Offering child care as a way to retain current employees and grow new ones

Kentucky School Advocate
August 2023

By Brenna R. Kelly
Staff writer

There have been many ideas to fix Kentucky’s teacher shortage – higher pay, more paths to teacher certification, more planning time, easier rank change, or all of the above.

While all of those may be pieces of the puzzle districts are trying to solve, Bowling Green Independent is adding another solution – child care.

Next summer the district will open Little Purples Academy, a child care center that will not only provide needed day care spots for district employees’ children, but also provide a work-based learning environment for high school students who want to pursue a career in education.

“A big issue that started to arise was we were losing staff,” said Bowling Green Independent Superintendent Gary Fields. “We lost staff – from teachers to custodians to cafeteria workers – through the course of the school year in a greater number than ever because of child care difficulties.”  

During a recent meeting of the General Assembly’s Interim Joint Committee on Families and Children, Fields told legislators that a high school social studies teacher quit this past school year because she could not find child care.

“It was painful and a great loss for our students,” he said, during the June 21 meeting.

District worker and child care shortage          

In a recent statewide poll, 91% of respondents strongly agreed that access to high-quality child care is essential for parents to be able to work. In the same poll, commissioned by the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, 61% of respondents said there are not a sufficient number of high-quality child care programs in the state.

And they are right. More than 65% of Kentucky counties are classified as child care deserts, meaning there are three or more children for every one child care seat.

Two counties, Magoffin and Martin, have no child care centers. In 18 of Kentucky’s counties, there are so few child care centers that there are six or more children for every one child care spot, according to a report from the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

FieldsIn Bowling Green, the third largest city in the state in one of the state’s fastest growing counties, child care is surprisingly hard to find. There are more than 21,000 residents below the age of five.

In two zip codes, there are 38 day cares but only eight that are rated 3 or above in the state’s All Stars system, a measure that indicates the quality of the centers, Fields said.

And more child care will be needed as the county’s population boom is expected to continue. Warren County is slated to add 74,743 residents between 2020 and 2050, according to a report from the Kentucky State Data Center.“One of the issues is a lot of young adults are coming in and we’re hiring them as teachers, employees, etc., and they don’t have family in the community. They’re new to the community,” he said. “We’re attracting them because of our great job opportunities. But they have no support, so they are counting on day cares.”

When Bowling Green Independent recently surveyed its 650 employees, more than 90% said they would need infant or toddler child care within the next five years. Some employees said they had been on a waitlist for a year.

“We know the issue is there,” he said. “We know they have to find help.”

Day care in districts          

Memorial’s staff and other Pulaski County Schools’ staff get priority for open spots and their children make up about 20 percent of the center’s children. District employees pay for the care, but the cost is lower than most of centers in the area, she said.

“Our child care program stands on its own financially without any direct monetary support from the district,” Smith said.

In 2016, Memorial became the state’s first child care center to get five stars, the highes in the state’s rating system.

Smith said she believes the child care center is an incentive for teachers or other potential employees to choose Pulaski County Schools. This fall she will enroll eight new children of Pulaski staff members.

In the past year, Smith has advised at least two other districts that plan to add child care centers. Boyle County Schools has plans to open a center with 54 child care spots, according to the Danville Advocate-Messenger.

In Northern Kentucky, Erlanger-Elsmere Independent partners with Learning Grove to run a center that serves children ages 0-5 years old that is open to area families and the children of district personnel. Kenton County Schools has day care spots for employees’ children ages 3-5 at its Summit View Academy in Independence.  

“I’ve talked to several counties about doing it,” Smith said. “We’ve been around long enough that we kind of know the kinks in the system.”

Child care as a career            
For Bowling Green Independent, the need for the child care center came at the perfect time. This year the district received $8.3 million for a Local Area Vocational Educational Center (LAVEC), funded in the 2022 state budget.

As district leaders weighed which career pathways would expand opportunities for students and meet the needs of the community – they decided the LAVEC should house a child care facility in addition to robotics, industrial maintenance and other career pathways.

The Little Purples Academy will have spots for 66 children ages six weeks to 4-years-old. In addition to the funding approved by the General Assembly, the district will use a $100,000 Community Partnership Grant from the Department of Community-Based Services to help start the day care.District employees’ children will get priority enrollment in the center. The costs for employees or others using the day care have not yet been set.

“It's going to serve a role for us because we’re going to have 66 children in that facility that are going to be children of employees who may be a cafeteria worker, a bus driver, a teacher,” Fields said. “The superintendent’s too old to have little ones in there, but hopefully other employees within our district will.”

The facility will be operated as a partnership with Bowling Green/Warren County Community Education, which will employee the child care workers.

The LAVEC will be on the district’s high school campus which will make it convenient for the 101 high school students in the district’s early childhood pathway to job-shadow and assist in the center’s daily operations, Fields said.  

“We have students who want to go into child care, they want to go into teaching, they want to go into social work, a lot of different programs that are available to them on their career path,” he said.The pathway allows students to earn credentials so that they can work in a child care center as soon as they graduate.

Like Bowling Green, Smith said students from Pulaski County’s two high schools also get hands-on experience at Memorial. Early childhood education students come twice a week from September to April as part of their classes, Smith said. Students collaborate with teachers at the center to do a small group or large group instruction, learn how to teach in centers, how to modify lesson plans and implement them, she said.

Students can also do a co-op at the center working mornings or afternoons, she said. Those students can get their certifications and then work at the center.

“I have three people right now who actually were in the classes last year that work for me,” she said.

Fields said he hopes the Bowling Green program will create child care workers and child care center owners to help alleviate the child care deficit in Warren County.

“Our high school students will be in that child care facility every day that it is open, getting apprenticeship hours, internship hours – and they’re going to be employable, and they’re going to work in and run facilities in our community for the next number of decades to come,” he said.