Child Care Story Archives - Page 3 of 4 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

DHHR Receives Federal Funding For Early Childhood Services

Federal grant money is being sent to West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources to support services for children in pre-K through 5th grade.

The Preschool Development Birth through Five grant includes $2.6 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It will help the agency’s Division of Early Care and Education (ECE) with efforts working with local early learning providers and school districts.

The ECE oversees and regulates childcare in the state, including by licensing and certifying providers. This particular grant funds six “resource and referral agencies,” which help provide parents with child care options and resources.

“For example, if a child is going to West Virginia pre-K, or if they’re eligible for Head Start, do they need childcare before or after?” division director Lisa Ertl said. “We’re kind of looking at how we can strengthen our entire early care and education system throughout the state.”

One of the main uses of the funding will go towards a needs assessment of the state, with Ertl saying the agency would like to see increased childcare accessibility in more rural areas.

“This will be able to help us assess how we can better determine where those gaps in available childcare are, and how we can perhaps solve that issue,” Ertl said.

Though multiple bills are currently in the state legislature that would see the current structure of the DHHR split into three distinct agencies, that would not affect the agency’s federal funding.

The grant helps fund the agency over a three-year cycle, according to the U.S. department’s website.

WVPB Wins 2 Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards

West Virginia Public Broadcasting (WVPB) has won two 2022 Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards (RTDNA) in the Large Market Radio category.

WVPB’s podcast Us & Them with host Trey Kay, in collaboration with Chris Jones and Jesse Wright of 100 Days in Appalachia, won Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Us & Them episode “Kingwood March Gives A Unique Look At Racism In America.”

WVPB also won a RTDNA in Feature Reporting for Emily Corio’s story “Finding Affordable Child Care In W.Va. Leaves Some Working Parents Short On Options.” The piece was featured in an episode of Inside Appalachia about child care in West Virginia.

WVPB is in Region 8 which includes Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. Regional winners automatically move on to the national round of consideration, which also includes digital news organization, network and student competitors.

Murrow Awards are among the most prestigious awards in news. It recognizes local and national news stories that uphold the RTDNA Code of Ethics, demonstrate technical expertise and exemplify the importance and impact of journalism as a service to the community.

RTDNA is the world’s largest professional organization devoted exclusively to broadcast and digital journalism. It was founded as a grassroots organization in 1946, and its mission is to promote and protect responsible journalism.

Finding Affordable Child Care In W.Va. Leaves Some Working Parents Short On Options

Sunlight streamed into Megan Kruger’s kitchen on a warm summer day as she sat at the table in front of her laptop, dressed for work. As the noon hour approached, she closed her computer. It was lunchtime. She poured red sauce with meatballs into a skillet. Some sauce splattered on her blue dress and she dabbed it off with a kitchen towel. She told her husband to wake the baby. She sliced strawberries, warmed pasta and set out plates.

Like many work-from-home moms during the pandemic, the separation between work life and home life blurred many months ago.

There are positives to this arrangement, like seeing your smiling baby boy wake up from his mid-day nap.

But it’s also exhausting.

“I wake up super early so I can start work. I work all day until he [Kruger’s husband] has to go to work and then I take care of the kids, do dinner, do bath time, do bedtime all by myself and then get up and do it again,” Kruger said.

West Virginia has the lowest workforce participation rate of women in the country. According to West Virginia Women Moving Forward, a consortium of private and public stakeholders interested in issues affecting working women in the state, a lack of child care is often the reason West Virginia moms who want to work are not able to. They either can’t find child care, or they can’t afford it.

The overnight closure last year of schools and forced isolation from extended families and caregivers exposed these child care challenges for all to see, but these issues pre-date the pandemic.

Kruger and her husband, Nathan Stewart, have adjusted to the child care challenges they have faced, both during the pandemic and prior to it, but it required significant career and lifestyle changes.

When the pandemic hit, Stewart and his wife were forced to adjust to new child care challenges.

Early in 2020, Kruger was in a new job. She was pregnant and the family had recently moved into a house in Morgantown’s First Ward District. Stewart was general manager at a restaurant in Morgantown. Their daughter Nora was in kindergarten. Things were falling into place, but then the pandemic forced businesses and schools to close and Stewart lost his job in the restaurant industry.

“I was devastated from losing my job because I loved my job,” said Stewart. “And the fact that we were in the unknown was scary; it was frightening.”

Just after their baby boy was born in September, Stewart started a job, working nights at the West Virginia University Library. The job paid half what he earned in his previous position, but this arrangement allowed the couple to avoid child care costs.

Earlier in their relationship, Kruger made a career choice largely based on child care. Kruger earned her bachelor’s degree in wildlife and fisheries at WVU. She wanted to be a wildlife biologist, but the internships she would need were unpaid, far away and unaccommodating for a mother.

As a result, Kruger embarked on a career in environmental education. She completed local internships and was hired for her first full-time job. Then the hunt for child care for her daughter began. She finally found a place in another town about 20 miles away. They would spend two-hours a day in the car going to and from daycare.

For Krista and Matthew Dixon of Fairmont, the commute to child care is much shorter. Since they had their first child four years ago, their parents, who live nearby, have provided care for free. With the anticipation of another baby on the way early last year, the couple thought that arrangement would continue. Then came the ultimate surprise: they learned at an ultrasound in early 2020 that they were having twins.

“I looked over, my husband was just, he was as pale as could be. I thought he might actually pass out,” Dixon remembered with a smile and laugh.

Dixon said she and her husband looked into child care centers. They realized that asking grandparents to watch three children under five was a big ask. But sending all three kids to a center was going to cost between $2,500 and $3,000 a month, Dixon said, and at that rate, it wouldn’t make financial sense for her to work.

But she didn’t want to leave her job at a local non-profit that helps those in poverty, so they turned to grandparents again to care for the children three days a week while she and her husband made special arrangements to cover the other two workdays.

“So my husband now works one day over the weekend, takes off one day during the week, and then I work from home and take care of the children for one day. So that’s how we’re making it work right now,” Dixon explained.

But if someone gets sick or has an appointment, there’s a lot of scrambling to figure out child care for the day.

“It is something that you would think would be so simple, something that so many people need,” Dixon said. “But it is incredibly, incredibly stressful — whether it’s trying to find affordable, safe child care or even the availability of it — it’s a major problem.”

Many parents are caught in a difficult financial situation where they don’t qualify for government subsidies but also don’t make enough to pay out-of-pocket for dependent care, according to West Virginia University Research Scholar Priscila Santos.

“In theory, it creates a disincentive for participation because why am I going to leave home and spend like a third or a half of what I’m making to pay for child care and try to survive on the rest?” Santos said.

Through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, families may be eligible to receive help with child care costs; it’s a sliding scale based on income. For example, a family of four would be eligible for partial assistance if their income is less than approximately $48,000 a year. For full assistance – meaning the family pays nothing for child care – a family of four would have to make less than approximately $10,300 a year.

At the same time, child care providers usually operate on thin margins. The nature of child care means the industry is labor intensive and heavily regulated.

A West Virginia Women Moving Forward report, authored by Santos and published last year, offers suggestions to support early care and education in the state, such as through a “shared services” network for providers, that could lower costs and improve quality.

“If we could come up with ideas to provide centralized services, and that could also include janitorial services and food services, that way, child care workers would only be focused on their main mission of educating and caring for children,” said Santos.

There is a push underway at the federal level to increase support for early care and education. As part of the COVID relief bill passed earlier this year, child tax credits for 2021 increased and some of that credit is being distributed to parents and caregivers in advance this year. There are income limits to qualify but they are much higher than the current eligibility limits for child care subsidies through the state.

While Kruger and Stewart do not qualify for the subsidies offered through the state, they are receiving the advance child tax credit payments this year.

“I mean, that’s a game changer,” said Kruger. “And if I would have had that when I had my first baby, things could have been extremely different.”

This story is part of a two-part series for Inside Appalachia about child care in W.Va. Read the other story here.

As W.Va. Attempts To End Child Care Deserts, Parents Struggle To Merge Work, School, Family

It’s the morning of the first day of school for Megan Hullinger’s two oldest children. She wakes at 6 to prepare lunches and get her four children dressed.

Around 7:30, she packs them all into her car. 11-year-old Tessa, 8-year-old Abby, 3-year-old Nathan, and 1 year old. Gemma, her baby. She drops them each off at a different school, Abby to elementary school, Tessa to middle school, then Nathan at his child care center.

Her last stop before heading into the office is Gemma’s babysitter. Hullinger’s youngest child is on a waiting list to get into a daycare. There are only two options for a registered child care facility in her county, Pocahontas, a rural, mountainous area in West Virginia.

It took nearly three years for Hullinger to get her son, Nathan, a spot. “It’s almost impossible to get a child under the age of two into a registered center,” Hullinger said.

A year after he first started school, her 3-year-old son is thriving. “He loves it, he loves his teachers,” Hullinger said. “He gets a lot of art time. I found out that he really loves to draw and write. It’s been really great for him, and to be around kids his age has been really great.”

Hullinger is happy with the level of care he’s receiving, and hopes her daughter Gemma will be able to get a spot at the same center. But she says she’ll happily take the first available opening- even if it’s at a school on the other side of her county, which is a thirty minute drive. That would mean an additional two hours on her commute each day.

Hullinger lives in what’s known as a child care desert. According to data from the Center for American Progress, over sixty percent of people in West Virginia live in a child care desert.

“It’s mostly the rural areas of our state,” said Barbara Gebhard, an expert in early childhood education, and a consultant for an initiative called “The Earlier The Better,” which is trying to improve child care in West Virginia. One of its main priorities is to help expand child care in rural regions, so families don’t have to wait years to get into a child care center.

About a quarter of early child care centers in the state closed last year, according to to Dr. Jeffrey, a pediatrician at Charleston Area Medical Center, and one of the people working on “The Earlier The Better” Initiative. Jeffrey worked with researchers at the Benedum Foundation to compile a map that shows the number of child care centers that closed during the pandemic. Their map shows a snapshot in January 2020. In the early months of the pandemic, many child care centers closed, said Jeffrey. Some were able to reopen, but the industry took a big hit in 2020– here in Appalachia as well as across the country.

Jeffrey said their group would love to see the state, or federal government, provide funding to help people open news centers in child care deserts, or work with existing child care directors to expand their businesses, so they can accept more children.

She and other child care advocates with “The Earlier the Better” say they also want to see more child care centers in West Virginia offer better quality education. That would mean staff would have more training in topics like early childhood development, and, ideally, bachelor’s degrees. It would help improve the level of care for all kids, including children with special needs.

More Than ‘Day Care’- Advocates Want Specialized Care With Trained Staff

In Morgantown, West Virginia, Tayrn Moser’s second son was having behavioral problems at his child care centers. He was two.

“He just had these outbursts and because the staff was not educated or trained on how to handle his emotions,” Moser said. “It turned into two to three-hour tantrums.”

The child care center her son was at eventually told Moser they couldn’t continue taking care of her son. She could have gone through the local school system to get him into preschool early– those programs exist in each county in the state, free for parents who have children with special needs.

But Moser found another child care center where staff were trained in occupational therapy, and she asked to be put on the waiting list.

“I knew that this would be the best environment for my son,” Moser said. “And once we got him into this facility, he was able to thrive.”

But it took 16 months before a spot opened up for her son. During that time, she had babysitters and family members help out, but it was a struggle. At times, she considered quitting her job to be able to take care of her son.
“I didn’t want him to be left behind,” Moser said. “And every day, it was such a challenge. It was very, very hard for me to leave him every day. I was scared for my son. I wanted to stay home and I wanted to be with him.”

In addition to not enough spaces available for children, parents also face a high cost of tuition– about $10,000 per year per child enrolled in full-time child care. That’s more than tuition at a community college in West Virginia. This high cost is partly due to ratios– child care centers are required to have one staff for every four children under two years old.

At the same time, a family’s income has to be very low to qualify for any kind of subsidy to help pay. For example, in West Virginia a family of four would be eligible for partial assistance if their income is less than approximately $48,000 a year. For full assistance – meaning the family pays nothing for child care – a family of four would have to make less than approximately $10,300 a year.

Subsidized Child Care For Essential Workers, Regardless Of Income

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several relief packages included funding to support working families, as well as help support the child care industry. One of the biggest things West Virginia did with its COVID relief money was it put it towards paying for child care for essential workers, no matter their income.

The state also changed the way it pays child care centers for subsidized tuition. Previous to the pandemic, if a child was out sick or if their family went on vacation, the child care center didn’t get paid– if that child was receiving subsidized tuition. Now, however, child care centers get paid for the whole month, not by how many days a kid was actually in school.

“It encourages every child care center to accept subsidy and not use that as an excuse not to accept subsidy,” said Dr. Jamie Jeffrey. “So that every single child no matter who were where they are, has access to affordable child care.”

Jeffrey and others in her group put together some of the recommendations for how the state should spend its COVID relief money. They advised the state ’s Department of Health and Human Resources, which is the agency in charge of regulating early child care.

They’re hoping some of the new policies the state put in place during the pandemic will continue as infection rates and concerns drop off.

Their group also recommended that child care programs receive more money per child enrolled in their school. This is because child care centers were already struggling financially to make ends meet even before the pandemic. On top of that, during the pandemic many tried to reduce their classroom sizes, to allow for social distancing, and they had to do a lot more cleaning. All these changes take more staff, so some of the covid relief went directly to child care centers to help them stay afloat financially. It wasn’t a lot of money, but according to Jeffrey, it was enough to help many childcare centers stay open.

Low Wages For Child Care Workers

None of the COVID relief money West Virginia received went directly towards increasing pay for child care workers. Most child care teachers are paid low wages, around $10-$11 an hour, and sometimes, they don’t even earn sick or vacation leave. So retaining qualified staff is a challenge for child care centers.

“It is the worst we’ve ever experienced trying to hire staff,” said Helen Post-Brown, who’s run Sunbeam Early Learning Center in Fairmont, West Virginia for 41 years. “Luckily, we kept our core staff at the center, but we need more than them. And it has been very difficult to first find someone qualified, and then someone willing to work now.”

Post-Brown is another one of the advocates working on “The Earlier the Better” initiative. They’d love to see more funding go towards teachers, making their salaries equivalent to their experience.

She and other child care advocates with the “The Earlier The Better,” Project – are hoping that some of the changes that were implemented during the pandemic can become more permanent. But where the money would come from is not clear.

Right now, Congress is arguing over spending trillions of dollars to boost the country’s infrastructure. President Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan” includes funding for child care. This funding would help, but it would not be enough to fix all the issues that are facing parents and child care workers?

Back in Pocahontas County, it’s 3 p.m. in the afternoon, time for Megan Hullinger to pick up her four kids. Normally, her two older kids walk home, and spend the afternoon with a babysitter. But today— her sitter has to go to a doctor’s appointment, so Hullinger picks up her children a little early.

She says without her family to support her, and neighbors who’ve helped with child care, she doesn’t think she could have kept working while she waits to get her kids into child care.

She picks up her youngest, one-year-old Gemma, first. On this hot August day, Gemma is singing “Jingle Bells.” Then they swing by the elementary school to pick up Abby. Gemma wraps her arms around her 8-year-old sister. They head out to pick up Nathan next, and then Tessa. Then the family drives back up the mountain, to home.

This story is part of a two-part series for Inside Appalachia about child care in W.Va. Read the other story here.

Childcare Services Agency Helps Essential Workers, Seeks More Solutions Post CARES Act

Many challenges parents and caretakers face under normal circumstances are exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Through the CARES Act, additional federal dollars were granted to help essential workers with things like child care regardless of income. Still, not every new challenge for working parents has been addressed during the pandemic.

Resource and referral agencies across the state such as Mountain Heart Community Services Inc., which is in 30 West Virginia counties, are processing the increased applications.

Across the state, essential workers have qualified for financial help with child care, since March of this year. The benefits are part of the federal CARES, or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Through September, 692,000 of the workers who left the labor force were women. That’s 80% , according to the National Women’s Law Center.

Susan McCoy is a supervisor and case management auditing coordinator with Mountain Heart Community Services, a resource and referral agency that provides child care for working parents along with other services.

Essential workers have been reaching out to Mountain Heart in 30 counties in West Virginia since April.

“In the beginning, once the changes came down in March and April,” McCoy said, “we did see a lot of frontline workers, nurses, doctors, emergency medical services, police officers, folks of that, you know, doing those kinds of jobs who weren’t eligible before.”

Since April, the agency has seen at least 30 more cases every month compared to the same time last year. In April alone, there were almost 130 more families who asked for help compared to the previous year.

“I do believe it is because the income limitations for essential workers have been waived,” McCoy said.

The stay-at-home order forced more parents to juggle child care while working from home. While essential workers such as custodians, doctors, and nurses were eligible for financial assistance, no policies existed then or now to help parents trying to stay productive at home while also taking care of their kids.

“It has been a challenge, especially when they have younger children who are not in school,” McCoy said. “And just overall income situations have been really difficult for families. You know, if you’re not working, you’re not making money. It’s hard to pay for childcare and you know, bills that are adding up for families.”

West Virginia is a rural state, and many times, day care isn’t an option. But those who are looking for employment can start their own daycares. Through Mountain Heart, child-care providers can get trained to provide care for up to six children in their own home. An additional service of the agency helps provide resources in remote and rural parts of the state that may not have the population to support a daycare center.

Violette Burdette is a development specialist for MountainHeart Community Services.

“You don’t have to go to a childcare center or facility to receive Mountain Heart (benefits),” Burdette said. “You can have an individual person that goes to the training program and takes care of your child while you’re at work or at school.”

Burdette looks for funding opportunities along with sources to partner with, and to help with program development within the agency.

The solutions or resources have been in place since the War on Poverty was declared in the 1960s, and it’s helped single parents go to school or work, while someone else cared for their children.

No program is not perfect, and the pandemic has magnified these challenges. Burdette was recently one of 40 professionals across Appalachia to attend economic skills training at the Appalachian Leadership Institute. It’s part of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) fellowship program.

Burdett hopes the fellowship will reveal strategies and resources that would work for West Virginia.

“I think the whole area of jobs and economic development is very important,” Burdette said. “If we could figure out better ways to allow people to work. You know that the ways that other people do it in rural areas, even in other states or other regions outside Appalachia is through telework or telecommunications. And of course, we don’t always have that, especially with, you know, the issues we have with connectivity and broadband and those types of things.”

After completing the nine-month series of online meetings, Appalachian Leadership Institute Fellows will become part of a peer-to-peer working group committed to Appalachia’s future.

The benefits are part of the federal CARES, or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

The federal benefits that provide financial assistance to essential workers regardless of income, are expected to run out after December.

LISTEN: Essential Workers Share Working Mom Struggles During A Pandemic

When the Coronavirus pandemic was declared in March, state leaders shut down schools, ordered businesses to close and told people to stay home from work unless they were deemed “essential” by the federal government.

This included hygiene production and services such as custodians for essential buildings. It created new challenges for single parents deemed essential, especially when daycares shut down. With virtual learning, more challenges emerged for parents. Jessica Lilly spoke with a few moms coping with this reality to get a sense of what they’re up against.

Kaitlyn Oxley and her daughter, Mia, pause for quick photo for SnapChat.

Kaitlyn Oxley is a custodian in Mercer County, West Virginia.

“I was deemed essential,” Oxley said. “But the daycare closed down as soon as it started. So I had to be off work and work when I can. It was usually one or two days a week if that.”

After the daycare closed, Oxley says she had no choice but to stay home most days, only working when her mother got a day off and could keep her 3-year old young daughter.

With so little work, Oxley’s bills started to add up – but she made it through with support from her family.

“I had a very gracious aunt that helped me,” Oxley said. “Luckily, I got my settlement. So I got the backup. But if I didn’t have that I would have been, just out of luck.”

The settlement came from insurance after she was in a car wreck in September 2019. The timing of it was a huge help for Oxley.

Kayla Graham is also a custodian in Mercer County.

“When the pandemic hit, I was out of work for a week,” Graham explained.

Graham, a single mom with four children, ages 13 to five, said that it was a layoff that helped her get back to work.

“Luckily, my youngest daughter, her father, ended up getting laid off because of the pandemic also,” Graham said. “So he helped out a lot with watching the kids whenever the daycare shut down. And usually, like a typical day, I go to work, I come home, I work on their schoolwork, and some days, you’re just feeling like you’re pulled in every direction.”

Kayla Graham cuddles with her four children.

Most of the time, she doesn’t really think about the challenges or how hard things could get. She simply does what she needs to do – for her family.

“I don’t really think right now anything could really help,” she says fighting back tears. “It’s just, you know, kind of doing what you have to do during the pandemic.”

When the local daycare finally opened back up, both Graham, as well as Oxley, qualified for financial assistance with child care through the nonprofit Mountain Heart Community Services Inc. because they were essential workers. The private, community action agency was created back in the 60s in the wake of the federal War on Poverty.

Anyone deemed “essential” qualifies through December. Mountain Heart offers child care assistance and several other services in 30 counties across the state.

You know, you have to make a living,” Graham said. “And without Mountain Heart, I probably couldn’t do that. And it helps a great deal whenever it comes to single parents, with multiple kids.”

Today, with the kids back to school, there are new challenges.

“Pretty much you just kind of have to wait until I get off of work and then do all of the kids’ school work then,” she said. “It’s difficult. They do their Zoom meetings at daycare. And, you know, they’re where they talk to their class and their teachers. I’m lucky that the daycare does that and they help with that.”

Graham notes her challenges in ensuring all of her children’s needs are met.

“My kids, they’re also in special ed, two of my boys are in special ed so whenever I say I’m pulled in every direction, my youngest daughter, she just started preschool. So it’s like this one wants help, this one wants help, and this one wants help. But it’s like where do you start? That’s, it’s stressful.”

Kaitlyn Oxley’s daughter, Mia, dressed as the Stephen King character Penny Wise for the Miss Wicked Pageant in Beckley, WV.

At times, it’s hard for these women to share these stories. But one activity that made both women smile was participating in pageants.

“I think it builds a child’s self esteem for the most part,” Graham said. “They get up there and everybody’s talking about how pretty they are, you know, and it’s putting them up on a pedestal and that’s great. It really is.”

Kayla Graham’s five-year-old daughter, Isabella, was presented with a trophy for Halloween Princess in the 2020 Miss Wicked Pageant in Beckley.

The women don’t find much time for themselves any more. But they find a bit of happiness to see the smile on their kids’ faces. Kayla encouraged other single parents like herself as they work through a difficult era.

“Honestly, you’re not alone,” Graham said. “Everybody’s kind of stuck in my own spot right now, as frustrating as it is.”

Graham and Oxley also said that another stimulus package would mean a chance to get ahead on bills and not have to worry as much about Christmas presents for the kids.