At five months pregnant, Kayla Marmaud started putting her name on waiting lists for child care.
But when her son was born in late 2021, she still hadn’t heard from any daycares. As her maternity leave drew to a close, Marmaud found herself in waitlist limbo.
Leaving the workforce was not an option financially for her or her husband, James. Grandparents were unavailable, and even unlicensed at-home daycares were full. So they contorted their schedules around one another, hurrying out the door when the other entered. She spent the days working as an administrative assistant at a local nonprofit, and her husband worked night and weekend shifts in restaurant management.
The makeshift arrangement ended last August, when one year after entering the waitlists, Marmaud finally found a spot for her then-eight-month-old son in a local daycare.
“Our family was able to navigate the time between my return to work and getting a spot,” she said. “Not all families have that luxury.”
Marmaud lives in St. Joseph, in Buchanan County, in what researchers call a “child care desert” — where there are more than three children ages 5 and under for every licensed child care slot or no licensed slots at all.
Almost half of all children in Missouri ages 5 and under, or about 202,000 kids, now live in child care deserts, The Missouri Independent and MuckRock found as part of a joint investigation, “Disappearing Daycare,” drawing from public records and data provided by the advocacy group Child Care Aware.
Those deserts are particularly concentrated in rural communities. In some ZIP codes, there are more than 20 children for every available seat in a licensed child care facility.
Living in a child care desert can leave parents feeling trapped, Marmaud said, their options severely constrained.
“Once a spot becomes open for a child, you have to take it. This eliminates parent choice in child care for their children,” she said.
ZIP codes alone are an imperfect measure of child care supply because families can drive beyond their own ZIP codes to nearby services, including child care. Still, clusters of ZIP codes characterized as child care deserts are meaningful: They show areas where child care is hardest to come by and driving to a neighboring area may not be possible.
And the fewer child care slots available in one ZIP code, the greater the potential demand on a neighboring ZIP code.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds have poured into the state to stabilize the child care industry, but the majority of grant money tracked by MuckRock and The Missouri Independent has gone to ZIP codes that aren’t in child care deserts.
Even in areas not considered deserts, where capacity looks plentiful on paper, many providers say waitlists abound.
One reason? They can’t hire enough staff to provide care and are forced to operate below capacity.
Federal pandemic money has helped keep child care providers afloat, but it hasn’t been enough to counter the hemorrhaging of staff from an industry with a median hourly wage of just under $12 in 2021.
If parents do find an open daycare slot, they have to shoulder an expense that can rival the cost of a mortgage or in-state college tuition — often at the point in their careers when they are making the least. For Marmaud, the daycare she eventually found was one of the cheaper options in her area yet it still eats up 17% of her family’s annual income.
The result is a limited set of options for parents of young children and an industry barely held afloat by a massive infusion of federal funds.
“Families are often faced with very difficult choices on what they should do to both be able to support their family and make sure that their children are in the highest quality care,” said Katie Rahn, executive director of the St. Louis advocacy group Gateway Early Childhood Alliance.
Piecemeal child care solutions can disrupt parents’ employment — and sometimes remove a parent from the workforce entirely. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found in 2021 that accessibility, quality and cost-related hurdles to child care force many Missouri parents out of the workforce or cause disruptions to their work, costing the state more than $1 billion annually.
Child care’s link to workforce issues has become a touchpoint for Gov. Mike Parson and lawmakers advocating for legislative change.
The governor is pushing several measures this year designed to alleviate the crisis — from expanding low-income public pre-K and tax credits to increasing the state’s subsidy reimbursement to providers that accept the public assistance program.
But each has run into roadblocks in the legislative process, and it’s unclear how much of Parson’s agenda will cross the finish line, despite bipartisan support.
“It would be a first step in what’s needed overall. [They] wouldn’t solve the entire problem,” Rahn said, of the governor’s proposals. “But it would certainly be moves in the right direction.”
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories on Missouri childcare. The series will continue Friday.
For more from the Missouri Independent, visit www.missouriindependent.com.