There's a gem of a childcare center in downtown St. Louis with a dedicated staff, a bright and welcoming building and space available to serve even more children.
Instead, like centers around the country, they have a waitlist due to a shortage of qualified teachers.
And of the teachers they do have, not a single one could afford for her own child to attend at full tuition.
Flance Early Learning Center is hardly alone.
The paradox of the child care crisis in America is well known: The enormous cost is a financial burden for families, but child care workers are grossly underpaid.
The median wages for child care workers "do not meet a living wage in any state" for a single adult with one child, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.
Several reasons underlie this contradiction. Regulations require low ratios of caregivers to infants and toddlers. At Flance, there is one staff member per three infants, and one per four toddlers. Some states mandate those ratios. Meanwhile, centers have high overhead and fixed costs such as real estate, licensing and insurance. The most significant factor driving the substandard pay, however, is that unlike K-12 public education, early childhood education lacks public funding.
That exposes another paradox: Our society shortchanges and devalues the most foundational years of children's development, which set the trajectory for their future achievement and learning.
One of the key lessons of the pandemic has been that child care and early childhood education are crucial to the infrastructure of this country. Simply put, if parents don't have care for their children, they can't work. This compounds labor shortages.
There is an upside to this long-standing problem: We now have an unprecedented opportunity to solve it. Child care centers in the St. Louis region stand to benefit from funds from the recently passed Prop. R measure, as well as from federal funding if the Build Back Better bill is passed. Early childhood education must also be prioritized when lawmakers allocate approximately $500 million from the city's recent settlement with the NFL.
Wherever the extra money comes from, center directors must be able to use it to pay staff more. They need it to be able to retain workers and hire more teachers. The Prop. R money is designated for consultants and trainers, which doesn't address the root problem.
It's like paying for teeth whitening when you have a mouthful of cavities.
"We can talk about training, but if we don't have teachers, it doesn't really matter," said Tami Timmer, the executive director at Flance. She said they could easily be serving 15 to 20 more children if they could hire more staff.
A teacher with a bachelor's degree could easily make 30% to 50% more money working at a public elementary school, while having holidays and summers off. One of her most experienced staff members has 36 years of early childhood teaching experience and a Child Development Associate degree (CDA), but cannot be considered a "lead teacher" because she does not have a bachelor's.
The pandemic cost the industry a considerable number of part-time workers, including retired teachers, because it serves a population that is too young to be vaccinated. And grandmothers who could have worked part-time or filled in as subs had to stay home to help take care of grandchildren.
High turnover means significant time is lost training new workers. But Timmer has great ideas about how to increase the pool.
Local high schools can establish partnerships with centers, so that interested students can earn a CDA while in school and be eligible for hire upon graduation. Extra funding can be used to pay for higher education for students and staff, so they can work in the field while earning a degree.
There should be a clearinghouse that provides universal on-boarding and basic training, like safe sleep for babies, for all new employees in the area. Similar to the K-12 system, early child care centers need a pool of vetted substitute teachers they can rely upon when a teacher is off or out sick.
If child care centers are able to retain educators through better pay and benefits, the biggest beneficiaries are children, who need secure attachment and consistency with their caregivers.
Jackie Weaver, interim executive director at SouthSide Early Childhood Center, said she recently had a conversation with a teacher that underscored the challenges her industry faces.
"I love this job," the teacher said. "But it's so hard when I could go to Amazon or Target and make more money."
As a society, we need to ask why it's more lucrative to deliver packages than care for our babies.