By Maggie Tiscornia
You’re pregnant? Congrats! Get on the waitlists for childcare now!
If you had a child in the past 10 years, someone in your circle probably offered this sage advice the moment you announced your pregnancy. Their suggestion — nay, warning — may have taken you by surprise, and rightfully so. After all, you were just barely wrapping your head around being a parent, and now it is already time to think about preschool and stuff? How hard could it possibly be to get a spot somewhere?
Very hard, it turns out. And it’s only getting more difficult as our Valley grows.
New moms and dads realize how tough it is to find high-quality, reliable, affordable childcare and early education in our area, but others might not. As the director of the Confluence Early Childhood Education Coalition (CECE), I’d love to paint a picture of this extreme, region-wide hardship. Because it impacts our entire workforce and extended community.
I’m the mom of two young kids. It took my husband and me a full year to find care for our first born. Then, when our second arrived, we quickly realized that the entirety of one of our paychecks would soon go straight to childcare for two.
Would it even be worth staying in that job? Should one of us have opted to stay home until our kids entered kindergarten? We weren’t sure how all of the career, financial and early childhood education pieces could fit together. It wasn’t until I began working in the early childhood space that I learned the true scale of the crisis in our region, and that my family’s struggle was far from unique.
The problem is twofold: limited capacity and outsized cost.
For starters, our community doesn’t have enough childcare spots available for more than half of the kids under 5 years old. Currently, there are about 2,100 spots available, compared to the nearly 4,900 babies and toddlers between Parachute and Aspen.
Why is this? One factor that limits program capacity is low teacher and provider wages. If the people caring for our kids can’t earn a livable wage in our community, they’ll look elsewhere for higher paying jobs. That leaves us without enough teachers to staff our childcare programs.
In a 2023 survey, CECE found that one-in-six regional child care employees reported difficulty in affording basic necessities. Tuition income alone is generally not enough to cover both operational expenses and livable wages for providers. And that is despite tuition costs already being too expensive for most local families to afford. It is a broken market in need of public funding in order to be successful.
Which brings us to the other problem: a disproportionate cost burden for the parents. The federal government recommends devoting 7% of household income to childcare. But an average four-person family at the area median income in the region is spending around 37%, based on our findings.
Your neighbors aren’t kidding when they say that they spend just as much, or more, on childcare than they do on their mortgage or rent. This is simply not sustainable for families, and if we want healthy economic stability in our region. Employees — from grocery clerks and bank tellers to K-12 teachers and nurses — need options and agency in their career decisions after having children.
One nurse we interviewed left her job entirely when her family’s childcare bill canceled out her monthly income. Now, she worries that she’ll be behind on professional development in her field whenever she is to return. Her struggle is shared by countless other parents in our community.
As we look to the future of our region, the question is: How do we fix the childcare crisis today, to ensure a better tomorrow?
The Confluence Early Childhood Education Coalition invites everyone who values the sustainability and vitality of our region to join our movement to support robust access to early childhood care and education, from Parachute to Aspen. Generational rewards await, but we must act now. Please visit www.CECECoalition.org and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date. Together, we can do this.