Lindsey Ramsey became an aide in an infant room at a child care facility as a 19-year-old single mom looking for work so she could afford diapers for her daughter. Never having thought about entering the sector, she learned how to care for children from a group of passionate caregivers.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” said Ramsey, 34, now the executive director of Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North. “But we had a wonderful group of educators who helped uplift new people entering the field … and they taught me how to change diapers and be a mom … I started to fall in love with early childhood education.”
The pandemic, though, exacerbated a multitude of underlying problems that had long haunted the care industry, such as high costs for parents and low wages for employees, according to child care advocates and providers. Now some child care practitioners are anticipating crisis.
While Congress injected $39 billion into child care through the American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA], it didn’t address underlying problems in child care infrastructure.
More than half of that funding ended in September, igniting fears over a mass closure of child care facilities dubbed the “child care cliff.”
While the end of federal funds will not lead to wholesale closures, Cara Ciminillo, executive director of Trying Together, an Allegheny County-based child care advocacy group, said the decline of providers will continue if long term funding is not brought in.
Despite the mounting challenges, Ramsey said caring for the community and her love of childhood education keep her working in the field.
“I’m driven by equity, because it is so important that we are elevating those who don’t have the resources, who don’t have enough to be able to succeed and thrive in life,” Ramsey said. “Having access to early childhood [care] early on, is one of the leading contributing parts to human development. So I consider it to be a key component to equity, and that’s why I am rooted and stuck here.”
Ramsey is one of many child care providers in Allegheny County who shared concerns with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. They fear that affordable and accessible child care could take major hits without new funding and government resources.
Pennsylvania shuttered 2,189 child care programs from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to June 2023, Emily Neff, Trying Together’s public policy director, said in an email. And even with new facilities opening, the net loss was 597.
Neff said 181 child care programs permanently closed in Allegheny County from 2019 through November of this year for a net loss of 18 in the county.
Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, partly blames the closures on high operational costs of facilities and rapid staff turnover that occurred throughout the pandemic.
Barber said utility bills rose over the pandemic, compounding bills for child care providers and families.
As the pandemic dragged on, employees at child care facilities across the state left for better-paying — and often easier — positions in public schools or even at retail locations, Barber said. And when the pandemic wound down, they didn’t return.
“I’ve heard this not once, I’ve heard this multiple times, that [a new child care staff worker] will show up and they’re gone by lunch because this is just not the job that they thought it was going to be,” Barber said. “They thought they were gonna play with kids and that’s not what it’s all about.”
Ramsey, who worked at Shady Lane as an educator before the arrival of COVID-19, returned as an administrator in the midst of the pandemic, while a budget deficit and record low enrollment prompted talk of closure.
Ramsey said Shady Lane received more than $200,000 in federal funds through the county to expand its programming for young children to accommodate eight new infants and 10 new toddlers. The grants sat on top of additional federal funds it used to subsidize employee wages.
“And that’s what really saved us,” Ramsey said of the Allegheny County grant. “We had a long infant-toddler waitlist. That gave us the ability to open more classrooms.”
How one of the county’s youngest departments distributed ARPA funds
Allegheny County allocated $20 million of its $380 million ARPA allotment to organizations providing or advocating for child care under the designation “Healthy Childhood Environments,” according to the county ARPA spending dashboard.
The county established the Department of Children Initiatives and assigned it to administer ARPA funds in December of 2021 following the recommendations in a report from the Allegheny County Children Fund’s working group.
So far, the department has disbursed a little over $6.1 million across 25 child care providers, advocacy groups and a consultancy firm, according to Mathew Singer, the chief of staff at the Allegheny County Controller’s office.
Rebecca Mercatoris, the department’s executive director since its inception in 2021, said the first goal when allocating the money was to build the capacity of existing part-time and full-time child care providers.
Federal spending deadlines stipulate the county needs to allocate the remaining $13.9 million to organizations during 2024 and distribute it within two years.
Mercatoris said since the department’s establishment, it’s focused on mapping out the problems impacting child care in Allegheny County. Now, it’s trying to solve them.
Minimal funds and shrinking staff make a ‘bad combination’
Mercatoris said one of the biggest problems facing child care — one described by many providers and advocates — relates to its business model. Parents across demographics need affordable child care to get back to work, while private child care providers need to turn a profit to retain staff and keep slots for children open.
“I think one of our largest challenges is around family access and affordability and being able to support families in meeting their child care needs while also ensuring providers have the funds they need to be able to hire great staff and be able to keep them with them,” Mercatoris said.
Despite a constant demand for child care, there’s not enough people staying or going into the workforce due to low wages. This, coupled with a lack of financial support on the county, state and federal level, makes for what Ramsey describes as a “bad combination” that providers can’t keep up with.
“[Providers] don’t want to price gouge families because they know families can’t afford it,” Ramsey said. “So in turn, they are taking the loss and this loss has impacted the sector to the point where we’re at the brink of collapse.”
According to Ramsey, even after the mandatory shutdowns ended, many facilities couldn’t open because all of their staff either had left for higher paying jobs or their older staff couldn’t come back to work due to risk of exposure to COVID.
“People started to realize that they had to increase their wages to get people to come back to work there,” Ramsey said. “So those mom and pop centers and nonprofits struggled financially because they were having to raise wages with money that they didn’t have.”
The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP] provides free after-school programs to families and students in the Brentwood area, but had to close down a program it started in 2019 at Concord Elementary School.
Khara Timsina, BCAP’s executive director, said BCAP will need more funding to continue to operate its after-school and summer programs into next year.
Deborah Gallagher, the director of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center Early Head Start program, said it’s become increasingly hard to find people who are both interested and qualified to continue working in early child care facilities.
Gallagher oversees both COTRAIC’s Early Head Start program in Hazelwood and the partnerships the program has with several other day care centers.
According to Gallagher, Head Start and Early Head Start received ARPA funding in 2021 and 2022, some of which covered quarterly bonuses for staff. But when the bonuses stopped, Gallagher lost staff. Now she is paying “hefty substitute fees” for subs from a staffing company called Childcare Careers.
“Parents can’t find care because we can’t find people,” said Gallagher, noting that if facilities had the funds to find and train people the industry would pick up.
‘I’m just trying to get good care for my kid’
Parents said issues of affordability and long wait lists existed long before pandemic-era staffing shortages added to their woes..
For Shawna Ramsey, 28, of Baldwin Borough, the high cost of child care pushed her out of her career.
A mother of three, Ramsey – who is not related to Lindsey Ramsey – said she had her first child while in college. In nursing school, she said she couldn’t find a child care facility with an open spot, let alone a facility that matched her budget stretched thin by student loan payments.
She became a nurse, had another child and then a third — but her nursing salary remained the same. She carried a surrogate child to pay for her student loans, and ultimately decided to leave the nursing field to focus on motherhood.
“I think it’s really interesting that [child care] costs so much when workers get paid so little,” Ramsey said. “Private owners seem to be profiting off of people in need.”
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, estimates that it costs the average family in Pennsylvania $987 monthly to keep one infant in child care. A median child care worker in Pennsylvania would have to spend more than half of their earnings to put their own child in infant care.
After serving in the Navy, Liz Sterrett, was wrapping up her degree and looking for a child care spot for her 3-year-old daughter. She found a facility that would let her do janitorial work in exchange for a spot, but after college she had to start paying $600 a month — a cost she can’t wrap her head around six years later.
“I’ve had to shape my life and career around the fact that I cannot afford child care by myself,” said Sterrett, 37, of Bellevue. “No matter how much I scream and shout and cry, it doesn’t become affordable.”
Sterrett’s current employer lets her work from home several days a week, saving her hundreds a month in child care. She said it’s not ideal, and her now 9-year-old daughter has “several meltdowns because I can’t give her my full attention,” but child care is still a luxury she can’t afford.
“Access to child care is absolutely abhorrent,” Sterrett said. “There is no reason why I should be struggling … I am not living some fancy metropolitan lifestyle. I’m just trying to get good care for my kid.”
‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’
While funding initiatives like ARPA sought to help facilities that took a hit during the pandemic build back their staff and resources, providers point to broader inequities that contribute to the issues they are facing.
“[ARPA] was not enough, because it was a Band-Aid on a historical problem,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “The historical problem is that the field was never invested in enough because the work isn’t valued and that has further snowballed into an issue of staffing … of the field not looking attractive enough to join, of programs not being able to truly reflect the true costs of the work that they’re doing.”
According to Ciminillo, the average hourly wage for a Pennsylvania child care employee is $12.43 — not enough, but hard to raise because doing so would increase the cost of tuition for parents.
“We’re competing for folks and we’re not being successful because we can’t get the wages up and it’s because we don’t have a larger government investment in the system,” Ciminillo said.
Ciminillo described the child care system as already “very fragile” prior to the pandemic given that providers were not compensated, valued, appreciated or invested in enough.
Lindsey Ramsey added that historically women, especially women of color, are the ones who provide child care, which she said is likely the reason why there seems to be less focus on funding the field.
Maria Manautou, a former worker at a child care center in Pittsburgh, said better pay would be the fast route to alleviating staffing issues.
“If you have two jobs, and the one offers you … $15 and you’re not having that kind of stress and then the one offers you $12 and you’re stressed all day, then you can see how people end up picking something different,” Manautou said.
Ciminillo said the federal government and local communities began to realize how much they needed child care once – after the initial weeks of shutdown in 2020 – essential workers needed to get back to work but couldn’t do so without care.
To build a sustainable future child care sector, Ramsey is calling for a “change and shift in the narrative of how we are looking at the early childhood field.”
“At a federal level, there needs to be policy put in place for true equitable wages that reflect the level and importance of the work that’s being done,” Ramsey said.
Calling on Congress: Providers say short term funding is not enough
Barber said short-term funding initiatives like ARPA only address problems in the child care sector as they arise, failing to address the underlying problems.
She compares the influx of short-term funding to building with Jenga blocks that keep moving around.
“Then we know how that game ends, right?” Barber asked. “Everything falls apart.”
Ciminillo said Allegheny County needs to establish a recurring revenue stream to support early learning and out-of-school programming. And for that to happen, she said local officials must hear their constituents’ demands.
“Each of us, no matter our position, no matter our age, no matter whether we have children or not, play a role in affecting young children, their families, and their caregiver’s lives,” Ciminillo said. “So it’s just so important that everybody show up and use their sphere of influence in support of that.”
Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in September to supplement child care funding by distributing $80 billion over five years when ARPA expires.
According to a press release announcing the legislation, this funding request would support more than 220,000 child care providers nationally that serve a total of more than 10 million children. It has not yet received a vote.
U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, and U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, toured La Petite Academy, a new child care facility at Pittsburgh International Airport, earlier this month and spoke about the issues plaguing child care and what they deemed as largely partisan opposition to potential solutions.
Clark said that without Republican support, she’s “not very optimistic” Congress will be able to get the $16 billion in supplemental funding passed.
Deluzio, a father of three and member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, described the “death spiral” child care providers enter when they’re forced to increase rates to retain staff but, in turn, price out families, which lowers their revenues. It’s a problem, he said, that can only be resolved through federal support of the child care industry.
“This is about lowering costs. This is about giving folks the ability to work and earn and be part of society,” Deluzio said in regards to the $16 billion funding request, “The federal government’s got to be there to help strengthen [the child care sector], invest and ultimately bring down costs for people.”
Still, several child care advocates say even ambitious fixed-term funding initiatives won’t solve the structural problems plaguing the sector.
“This can’t be a one-time funding,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “This has to be funding that is ongoing [and] sustainable, that’s built into government policy.”
Correction: Shady Lane School is in Point Breeze North. An earlier version of this story included an incorrect neighborhood.
Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh. They completed fall internships with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Tanya Babbar, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and Erin Yudt, a student at Point Park University, completed fall internships with PublicSource. Juliet Martinez is managing editor of The Homepage, a community newspaper serving Greater Hazelwood and surrounding neighborhoods.
