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NEWS Child Care? Child, Where?

Cracks in Central Oregon’s child care market deepen as COVID causes several facilities to close

By Jack Harvel

Several of Central Oregon’s child care centers closed their doors as the region experiences recordhigh COVID-19 cases, causing parents to scramble to find alternative care.

The latest surge is exacerbated by Central Oregon’s lack of available child care. A 2019 study from Oregon State University found that only 20% of children in Deschutes County had access to a child care spot, and that nearly every county in the state qualified as a “child care desert,” meaning any area with a 3:1 ratio of children to available child care spots.

“Most of the United States, so even beyond our regional realities, is struggling,” said Megan Pratt, an assistant professor at OSU and the lead author of the study. “What’s really clear is that two thirds of families of children under age five in our state don’t have available care, and this has stayed consistent. It’ll be interesting to see where we’re at, we’ll be looking at this next after the pandemic, because what a lot of times happens is, when there’s no child care, is mom stays home.”

The shortage of available care can lead to years-long waiting lists for children to get enrolled in preschool. Under these circumstances, some parents feel child care centers take advantage of the shortage by charging more for less. During closures from COVID exposures, several parents who spoke to the Source reported they continued to pay full price despite their preschool’s lack of service. Deschutes County Public Health stopped tracking active cases in early learning facilities during the Omicron wave to focus on supporting facilities rather than track cases.

“From the second you get a positive pregnancy test, you have to get on the waitlist and then you have to call every single month to be sure that you could even get your child a spot,” said a Bend mother who asked to remain anonymous. “That’s why they can do what they do with their prices, when you wait over a year to get child care that you could barely get to begin with, you’re going to do what you have to do, even if it’s paying $850 a month to hold a spot that never comes.”

Some parents said they’ve had to take leave from work several times over the pandemic to cover for child care they still paid for. Others complained that little was done to inform parents how long the closure would last, and that some facilities didn’t do enough to contain outbreaks.

“I had zero confidence in their ability to manage it. They would say one thing while doing another,” a parent

Courtesy Fort George Meade Public Affairs Office via Flickr

Central Oregon was already considered a child care desert, and COVID certainly hasn’t helped.

said. “You were going to have stations for hand washing set up, so every person who comes to the facility will wash hands, and then you go in, there’s nothing like that set up.”

The issue of cost can to some extent be attributed to the high cost of staffing a child care center. Pratt said 72% of the child care system is funded by parents, and about 80% of revenue goes toward staffing. The reliance on funding from parents leaves few options when a closure happens.

“These programs are running on incredibly slim margins, and that’s because to provide safe, healthy care you can’t have more than four babies for each teacher or single adult, so you have to maintain these ratios,” Pratt said. “So it takes more money than typically most parents are able to truly afford to do it and then be able to withstand a closure for two weeks, or withstand any sort of hiccups.”

Compounding this is the industry’s difficulties retaining and hiring enough staff to meet demand. A survey of 7,500 early child care providers over the summer from the National Association for the Education of Young Children found that more than half of the respondents said they had a harder time staffing than they did prior to the pandemic. "We're in a desert, only one in three kids under the age of three had a place to go before COVID in Central Oregon, and I haven't seen any recent numbers, but we know it's worse, much worse," said Katy Brooks, CEO of the Bend Chamber of Commerce and a member of Oregon's Early Learning Council.

Eighty percent of center-based providers experienced a staffing shortage, where at least one open role was unfilled for more than a month.

As a result, over 50% of centers said they were serving fewer students, a third had longer waitlists or were unable to reopen all classes and a quarter had to reduce operating hours. The largest barrier to getting new employees is the industry’s low wages for teachers. Seventy-eight percent of NAEYC’s respondents cited low pay as the largest barrier to attracting new employees, and 81% cited pay as the main reason educators are leaving.

“It’s one of the lowest-paid professions in our country, and the pandemic has shown a really central piece of our economic infrastructure,” Pratt said.

Low-income families more often rely on one parent or a family member for child care, while families most able to weather a challenging child care situation are the ones with financial, community and professional privileges.

“The families that are faring better than others are those that have the backup resources. They have grandma, they have the extra funds where they can keep paying tuition and then also pay someone else to watch their kid, they have a flexible job, where you can say, ‘I guess I’m working from home today, or for the next two weeks,’” Pratt said.

There’s been efforts to address a lack of child care in Central Oregon. In October, 2021, the Deschutes County Commission allocated $6.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to help create 500 new child care spots and 275 new workers. One of the Bend City Council’s economic vitality goals from 2019-2021 was to increase available child care slots by 20%, and on Dec. 2, 2020, it voted to exempt child care providers from transportation system development charges until December 2022.

New Sunriver Station and Trails Funded

Deschutes County’s Transient Room Tax revenue funds tourist-y projects

By Jack Harvel

The Deschutes County Board of Commissioners spent a large sum of unallocated Transient Room Tax funding at its meeting Jan. 12, giving $600,000 to the Deschutes Trails Coalition for trail infrastructure and maintenance and $8 million toward a public safety building to house police and fire services in Sunriver.

In Deschutes County about 30% of TRT goes toward tourism promotion via the Central Oregon Visitors Association and tourism-related facilities. The remaining 70% is allocated for general county purposes including the Sheriff’s Office, administrative costs, capital reserves and an unallocated fund to be spent at the County’s discretion.

The unallocated fund is the largest and fueled by a boom in the past few years that saw TRT collections up nearly 50% in 2021. It was largely fueled by tourism to Sunriver, which contributes about half of all the county’s TRT collections.

“We’re not a city, we can’t impose any room taxes, so all the room taxes that are generated in Sunriver, and other parts of unincorporated Deschutes County, go to the county,” said Debbie Baker, board administrator for the Sunriver Service District. “That was the nexus for us, because we’re not able to impose those taxes... the funds generated in our area have gone into this pot.”

The service district said its police and fire facilities currently don’t meet industry standards and can be overly burdened when nearly 30,000 tourists visit over the summer. The police station is essentially an office space; it doesn’t have showers, decontamination facilities, holding cells, booking equipment or adequate security measures. The fire department lacks gender-specific sleeping facilities or adequate decontamination facilities, Baker explained. The new building would house both these services under a single roof.

“Our vision is to take the fire station and remodel it to meet those deficiencies that are existing or to mitigate those deficiencies, and include the police department in one building, and also create a community space as well,” Baker said.

The service building is funded through three main pools of money: $8 million from the county’s unallocated TRT fund, $3 million from Sunriver’s reserves and a voter-dependent 10-year capital improvement levy for $7 million that will be on Sunriver’s ballots in May.

Trail Maintenance

The Deschutes Trails Coalition’s $600,000 funding will establish a grant program for trail maintenance. The Deschutes National Forest spends a little over $1 million annually on trail maintenance, but DTC coordinator Jana Johnson said there’s a $10 million backlog of projects that federal funding fails to address.

“Trails are a primary reason people come to Central Oregon to live, to recreate and to vacation. Our trails are being impacted by several factors such as increased use as well as climate change, and we know that existing trail funding opportunities are not keeping pace with maintenance and infrastructure needs,” Johnson told commissioners during the meeting.

The grant program the funding establishes is meant to fill holes in the patchwork of public and private funding that maintain trails now, particularly in trails that aren’t “shovel-ready.”

“Because these funds are unrestricted they can be used to fund things other funding sources just aren’t able to, most grants require proposals for shovel-ready projects, but how do projects that require planning and analysis and design to become shovel ready get to that point without additional funding?” Johnson said.

DTC requested annual funding, but the Deschutes County commissioners requested it be revisited after a year to learn more about progress made on the trail system.

The Sunriver Service District would like to upgrade its police and fire facilities into one building.

Testing, 1-2-3-4

The Biden Administration kicks off program to send home tests to anyone who asks

By Jack Harvel

Courtesy of Navy Medicine via Flickr

All U.S. households could order four home COVID-19 tests straight from the U.S. Postal Service at Special. USPS.com starting Jan. 18. The Biden administration ordered a billion tests to increase COVID-19 testing capacity, along with expanding free testing programs and attracting more pharmacies to participate in the federal pharmacy free testing program. People who order tests online can expect to receive them in seven to 12 days. This comes after the Biden administration required insurers to cover at-home COVID tests.

It’s recommended to test for COVID if someone is experiencing symptoms, if they’ve come into contact with someone who tested positive or are gathering indoors with people who have comorbidities or are unvaccinated. In Deschutes County people can also get tested for free at St. Charles Health Center, at either the Bend or Redmond campus of Central Oregon Community College and several pharmacies and health centers.

Noticias en Español Las dificultades en el sector para el cuidado de niños aumentan porque COVID causa que varios centros de cuidado cierren

Por / By Jack Harvel Translated by / Traducido por Jéssica Sánchez-Millar

Varios centros de cuidado de niños del Centro de Oregon cerraron sus puertas porque la región pasa por el número de casos más altos de COVID-19, causando que los padres batallen en encontrar un cuidado alternativo.

La ola más reciente es agravada por la falta de cuidado de espacio para el cuidado de niños disponible en el Centro de Oregon. Un estudio de 2019 de la Universidad del Estado de Oregon encontró que solo el 20% de los niños en el Condado de Deschutes tenían un lugar disponible para el cuidado de niños y casi todos los condados en el estado calificaban como un lugar “inhabitado con cuidado de niños,” lo que significa que 1 de cada 3 niños tienen un espacio de cuidado de niños disponible. “La mayor parte de los Estados Unidos, aún más allá de nuestros rumbos, están batallando,” dijo Megan Pratt, profesora auxiliar de la Universidad del Estado de Oregon y autora principal del estudio. “Lo que está muy claro es que en nuestro estado dos tercios de las familias con niños menores de cinco años no tienen cuidado de niños a la mano y esto ha sido constante. Será interesante ver cómo estamos, estaremos viendo esto después de la pandemia porque lo que pasa muchas veces es que cuando no hay cuidado de niños disponible, la mamá se queda en casa.”

La falta de cuidado disponible puede crear una lista de espera de años para que los niños se inscriban en preescolar. Durante los cierres, debido al haber sido expuesto a COVID, varios padres que platicaron con the Source reportaron que continuaron pagando la cantidad completa a pesar de la falta de servicio de preescolar.

Algunos papás dijeron haber tenido que ausentarse varias veces del trabajo durante la pandemia para encargarse del cuidado de niños que aún tenían que pagar. Otros padres se quejaron que poco se les informó de cuánto tiempo permanecerían cerrados y que algunos de los centros de cuidado no hicieron lo suficiente para contener los brotes. “No tenía nada de confianza en su capacidad para lidiar con la situación. Decían una cosa mientras que hacían otra,” dijo un padre de familia. “Iban a tener estaciones para lavarse las manos para que cada persona que entrara a centro de cuidado se lavara las manos y entrara, no hay nada de eso.” “Estos programas están llevándose a cabo con márgenes muy reducidos y eso se debe a que para brindar una atención segura y saludable, no se puede tener más de cuatro bebés por maestro o por adulto, por lo que es necesario mantener estos rangos”, dijo Pratt. ”Por lo tanto, para hacerlo se necesita más dinero de lo que normalmente los padres pueden pagar y luego poder lidiar con el cierre por dos semanas o soportar cualquier contratiempo.”

A esto se suma la dificultad en la industria para retener y contratar personal suficiente para cumplir con la demanda.

Como resultado, más del 50% de los centros de cuidado dijeron que ofrecían servicios a menos estudiantes, un tercio tenía listas de espera más largas o no podían reabrir todas las clases y un cuarto tuvo que reducir sus horas de servicio. La barrera más grande para emplear a más personas en la industria es el pago bajo a los maestros.

Se ha puesto el esfuerzo para solucionar la falta de cuidado de niños en el Centro de Oregon. En octubre de 2021, la Comisión del Condado de Deschutes asignó $6.6 millones en fondos a la Ley del Plan de Rescate Estadounidense para ayudar a crear 500 centros nuevos para el cuidado de niños y 275 trabajadores nuevos. Una de las metas para la vitalidad económica del Consejo Municipal de la Ciudad de Bend para 2019-2021 fue aumentar los espacios disponibles para el cuidado de niños en un 20% y el 2 de diciembre de 2020 votó para excusar a los proveedores de cuidado de niños de los impuestos por desarrollo del sistema de transporte hasta diciembre 2022.

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