Following Up With Erie's Early Childcare Crisis: A Key Component of Economic Growth

Jessica Hunter

Court Gould, author of a report published by the Jefferson Educational Society detailing his research into the child care issue at the local level, posits that child care is not a social issue, it is an economic one. The children in child care today will make up our future workforce and their success is directly related to our economic growth.

Child care is not a weapon for either side of the political aisle to wield. It transcends traditional education, developing a future generation and enabling parents to go to work without worry. And every single person should have access to quality, affordable child care in some form, should they want it. At least that's the thought behind a new local policy initiative.

"This is not a social issue," said Court Gould, who wrote a report published by the Jefferson Educational Society (JES) detailing the research effort he headed for the past six months. "Child care is mainstream economic development both near and long-term. It's one of the workforce and economic strategies that frankly, Erie has yet to deploy in its otherwise Herculean efforts to turn around our economy and stem the tide of generational population loss and a shortage of workforce that presently stymies our economic growth."

After Gould first sounded warning bells on the situation in his 2021 JES report "Caring for Erie's Economy: Childcare is Economic Development," the JES tasked a team of child care professionals to develop recommendations for Erie to reverse its shortage of quality, affordable child care.

Currently, centers in Erie and nationwide are closing due to staffing shortages and lack of funding, creating a child care deficit for working families.

With funding from the Erie Community Foundation, the Early Childcare Investment Policy Initiative team spent six months this year quantifying the problem in Erie and putting a dollar sign to the issue to achieve progress in an otherwise stagnant situation.

The current situation

The team used primary research to gain insight into a key population that often falls by the wayside in child care legislation — those from birth to 3 years old. The age group is frequently overlooked as care is not treated as a public service the way that Pre-K and Kindergarten is.

The research showed there are about 3,500 infants and toddlers in the area, but only about 27 percent of those needing care are currently being served by the 30 licensed infant care providers in Downtown Erie. Only 30 out of 40 total providers can care for infants to toddlers because the cost is so high to take care of that age range.

Michelle Harkins, executive director of Early Connections and member of the research team, explained that to encourage high-quality child care, Pennsylvania rewards centers that meet high standards of care using the Keystone STARS rating (Standards, Training/Professional Development, Assistance, Resources, and Supports). However, Harkins said that providers are currently reimbursed up to $9,000 less than the actual cost of care for infants.

Tiffany LaVette, owner of ABC 24-Hour Childcare, said children learn how to communicate, speak, and feel within the first 1,000 days of life, making it especially formative. The shortage of care, among other factors, affects the education of Erie's youngest demographic.

According to the i-Ready Mathematics Diagnostic Assessment for 2023-24, 97 percent of Erie Public Schools kindergartners are entering the school system below grade level, meaning they have not met the benchmarks needed up to that point. In basic literacy skills, 65 percent of Erie Public Schools kindergartners are underperforming. The national average is 42 percent.

"This poor performance is likely due in some large part to Erie's lack of quality child care services or slots," Gould said while presenting the report. "Superintendent [Brian] Polito reports that due to the dire financial situation at the Erie Public Schools, the extensive remedial interventions necessary to catch those 65 percent of students up do not exist."

 Tiffany Lavette, owner of ABC 24-Hour Childcare, stresses the importance of very early childhood care and development – the first 1,000 days of a child's life are particularly formative for a child's eventual communication skills. Lavette is part of a team, funded by the Erie Community Foundation, assigned to assess and quantify the child care crisis in Erie. (photo: Chloe Forbes)

Laying out the game plan

Elana Como, Early Learning Resource Center's regional director and the CEO of the Northwest Institute of Research, said this opportunity to take action has been 40 years in the making for her. "We're finally getting communities as a whole together to dive deep into what are the needs around communities for child care and how the community — not the state, not the federal government — can make a positive impact as we move forward," Como, a part of the policy initiative team, said.

Especially for infants to age 3, supports like the Educational Improvement Tax Credit awarded to businesses in exchange for contributions to early education are not applicable. That credit is only eligible to benefit ages 3 and above.

The team's research showed that while nearly half of Erie's infants and toddlers were eligible for a subsidy equaling the cost of child care due to the number of families that fall beneath the poverty line, just under a third of those eligible are taking advantage of the state support.

The report states that one of the top-ranking reasons for the disparity is the lack of availability of child care slots among providers of quality child care in Erie.

There's a gap of 1,542 slots needed for infants and toddlers in Erie's downtown. To solve that, the report states addressing the teacher shortage is the best first step.

"The most effective way to serve more infants and toddlers is to address the shortage of educators. The way to attract more teachers is by providing better pay to bridge the gap between the pay of child care professionals and their higher paid counterparts in K-12 public schools," the report reads. "Subsidies to increased hourly pay must be uniform across all early child-care providers to avoid poaching by other employers who do not provide child care and within the early education community itself… If teachers are in place, more children can be enrolled."

The strategy in the report includes stabilizing the current child care workforce, which faces high turnover, by raising teachers' hourly pay by $5 an hour. Currently, child care teachers in the area make around $15 an hour, and according to the National Education Association, new K-12 public school teachers make an average of about $20 an hour.

Then, the strategy seeks to fill 59 staff vacancies and close the remaining gap with new teachers. To achieve that, $4,571,840 is the estimated annual cost to increase the hourly wage from $15 to $20 per hour, stabilize existing enrollment, and recruit and place 309 additional teachers needed to care for infants and toddlers in the city.

That's an average of $2,083 invested per child downtown.

Economic value

Child care investment would be significant in reversing a potentially detrimental situation as the labor shortage worsens and future generations are primed to fall behind in current conditions.

Erie's population has been declining since 1960 and that trend is predicted to continue. The median age of the county is also growing older, with those 65 years and older now accounting for 19.1 percent of all county residents. Baby boomers retiring correlates with a declining level of skilled labor in the community, and in February this year, reports by the Milken Institute and Policom ranked Erie in the lowest tier of economic growth among cities in the United States.

This is coupled with the fact that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2021 indicated that mothers with children under six comprised 65.6 percent of the labor force — a rising number.

In the report, Gould cited a growing trend to levy new taxes and create strategies around child care because of the evidence-based economic benefits emerging.

Gould — whose background is in accelerating policy and practices of sustainable development based on the work of other cities around the world — maintained that Erie could be a trailblazer in policy.

"A city of Erie's modest scale, and with its oversized resources, is well-positioned to make a great stand and become a national role model for eliminating child care as a barrier to work," Gould wrote in the report. "Erie has a unique abundance of public, private, university, philanthropic, and civic leaders who, when focused on a problem, can create solutions."

Key players to be tapped

To "quarterback" the policy's strategy, the report calls on Infinite Erie, who is implementing Erie's Investment Playbook, to place infant and toddler care at the top of its priorities. The report proposes a reworked infrastructure for Erie's child care industry and lays out every tool needed to build it.

In addition to the nearly $4.5 million investment to stabilize child care in Erie, the report recommends assembling a group of experts to guide investment and policy structures to address Erie's child care challenges. The public-private Erie Infant and Toddler Investment Partnership is recommended to be managed by Infinite Erie and include City of Erie government officials, Erie Public Schools, United Way of Erie County, Erie Community Foundation, Bridgeway Capital, and report team members.

The partnership would be tasked with ensuring the sustainability of funding and progress in Erie's child care ecosystem.

These would include an investment fund to address wages for child care educators, a professional development program, a governmental task force focused on child care, and a child care facilities expansion fund.

The current $4.5 million investment does not factor in operating costs, staff development costs, subsidies to families, or the building of additional classroom space, which is equally as important to address moving forward.

Gould said he believes there is an appetite for this type of work in the area, which he noted is already exemplified by the Erie Community Foundation's willingness to invest in the policy initiative thus far. He also cites cross-departmental areas ripe for city government leadership to make a mark, including development incentives, the removal of zoning and land use hindrances, and the collaboration with public transportation to ensure accessibility in routes to child care centers.

The Erie Reader compared Erie Metropolitan Transit Authority (EMTA) bus stops with the locations of every child care provider in Downtown Erie serving children under 5 years old as of October 2021, using data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education and Human Services.

It showed that centers are not along transportation lines, which is advantageous to keep children far from busy roadways but makes child care less accessible as 69 percent of Downtown Erie households do not own vehicles.

Sarah Morrison, director of marketing and public relations at EMTA, said the EMTA is beginning a new transit development plan, and they regularly evaluate stops and plan accordingly to accommodate residents. She commented that the EMTA team would be willing to work with child care providers to ensure there is service in areas where there is ridership.

"As a whole, EMTA is doing what we can and trying to do as much as we can and continually making adjustments and trying to have the best possible system that we can have, so if there are ever any holes in the system, it's no problem just to reach out and let us know," Morrison said. "We'll happily take a look at it."

Availability, affordability, recruiting quality teachers, and widening access to assistance are all barriers recently identified by the Early Childcare Investment Policy Initiative team. (Photo: Jessica Hunter)

Expanding existing supports

All of this is not to say the supports in place are moot and must be overhauled. For example, the report recommends establishing an Erie Infant and Toddler Investment Fund to receive donations from public and private entities. To leverage the work already in play, the report states that Infinite Erie manages the fund in-house or delegates fund administration to Early Connections or the Northwest Institute of Research (NWIR).

Early Connections manages the Future Fund and provides scholarships to low-income families to allow children to attend high-quality programs at 3 and 4 years old. Gould said the Future Fund exemplifies a program ripe for modification and expansion.

Regarding a teacher pipeline, Early Connections is the intermediary for the Early Childhood Apprenticeship Program and sponsor of the Registered Pre-Apprenticeship Program for the Northwest Region.

"There exists today in Erie an innovative apprenticeship program that is primed to be grown substantially to be on par with the great number of additionally needed educators for infants and toddlers," the report reads.

Short of burdening city residents and employers with more taxes, the report states that public-private partnerships are more appropriate to raise funds and expand upon these efforts.

This report answers the question of "How do we help?" and it's now up to local officials, businesses, and organizations to take action and reveal their true intentions. "Beginning with quantifying the need, supply, and gap in access to quality care and presenting the most impactful remedies with costs identified, a roadmap for action beckons a response coordinated among city government, business, and philanthropic leaders together with the many nonprofit stakeholders who directly serve Erie," the report concludes.

Find the entire report at jeserie.org

Chloe Forbes can be reached at chloeforbes14@gmail.com.