As Wisconsin child care centers struggle with staffing, thousands of kids can’t get in

At Community Care Preschool & Child Care Inc. in Beaver Dam, administrator Renae Henning said she feels like she’s been living on luck as other child care centers across the state struggle to find and keep staff. She hasn’t had to close so far, but she’s had staff leave abruptly and has lost sleep over the thought of turning families away. It feels like the floor could give out at any time.

“In the last couple of years I’ve been living on the edge. I’ve had to make contingency plans for, OK, if somebody calls in, this is what we’re going to have to do, because we just don’t have anybody,” she said.

Almost 60% of child care providers across the state have empty classrooms and child care slots that could be filled if it weren’t for staffing shortages, according to survey results reported by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and Gov. Tony Evers’ office. If providers had more staff, they said, they could serve up to 33,000 more children, shortening waitlists that have about 48,000 kids on them statewide.

The report calls for more funding for Child Care Counts, a federally funded program that was created in 2021 to help child care centers stay afloat amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s provided over $750 million to help child care providers pay for wages and benefits and increase access to care.

The program was set to expire in January, despite centers still struggling with costs. Evers proposed making the program permanent in the last state budget, but the Republican-controlled state Legislature removed its funding. Evers then directed $170 million in emergency stopgap funding to DCF to keep the program going through June 2025.

“This isn’t how we’re supposed to run our business. I shouldn’t be fearful: Is this the week I’m going to have to call a family? Is this the week I’m going to have to say, No, I can’t take you because I don’t have the staff to meet the needs? That’s very real, but the need — the phone calls keep coming,” Henning said.

‘Nobody has a spot’

When Elizabeth McGeary had to return to the office after working from home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she had to find child care for her two young children. She called 22 different child care centers across three counties, but none of them had openings for both kids.

Eventually she found openings at Future All Star’s Academy in Juneau — about an hour drive from their home in North Prairie in Waukesha County.

For more than a year, McGeary drove roughly four hours every day across three counties, from North Prairie to Juneau, to drop the kids off at day care, then to Jefferson, where she works as the director of the Jefferson County Health Department. She’d then do it all over again in reverse on her way back home at the end of the day.

“It was devastating,” McGeary said, “because on one hand, I was losing out on that time and those opportunities with my children because we were spending time in the car. And while we did everything we could to make it fun and interactive with them, at the end of the day, they’re still in the car.”

“This was an exhausting year of my life,” she said. “It was so difficult, it caused so much additional strain on just every aspect.”

While Future All Star’s Academy had openings for McGeary’s children at the time, the child care center has not been immune to the staffing crisis. In January, owner Tricia Peterson told the Wisconsin Independent that they had more than 50 families on their waitlist and about 10 vacant slots they couldn’t fill because of staffing shortages.

Since January, Peterson has hired three new staff members. But now, 10 months later, only one of them is still there. One of those new hires left because she couldn’t pay her bills with the salary she was earning, Peterson said.

The state’s report found that on average, lead teachers in child care centers only make $13.55 an hour, less than half of what all workers statewide make on average. Peterson said her 17-year-old son currently makes $21 an hour as an apprentice at a local factory, more money than any of her staff makes. Child care centers are losing a lot of employees to school districts that are able to pay them more, with better hours and benefits, too, Peterson said.

It’s not cheap for child care centers to bring on new employees. Peterson said it can cost up to $2,500 to onboard new staff because of required training, certifications and background checks.

“I think the biggest problem that we do have is that we find these great staff, we get them educated, we train them, and then they leave because they can go to the school districts and make more money,” Peterson said.

The staffing crisis also has negative effects on the kids and staff. There are more behavioral issues when students don’t consistently have the same teacher, both Henning and Peterson said, and staff are getting burnt out by taking on more work.

“I think a lot of times we’re just doing the motions of it, you know, trying to make the relationships with the kids and do everything that we need,” Peterson said. “But at the end of the day, how impactful are we being? Because we’re barely mentally there.”

Peterson wants to give her staff raises, but she’s facing a $100,000 budget shortfall for next year, in part due to the Child Care Counts program expiring.

Without that funding, Peterson will have to raise tuition rates by 20%, which she thinks will cause families to leave.

“Where else is the money coming from? It’s only coming from the parents. So unfortunately, at what point do you price yourself out of business and then the whole vicious cycle happens?” she said.

While they’ve never had to close because of short staffing, Peterson said, they’ve had to shift staff around to substitute when there’s an absence. They’ve started to tell parents to have backup plans in case they get a call in the morning saying the day care needs to close for the day.

Henning said she gets about five calls a week from parents looking for care, typically for infants and toddlers, but they don’t have any openings until June 2025. She hopes to serve twice as many children under 2 by January, but first needs to hire two more staff members. But finding them is hard, and when she posts openings, she gets either no interest or applicants with no experience.

She’s gotten creative and has partnered with the Beaver Dam School District, which is leasing her a classroom in exchange for discounts for school staff. She has about 10 children with parents who work at the school district at the new site.

“We have to get creative. We have to do whatever we can within our communities to work together, answer the call, so to speak, to make this a little bit better for families. It’s rough,” Henning said.

Still, she worries that one morning she’ll have to tell a family that she doesn’t have space.

“Can you imagine if you are three weeks out of going back to work and your child care calls you and says, ‘No, we can’t take you.’ And then what are you going to do?” she said. “It’s not like you can go call the child care center down the block and they’ll have a spot, because nobody has a spot.”

In her work with the health department, McGeary said she sees firsthand how not having access to quality child care has ripple effects in a community: Without child care, someone may struggle to find and keep a job, and in turn may not be able to afford groceries, gas, rent, health care or other essential needs.

Her children have since started school and they’ve moved to Beaver Dam to be closer to the school and summer child care, relieving the burden a bit for her. But she said she realized in those long drives how many people don’t have the same resources she did, like a reliable car and flexible work schedule.

“If I’m having these issues,” she said, “think about the community that we’re serving and the issues that they’re having. And we’re not even recognizing the extent.”