Mass. child care is bouncing back 5 years after COVID, but many families still struggle

The Guild of St. Agnes, which runs child care centers in Worcester, closed its doors when COVID hit, like many child care centers. When it re-opened in fall of 2020, enrollment was only two-thirds of what it had been before the pandemic. But now things have improved: Overall enrollment is not only up, but greater than what it was five years ago.

“Enrollment-wise, we’re back to normal and more,” said Sharon MacDonald, the centers’ executive director. “Which is fabulous.”

The child care sector was hit hard by the pandemic five years ago, but it also ushered in a new era of state funding, with hundreds of millions of dollars now set aside each year to directly help child care centers. Now, there are tens of thousand more child care spots available in Massachusetts than there were pre-COVID.

Even though funding has helped many bounce back, centers have been dealing with not enough staff and more behavioral issues among kids. Those same behavioral issues mean that centers would prefer to have even more staff than before. And, for many families, child care is still unaffordable and hard to find.

“The children that we’re seeing are very challenging,” MacDonald said. “It’s a trauma response — the pandemic was traumatic for children and families.”

Ben Hires leads Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, which serves 13,000 children and 400 families through family child care, a child care center and afterschool programs. He says the staff have seen an increase in kids with behavioral challenges, or who have autism or other learning disabilities.

In some classrooms, he said the number of kids with those added challenges has tripled in recent years, which puts another strain on workers.

“There are some children who really need, like, one-on-one [support],” he said.

In 2020, Massachusetts used federal relief money to create the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) program, providing grants directly to child care providers to help them stay open and stabilize the sector. When that federal funding ran out last year, Massachusetts became the only state to make C3 permanent in the budget .

Earlier this year, the state also moved to increase reimbursement rates for providers who serve low-income families.

Hires said that C3 grants have been “incredibly important and helpful to our organization,” he said, bringing up their entry-level salaries from $18 an hour to $22 an hour.

MacDonald said the funding has been a “life-changer,” allowing her organization to pay staff a higher-than-average wage and provide better benefits. It also allowed them to update classrooms with new technology and supplies, and work on deferred maintenance projects.

“It’s like Christmas when you bring new supplies and new equipment in the classroom to teachers,” MacDonald said. “It’s not only good quality, but it gives them a sense that we’re investing in the work that they’re doing.”

Advocates and child care leaders say that while the infusion of federal and state money has helped the sector, challenges remain. And child care costs in Massachusetts consistently rank among the highest in the country.

“The message has been that we need to rebound from COVID,” MacDonald said. “But frankly, we weren’t in great shape before COVID. It was hard. It was low wages.”

And families across income groups are being squeezed financially, and struggling to find child care they can afford, said Latoya Gayle, senior director of advocacy at Neighborhood Villages in Boston.

“People still feel the pressure and the scramble to try to find care. Because when people get a good seat, they’re not letting it go,” she said.

According to a report released this month by the Healey administration’s Inter-Agency Early Education and Child Care Task Force, a lack of seats means that just over half — 52% — of children under kindergarten age are enrolled in a formal child care program across the state.

Many advocates say that low pay causes turnover among workers, giving them little choice but to leave for other higher-paying jobs. Teachers at child care centers earn an average yearly salary of $43,000, which is about half the salary for a K-12 teacher in the state, according to a recent report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

“We’re trying to be as competitive as possible,” said Hires, who raised his center’s pay with help from C3 grants. “Thinking about equity, thinking about who our teachers are — 100% women, a lot of them immigrant staff.”

He also sees a need for staff who are not classroom teachers — such as navigators, who serve as a bridge between children and teachers, and staff who can connect families with behavioral and mental health support, as well as experts in child development and speech pathology.

Latoya Gayle hopes the state can help make child care a more appealing career path.

“How do we shore up our pipeline of workers who want to be in this field?” Gayle said. “I think sometimes we take it for granted, the work and the learning and the expertise that goes into caring and educating our youngest learners.”