve been writing about for ten years is the challenges with Wausau’s public transit system. Ten years since first writing about the issue, not much has changed. There is finally a plan for improving the system developed by a consultant and released to the city in 2021; but so far the bus system remains the same and is continually losing ridership.

The child care situation is similar in that the number of providers and slots available to parents has continued to decline. But unlike transit, solutions are being worked on that hopefully will make a dent into the problem.

Which is good, because the county’s workforce viability is depending on it.

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Read our latest Full Court Press, a look at the most notable civil cases in Marathon County from the previous month. Only here on The Wausonian: