EARLY LEARNING CRISIS

Some employers with the deepest pockets tried to "step up their game." Ascension Sacred Heart pursued offering childcare for 450 kids at a cost to employees of $500 per month. The sticker shock of a $1 million subsidy from the hospital halted the plan. Navy Federal Credit Union came to the same decision.

Infant care costs are particularly crippling for those without federal or state dollars rolling in. The Department of Children and Families strictly mandates one staff member for every four infants. Infant care costs First United Methodist Church $1,100 per month, and that only covers staff salaries and benefits.

Head Start provides services for ages 0-5 and encounters challenges with finding enough staffing for infants

By Tom St. Myer

Inadequate early childhood education is the black eye on Escambia County that never heals. The county consistently ranks near the bottom of the state in kindergarten readiness rates.

The odds of those rates improving anytime soon appear remote, considering the shortage of slots available for children at early learning centers. Hundreds of children wait for spaces to open, as a critical shortage of educators leaves the county in a crisis with no easy solutions.

Early Learning Coalition is only at 75% capacity, and its waitlist tops 700 because of a staff shortage. Head Start slots for 735 kids, but classrooms by the dozen are vacant with no staff to fill them. Escambia County Public Schools operates 31 Voluntary Prekindergarten classrooms in 16 schools, with an average of 19 students per classroom. The VPK program is at capacity because of financial and staffing challenges—while a need exists for programs at all 32 elementary schools.

Low Pay

The staff shortage is a product of low pay in a region where the cost of living is on the rise. In April 2023, the median listing home price in the county neared $350,000, trending up 7.3% yearover-year.

Escambia Children's Trust Executive Director Tammy Greer said retail and fast-food jobs pay better without the same education and certification requirements. She added that early learning positions require applicants to pay for a background screening. After the applicants clear all those hurdles, the real fun begins.

"They get in there and don't have benefits, and they're treated like crap because people treat them like babysitters," Greer said. "The work they do is hard. They're putting diapers on babies, and in many cases, they're babies who have been through a lot. Retention is difficult. Turnover is incredible."

Greer has sought to bring the community together to identify solutions to the early learning crisis. Escambia Children's Trust recently hosted a roundtable that included a crosssection of childcare, education, government, healthcare and industry representatives.

"We really want commitments," Greer said. "There's been lots of activity, but it's not enough, because look at the condition we're in. People can't find available care. This is a call to action. Who's going to do it? Otherwise, we'll just keep talking about it."

Participants proposed possible solutions to the crisis, but many depended on subsidies. The options discussed included creating and maintaining a volunteer database, covering the costs for volunteers, creating incentives to attract people to the early learning profession, offering scholarships, expedited online classes with completion bonuses, developing internships for students at early learning education centers and incentivizing military spouses to become early learning educators.

"How do we make people pay their people more? Where does that money come from?" Greer said. "It gets passed down to the parents. How do we do this without pricing people out of the market? We have to have private companies step up their game."

"Each of our business models is different, but they rely on the same regulatory framework," said Douglas Brown, the Head Start executive director. "There's a certain number of slots you have to have staff for, and the numbers don't work from the cost of facilities, operations and then the salaries. You need a subsidized market because most families can't afford to pay more."

Head Start and Early Learning Coalition receive federal and state funding for their operations, but the restrictions on that money prevent the agencies from spending freely on their employees.

School readiness and VPK expenses account for about $22 million of the ELC budget, and the money is primarily devoted to operating expenses for childcare facilities. Those funds come with three notable restrictions that limit who qualifies for childcare.

Parent(s)/guardian(s) must be working or participating in an educational activity such as attending college or trade school at least 20 hours per week.

Gross income must be at or below 150% of the federal poverty level for family size.

Families must pay a copayment for childcare based on income and family size.

The demand is still there, as evidenced by the 700-plus children on waitlists, but staffing issues prevent optimal class sizes.

Too Few Dollars

Coalition Executive Director Bruce Watson invested the largest portion of his budget in the agency's history to bump salaries into the $1520 an hour pay scale, but the dramatic increase in property insurance costs prevented him from making any headway.

"All that money I thought would help pay staff better, got sucked up by the insurance bill," Watson said.

The legislation appropriated $1.9 billion for early learning and $315 million of that amount must be encumbered by September. Watson envisions using some of that money to offer bonuses to staff members who successfully recruit new employees. Another possibility from the discussions is offering employees insurance and retirement benefits through group discounted rates.

"We have the latitude to do some things we haven't tried before," Watson said. "...If we could get some more people working, I definitely have a little more room in my budget to help children."

Brown's longer-term goal is to re-recruit some of the staff he lost due to the pandemic and increase the number of early learning classrooms. But, he said he is living in the now, and his top priority is retaining staff. He demonstrated that priority when he scrounged to pay employees equitably.

"Our state, through the Early Learning Coalition, allocated $1,000 to every VPK teacher in Florida, and that's wonderful," Brown said. "Here's the challenge for my agency. I have seven VPK classrooms, which means out of my staff, I had about 40 of them get the bonus, and the teacher next door is asking, 'Where's ours? Don't we get one?' I had to make that good, because it's a retention issue for me."

The early learning crisis is statewide. In Florida, 92,000 households reported that an adult left paid work to provide at-home childcare, and thousands of other Floridians reported cutting hours, according to a March 2022 census survey.

Christa Pate, circuit 1 administrator for Northwest Florida Health Network, said she knows parents who cut work hours to provide at-home childcare. NWF Health Network serves as the region's network management agency for child welfare and substance abuse and mental health services. She attended Greer's roundtable.

The staff shortage is particularly damaging for those in the NWF Health Network who count on early learning educators equipped to care for children coming from broken homes, Pate said.

"Kids with foster parents and caregivers' children are coming out of complex situations and are more likely to express themselves," Pate said. "There are not the specialized settings they need, not even the regular settings. You have a kid who is disruptive, and they call the foster parent, and the foster parent can't come pick up the kid every day because they have to work."

Greer acknowledges that challenges outnumber the solutions. Slowing the early learning crisis is a Herculean task that starts with finding and retaining educators.

"We can't even get to quality, which is my ultimate goal," Greer said. "We don't have enough warm bodies willing to stay in this field." {in}