Public officials, community leaders and businesspeople from Wrangell and Juneau met online Feb. 11 to discuss possible solutions to Wrangell’s lack of child care options.
Representatives of the Wrangell Cooperative Association, Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, the Wrangell borough, SEARHC, Sealaska Corp. and Little Eagles and Ravens Nest (LEARN) talked through the problems.
WCA IGAP Coordinator Valerie Massie, one of the meeting attendees, said she and others “saw child care and housing as the two main hurdles to economic and social development here in Wrangell, just like many other towns.”
Massie said part of the problem is being able to pay child care staff a living wage without charging parents unaffordable fees.
“(We) discussed how a facility in Wrangell would need to be a combination of supplemental funding and private pay,” she said.
Jamie Shanley, the administrator of LEARN, attended the meeting since her facility in Juneau is seen as a model of how a child care center in Wrangell could be created. Along with the fees paid by parents, LEARN also receives a block grant from the Juneau Native corporation, as they partner with them to provide child care.
LEARN employs 17 full-time staff and one AmeriCorps worker, who is partly paid by LEARN plus an AmeriCorps stipend.
“We have a big range (of salaries),” Shanley said. “We bring people in around $18.50 an hour and lead teachers make upwards of $26 per hour. We’re also offering a premium pay right now since they are working on the frontlines with unvaccinated children.” Shanley said that premium pay is $4 more per hour.
Each employee also receives full medical and dental insurance and a retirement plan. She said the partnerships with larger entities that need child care options to attract qualified workers is the key to sustaining child care.
“Really, in order for child care to be successful, you need to have subsidies,” she said.
Ashley Snookes, program manager at Juneau-based Spruce Root, a nonprofit organization that helps develop small businesses in Southeast, echoed Shanley’s thoughts.
“It’s incredibly difficult to create sustainable financial models for day cares,” Snookes said. “It’s difficult to create that if you want to pay employees more than $14 an hour or provide benefits or a 401k. In my opinion, the only way that child care centers can attain sustainability, while increasing benefits for employees and increasing education without outrageous fees for parents, is partnering with municipalities, partnering with large employers to provide priority care, or investment funds to sustain centers over time.”
Snookes said that as pandemic relief funds begin to wind down, it’s a good time for local governments and institutions to see how Southeast communities can innovate and sustain child care centers.
LEARN has 34 children currently enrolled, however it has capacity for 60. Its rates are on par with the rest of the market, but parents can apply for child care assistance depending on their income level, Shanley said.
Having received $8.3 million in federal pandemic aid funding in 2020 and 2021 — though much of the money has been allocated for food and utility assistance and other programs — the WCA council has asked for ideas from its membership and staff on ways to use the funds.
“Both Brooke (Leslie) and I saw expanding child care options as a crucial step for the community, especially during the pandemic,” Massie said. Leslie has been researching and pushing for child care services in Wrangell since last summer.
“Other communities and tribes have invested in expanding child care and other social services during these past two years,” Massie said. “WCA is in a unique position after being inundated with CARES and ARPA funds (federal programs) through 2020 and 2021.”
However, Massie noted, no funding has been earmarked for child care services yet, and several steps would need to be taken to move forward with some sort of plan.
“Next steps would be to formally put interested parties in writing, do a needs assessment (formal and informal) on families that would potentially use child care, and find locations that could work (and) figure out how close they are to licensing standards (adequate square footage, bathrooms, fire code, etc.),” Massie said. “These are all things that were discussed at the (Feb. 11) meeting.”
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