[C]hild care capacity in Vermont’s regulated market fell by 7 percent between 2015 and 2018, mostly because of a precipitous decline in home-based providers, a new report from the Joint Fiscal Office found.
Legislators asked for the report last session to get a better picture of Vermont’s shifting early education landscape. It includes data on child care capacity for kids ages 0 to 5 by county, age and type of provider.
Department for Children and Families Deputy Commissioner Reeva Murphy said the report includes useful, granular data about the problem — but few surprises.
“This reduction in family child care trend is national and particularly exacerbated in rural areas,” she said. “In rural areas, for me, this is particularly concerning. Because we need family-based providers.”
The number of available slots at school- and center-based providers increased slightly, but not enough to offset closures in the home-based market. There were 204 fewer home providers in 2018 compared to 2015, and 1,854 fewer spots available in those settings — a 25 percent decline in capacity. The hardest hit counties were Essex and Grand Isle.
By design, the JFO report provides an incomplete picture of the child care shortage. Legislators have also asked for a survey of parents to take a look at demand by age, the need for full-time versus part-time slots, and affordability constraints. That analysis is due out in January.
The report offers some potential explanations about why home-based providers are declining, including that older, retiring providers just aren’t being replaced by new entrants in the market. That could be because state regulations are perceived to be too onerous, or because low unemployment is steering people away from the field, where wages and profit margins are notoriously low.
Maureen Blanchard runs a child care center in Canaan — the only registered home-based center in northern Essex county. She’s never had much competition, at least in the regulated market, she said.
“I’m full and I have a waiting list,” she said. “And parents call all the time to find out if they’ve moved up on the waiting list.”
She said she’s not sure why there are fewer home-based providers, although she pointed to state mandates as a potential culprit.
“I know the new regulations probably don’t entice people to go in that direction,” she said.
She added that many of parents choose to go to unlicensed, and often cheaper, home-based providers, which are legal in Vermont so long as they don’t serve more than two families at a time. Blanchard said she sometimes worries about quality at unregistered centers, but she’s also sympathetic to providers who feel overwhelmed by state and federal mandates.
“There needs to be a balance,” she said.
Lynn Macie, who runs Essex county’s only other home-based center, in Lunenburg, said the pressures on home-based providers are mostly economic. Families can’t pay the necessary prices to keep home-based providers open and adequately staffed.
“In the Northeast Kingdom you cannot charge what you should be earning to even maintain our business,” she said.
Janet McLaughlin, the executive director at Vermont Birth to Five, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to high-quality child care, agrees.
“It’s that under-investment in the system that we really see at the root cause of the problem,” she said.
A an earlier DCF report on the closure of home-based providers echoed Macie and McLaughlin’s concerns. According to the report, nearly 80 percent of surveyed providers that closed between 2009 and 2013 said that raising the state’s child-care subsidies for low-income families would have helped them stay open.