When Carli Viola-Luqa learned in April that her kid's child care facility planned to permanently close, she panicked.
Viola-Luqa, a nurse, and her husband, a dentist, both work full time and have no family in Pennsylvania.
The couple, who live in suburban Pittsburgh, had depended on the early childhood center for more than 45 hours of care per week. While Viola-Luqa scrambled to find a new program with openings for her two toddlers, she teamed up with another mom to split caregiving duties and also hired a part-time nanny.
This temporary fix was not ideal. Viola-Luqa had to ask for a lot of flexibility from her job, which she started less than a year ago. She worried that her frequent requests for time off and the weird hours she was working reflected poorly on her as a new employee.
Viola-Luqa started having trouble sleeping and even considered sending her small children to stay with their grandparents in Canada until she found a permanent solution.
“I had tunnel vision. I felt like I couldn’t even make rational decisions. I was just being reactive,” Viola-Luqa said.
Many parents across Pennsylvania face similar predicaments. There simply aren’t enough child care providers, and advocates say the situation will get worse without help from the state.
Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, said she knows of seven early childhood programs that have either closed or announced closures to come in the past month.
“We can open more child care, but there’s a reason those programs closed. Because
they couldn’t do it anymore. Because they couldn’t afford to do it anymore,” Barber said.
The problem, experts told Spotlight PA, is largely low wages, which make it difficult for child care programs to hire and retain staff. A May 2023 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found the mean annual income for a child care worker in Pennsylvania is $29,480, less than half of the mean wage for workers overall. For a preschool teacher, it’s $36,350.
As Viola-Luqa can attest, parents who lack child care can’t punch the clock. The business community says this issue significantly contributes to the workforce shortage.
In June, a coalition of more than 50 local chambers of commerce penned an open letter urging lawmakers to fund child care programs directly: “Providers just can’t compete in a labor market with many sectors offering $20+ per hour for largely unskilled positions.”
The business chambers also joined forces with child care advocates to campaign for a $284 million infusion of new and recurring state dollars, arguing the money would allow providers to increase workforce recruitment and retention efforts.
Despite the state’s $10.6 billion budget surplus, this push failed.
“We are very disappointed,” said Jen DeBell, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children.
Read the full story here.
—Sarah Boden, for Spotlight PA
