Day cares struggle to find staff
At the end of a long week on Oct. 15, administrators at Early Years Child Care in Butler had to make a difficult decision.
The center, one of six Early Years locations in the county, employed seven teaching staff members and one director, but was having difficulty finding new staff to fill holes left by departing employees.
“Some staff are leaving, and no other people have applied,” center director Shayla Leopardi said. “We just can't get staff right now.”
The problem had become untenable. The Route 68 location, which serves about 35 children, decided to close, marking its last day open as Oct. 29. Parents would have two weeks to find their children an alternate child care option.
But even as the center marked its last days, Leopardi said the demand for child care didn't cease.
“We're not having trouble (finding) kids,” she said. “There are five new phone calls a day. We've had a few new kids start this week, even knowing that we are done in two weeks. It's been crazy.”
The difficulties faced by the closing Early Years center aren't unique. Child care centers across the county are having trouble attracting staff, amid a growing need for child care services as parents return to in-person work.
At the Cranberry location for Kiddie Academy, which employs 20 people, center director Mona Bhatia said she feels that the hiring issue is “all over” the industry.“You go anywhere, and everyone is stressing out,” Bhatia said. “We are blessed that we are able to sustain our employees, but we lost a couple people because of the pandemic, and the new people are not even coming.”Kiddie Academy has a number of positions open on employment website Indeed for teachers, infant teachers, assistant teachers and child care center teachers. Wages are listed as between $13 and $17 an hour for child care center teachers, which the academy lists as an immediate opening. Previous job listings noted $10 to $14 an hour as a range for early childhood teachers.“It is just terrible,” Bhatia said. “People will no-show. They will say that they will come in for an interview, but they won't show up. It is very difficult to hire employees at this time, even with the benefits, medical, dental and vision.”
At larger, nonprofit child care organizations, the problem is also persistent.Early Learning Connections, which serves Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Indiana and Lawrence counties, is also the grantee agency for the Butler and Armstrong County Head Start/Early Head Start Programs, Pre-K Counts, Infant Toddler Contract Slots Program and the Child Care Information Services Agency of Butler County.“We do have challenges with finding staff,” said Elisa Spadafora, the CEO of Early Learning Connections. “We are really trying to increase our advertising and what we offer as an organization in terms of benefits.”Spadafora said that Early Learning Connections' outstanding needs are in the category of classroom staff, and that the provider has 16 open positions as of Thursday, although the number continues to shift and updates are regularly posted online. She said Early Learning Connections offers competitive industry wages and benefits.“We have a unique challenge in that we have enrollment requirements, and we also have requirements for ratios of staff to children, and we still have some outstanding positions that need to be filled,” Spadafora said. “We're doing everything that we can for that, including as much advertisement as possible.”At Lifesteps, a nonprofit which serves Beaver, Butler and Armstrong counties, vice president of early education Stacy Slater said she's seen issues with staffing all across the state through the organization's participation in the Pennsylvania Child Care Association (PACCA).“We know we're not alone in this, but this is still a challenge that we all face, and it seems pretty uniform,” she said. “We have had deliberations in that group where we've discussed the challenges that we are facing across the Commonwealth in staffing and in rates that are paid to providers versus the rates that we need to pay to our staff to get and retain quality staff.”Lifesteps has over a dozen positions open, including preschool teachers, aides, assistant supervisors and substitute teachers. Slater said that Lifesteps's services have become even more needed as other providers close their doors or struggle further.“We've seen nothing but providers in our community continuing to close their doors, or discontinuing services like child care,” she said. “We have seen a recent increase in applications (for positions) but certainly nothing like what we were accustomed to pre-2020. We've never gotten back to that point.”
At Kiddie City child care center in Butler, owner Rich Gall said the center has been “bombarded” with calls in the past week, many from parents who previously had enrolled their children at the closing Early Years center.“We've had a lot of phone calls recently, and it's parents looking for last-minute changes,” Gall said. “We want to accommodate everything as best we can, but we'll have to wait until we have the staff. We have the space, but we just don't have the staff.”Gall put out ads on Indeed online, and reached out to the unemployment office, Butler County Community College and Slippery Rock University. He also bought a sign to put out on the fence to announce the center is hiring. Kiddie City is in need of in-classroom teachers, either full or part time, and Gall said the basic staffing rate starts at $12 an hour.“I'll be honest with you, it's always been bad in day care. It's a hard job,” he said. “But after COVID hit, it was really hard. It never got any better.”Wages are difficult to balance with tuition, he said.“I think the thing in day care is that we never paid minimum wage — we always paid $10, $11 to start when minimum wage was $7,” he said. “Now, everybody has upped their wages, which makes it hard for us to look like a good option for people because they can make that anywhere. That's what hurts us because if we up the wages, we have to up tuition, and once you get to a certain point, then people can't afford tuition, and they'll keep their kids at home.”He said that the center has had loyal clients, but that after COVID-19 and closing for two months, it took a whole year to build up to 90% of what Kiddie City was before the pandemic. Now, the struggle is finding the staff to cover those children.“We were fortunate that all of our employees came back when we reopened, but a lot weren't that lucky,” he said. “Some of their staff said they weren't coming back, and that hurt a lot of day cares. A lot of elderly babysitters may have quit doing it because of COVID. The demand for day care for us definitely picked up, but it took a while because for a good year there were a lot of people working from home.”
At Lifesteps, Slater said that the entire human services industry is feeling the impact of a year and a half of pandemic conditions.“The things that we're going to need to find are ways for us to financially be able to run our business successfully, and somehow obtain and achieve the funding levels we need to be able to pay staff what they find to be a liveable wage,” she said.“Through PACCA, we've been working with state legislators and representatives to determine what funding opportunities might be available to providers like ourselves to help support the funding we already receive, and help us be able to meet a liveable wage for our staff.”Funding, she says, is key to keeping the doors open, paying staff and serving families in need of child care.“We have high expectations of our staff and the responsibilities are great, but we understand that wage-wise, we are competing with the retail and restaurant industry,” she said. “So that's a real challenge.”Gall says he expects that something will have to change in the industry moving forward, but that he isn't sure of a specific solution.“I'm not sure exactly what the future is going to be for day care,” he said. “The government is starting to realize that there is a major concern. It's the beginning of the economy. If people don't have their kids taken care of, they can't go to work. It's finally come to a head, where, 'Boy, we better do something about this, or we aren't going to have an economy left.'”
