Children play at Shady Lane School in Homewood, Pittsburgh (Courtesy of Shady Lane School)
Allegheny County allocated $20 million in COVID-era federal funds to prop up the child care sector over the pandemic. Now that part of the funding is coming to an end, advocates and providers fear the same old problems will cripple facilities county-wide.
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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 Homewood. “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.”
Lindsey Ramsey, executive director of Shady Lane School in Homewood (Photo courtesy of Lindsey Ramsey)
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.
Children at Mount Washington Children’s Center sit for storytime with director Rose Marie Smith. (Photo by Alexis Wary/PublicSource)
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.”
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