Register-Guard Highlights Child Care Crisis
On December 22, 2022, the Register-Guard posted an article detailing the difficulty that Lane County parents are facing when it comes to finding affordable child care, and the work being done locally to alleviate this pressure. Below is the article in its entirety, featuring interviews with United Way of Lane County’s President & CEO, Noreen J. Dunnells, as well as with Family Leadership Council member Jen Cisneros, Racial Justice Advisory Council member Mariela German Hernandez, and Child Care Sector Strategist Holly Mar-Conte.
For Lane County parents, finding child care is 'like preparing for the Olympics'
By Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, The Register-Guard
December 22, 2022
Talia Cisneros, 10, center, reacts after accidentally soaking hot dog buns in water as the family scrambles to eat dinner between the end of the work day and after-school sports practice with her father Daniel Cisneros, left, 5-year-old sister Tiralyn Cisneros and mother Jen Cisneros. Photo by Chris Pietsch - The Register-Guard.
From diapers to discipline to sleep deprivation, parenthood is hard. Amid the endless list of challenges, finding affordable, quality child care is rising to the top. Lane County has long been considered a child care desert, with the number of children needing care outpacing the number of available spots. But the pandemic, stagnant pay and rising prices have pushed the problem to a crisis point for many families. And that crisis doesn't just affect those families. A lack of good child care impacts the quality of a community's workforce, graduation rates, incarceration rates, the cost of K-12 schools and the amount of disposable income available in a community to support other businesses.
Local organizations are looking at ways to address the problem that impacts both the workforce and the community's wellness. The problem is both access and affordability. “The challenge here is that people don't make enough money. The cost of living in our community and the salaries just don't measure up,” Noreen Dunnells, CEO of United Way of Lane County, said. During the second year of the pandemic, 6,700 local women left the workforce, according to United Way of Lane County. Many were unable to afford child care. “Behind housing, childcare is the second most expensive family budget item,” Dunnells said.
“The cost of living in our community and the salaries just don’t measure up. Behind housing, childcare is the second most expensive family budget item.”
The current economy is compounding some of that problem. As families face what some economists call “stagflation,” a combination of an uptick in expenses and a stagnant economy, people’s wages can’t keep up with climbing prices. Prices are overall up 7% from last year and food prices are up about 10% in the western United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "This is an issue," Dunnells said. "It doesn't matter what your political views are. Honestly, it cuts across all political views."
Childcare too expensive for some parents to return to work
“Working for anything less than $20 an hour, that’s not feasible. At that point, you’re working just to pay your childcare provider and nothing else.”
"As a stay-at-home mom, I find myself a lot of the time just dying for an adult interaction of some kind,” Krista Lopez said. “I do miss working. I miss being out of the house, having my own thing to do and being able to help support my family. Lopez has three kids. She’s worked in the caregiving industry, including memory and hospice care. The work was fulfilling but often intense, so occasionally she’d take a break from it and work in fast food. Lopez has wanted and needed to get back to work for about two years, she said.
Her husband is a miner and a heavy equipment operator, so he makes enough that they don’t qualify for state assistance. With just one income for the family of five, it’s hard to make ends meet. “Working for anything less than $20 an hour, that's not feasible,” Lopez said. “At that point, you're working just to pay your childcare provider and nothing else.”
Minimum wage in Lane County is $13.50 an hour, but a living wage in the area for a single-income family of five is $45.88 an hour, according to MIT’s Living Wage calculator. If both parents are working, it’s $30.78 an hour for each.
Unable to find care she can afford and trust, Lopez is stuck.
Finding a spot 'like preparing for the Olympics'
Jen Cisneros and her family juggles jobs and their children’s activities during the holiday season. Photo by Chris Pietsch, The Register-Guard.
The issue of child care is top of mind for many across the state. Earlier this month, Oregon governor-elect Tina Kotek shared plans to work with the private sector on early learning and child care, saying the problem is holding back both families and businesses. Statewide, there are seven infants and toddlers for every funded, regulated infant and toddler child care slot and three preschool-age children for every single child care slot in the state, according to a 2021 report from Oregon State University.
In Lane County, 14% of families have access to a slot for their 0–2-year-old and 35% of families have access to a pre-K slot for their children age 3-5. "It’s like preparing for the Olympics,” said Jen Cisneros, a Eugene mother of two and social worker, describing the difficulties of getting on waitlists for child care. When her children were younger, her husband had to stay home to care for their youngest because they couldn’t find a spot they could afford. “We just kept looking for work and then I would do the math and we couldn't afford it,” Cisneros said. “It was more than one of our paychecks.”
Within Lane County in 2020, the medium monthly cost of care for toddlers was $750 a month for small home-based facilities, $1,020 for large home-based centers and $1,172 for non‐residential facilities that are certified by the Office of Child Care, according to the report from OSU. Data from United Way of Lane County found that the average monthly cost of full-time child care is $886 per child, 21% of the median household income for a family with a child under 6. Families at the federal poverty level or below are hit harder, with care consuming 52% of the median household income. “We have help wanted signs up everywhere,” Cisneros said. “Yet, your paycheck isn't enough to pay your child care.”
Now that her youngest child is 5 and both kids go to school, her husband has been able to rejoin the workforce, but the family’s childcare woes aren’t gone. While her workplace at child wellness nonprofit Head Start of Lane County is flexible and family-oriented, it’s still a struggle figuring out somewhere for the kids to be after school. Her daughters have been on an afterschool care waitlist since the beginning of the school year, but they still haven’t snagged a spot. “I am supposed to be working full time, eight-hour days, trying to go get my child from school on my lunch hour, then trying to get a couple hours in here and there to make up my time,” Cisneros said. “It's just a struggle because kids go to school for six and a half hours a day, but parents have to work eight hours a day.”
As a social worker, Cisneros knows she’s not alone in the struggle to find and afford childcare. She said many of the families she works with don’t have the flexibility at their jobs needed to be both good employees and parents who have to deal with sick days, extracurriculars and non-school days. “There's this fear and stress, and then the kids can feed off of that fear and stress,” Cisneros said. “You don't want to lose your job because you got to pay your rent, but your child needs you because they're sick or their school is closed. So what do you do?”
Challenges increase for communities of color
Finding adequate, culturally-appropriate child care and workplaces that are understanding of parents can be especially challenging for Latinos in Lane County, shared Mariela German Hernandez. She works with Lane County Latino communities through her job as program coordinator for Escudo Latino and program manager for Familias en Conexion at The Arc of Lane County, both nonprofits focused on community wellbeing.
German Hernandez said Latino families looking for bilingual and culturally appropriate care have few options. Through her work roles, she sees families struggle to even find accessible Spanish information about child care opportunities. She has a more understanding, flexible situation working with family-oriented employers now, but with three children of her own, she knows what fellow parents are going through. “Certain job sites don’t appreciate their workers and understand that life happens and the priority of families is their kiddos,” German Hernandez said. “I think we need to be understanding that raising a family and working, it’s not an easy thing.”
Working for urgently-needed solutions
Child Care Sector Strategist Holly Mar-Conte is working to help solve the child care crisis in Lane County.
In the past two years, Lane County has lost approximately 600 child care slots, according to data from United Way. The organization has long been in conversations with Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce, Lane Workforce Partnership, Lane Community College's Quality Care Connections and others, exploring how to create quality, affordable child care across the county. So, when a supporter of United Way gifted $90,000 earlier this year, the organization worked with Onward Eugene, a nonprofit that supports the success of local businesses, to create a one-year position for someone to tackle the issue from a new angle. After taking a sabbatical after 15 years of work in local early learning systems at United Way, Holly Mar-Conte was picked to be the county’s child care strategist in the fall.
Her task is big. She’ll work to create partnerships among local businesses, community-based organizations, education systems, philanthropists and government to expand equitable access to high-quality, affordable early care and education. “Until this position was developed, there wasn't one entity trying to pull it all together,” Mar-Conte said. She’s part of the larger Sector Strategy Team at Onward Eugene. She said looking at the issue from an economic development lens has been a change. Mar-Conte is eyeing some long-term changes that would require policy initiatives, such as the ways care work is seen and valued, how community funds are allocated, how to possibly embed child care into affordable housing developments and accelerating the establishment of child care businesses.
“I don’t think we can move quickly enough. Families now are feeling it, providers now are feeling it.”
“From the employer side, we know that child care is the work that makes all other work possible and employers are struggling across the board with employees' absenteeism, productivity, recruitment and retention,” Mar-Conte said. “From the child care worker side, we know that it's labor-intensive, hard work and even though there are really great efforts to change this, it's often low pay and not great benefits.” Investments in stabilizing child care providers were made during the pandemic, but those funds have run out now, she said.
In the past few months, she’s been working on data collection and survey efforts to better understand what families need and what employers are willing to provide. Recently, she helped Onward launch a toolkit that can assist employers in learning how to better support their employees with kids, such as providing onsite or nearby child care, an endeavor that might be easier to implement than people realize, Mar-Conte said.
“My position is to try to help identify innovative strategies that we can lift up that either we haven't considered, or we haven't had the capacity to carry out as a community,” Mar-Conte said. “I don't think we can move quickly enough. Families now are feeling it, providers now are feeling it.”
Tiralyn Cisneros, 5, shows off her drawing of a pumpkin at her home in Eugene. Photo by Chris Pietsch - The Register Guard
Parents who spoke to The Register-Guard shared that more grants, scholarships or other opportunities for low-cost child care would make it easier to return to work. More childcare slots are urgently needed, either through the existing education systems or workplaces. They also said there is a need for more employers who understand the demands of parenthood. “We need our education system set up to match the work-life system that our country’s created, where two parents have to work 40 hours a week,” Cisneros, mom of two, said. “And your job (needs) to understand that caring for our little ones that are eventually going to be running this country, this world, is really where we need to put our emphasis.”