For working families, quality child care is an absolute necessity. Long waitlists for child care centers mean it can take months – or even years – for families with infants and toddlers to get access to care. For many families with school-age children, finding care after the school day ends and during summer break can be equally challenging.
Katie Jenkins of Jonesboro is no stranger to the struggles that come with finding quality child care. She put her name on the waitlist for multiple child care facilities as soon as she found out she was pregnant with her son. It wasn’t until a mere few weeks before his birth that she had heard back from any of them.
As children age, the struggle to find quality child care and after-school care options persists. Once Katie’s son was enrolled in school, finding access to after-school care was impossible. She was forced to make the difficult decision to leave a job she loved.
“I had a very good job at the hospital. I had been there for nine years,” Katie said. “When my son enrolled in public school, there were zero after-school care options with available openings. So, I was at the point where my son would get out of school at 3 and had no one to watch him until 5. My employer tried to work with me, but unfortunately, I had to make the difficult decision to leave my job.”
The issue of not being able to find after-school care in the area that aligned with Katie’s work schedule was compounded by her physical distance from family members. As a transplant to northeast Arkansas, she had no family in the area to call upon when she needed someone to watch her son while she worked.
“My husband and I, we’re not from here. We don’t have a village here,” she said. The thing that got me is so many people are in the same boat.
“Careers and child care – they just don’t go together right now.”
Many other working families can relate to Katie’s situation. Courtney Fisher of Blytheville also has had difficulty finding after-school care options in her community. Similar to Katie, she does not have family close by to rely on.
“It is really hard to find care for your kids once they start school, especially for that gap in the summer,” she said. “Many child care centers that accepted school-age kids in the afternoons stopped doing so after the pandemic.”
For parents of children enrolled in elementary schools, there is a lack of care during the gaps in the educational calendar. Most of the gaps in the educational calendar do not align with their parents’ time off, causing some parents and caregivers to make the difficult decision to change their jobs or entire careers to align with their children’s care needs. However, for many families, that is not a possibility.
Without access to quality child care for working families, many parents and caregivers are forced to make sacrifices, which affect their families, their careers, and the workforce as a whole.
The bright side is that more workplaces are beginning to understand that quality child care is essential to a thriving Arkansas economy. Excel by Eight’s Business Coalition is working to identify solutions so that parents can access safe, reliable, and affordable child care to build successful careers, remain contributing members of the workforce, and support their families.