Child care remains out of reach for many Juneau parents who can’t find a place or just can’t afford it.
Juneau has about 2,400 children under 6 and just 560 child care slots.
Now, a volunteer group is appealing to the Juneau Assembly to channel millions in sales tax revenue to address the problem.
Meghan Stangeland had her first child last year – a boy. Within two months, the 25-year-old mother had to be back at her job as a purchasing agent at a fish processing plant.
Her son came to work with her too.
“It was intense,” she said. “I mean, I was definitely grateful that my employer allowed me to. However, you are not quite as productive with a three-month-old strapped to your chest.”
It’s not like she didn’t try to find child care. She was willing to shell out the going rate of about $700 to $1,000 a month.
“Either they weren’t taking children that young, they never returned my phone call and I couldn’t contact anybody at the day care provider,” Stangeland said, “or the most frustrating situation was one day care provider who said they’d have one space available as of August, but she already had 40 applicants on file for that one position.”
She’s since found a temporary arrangement – for the summer.
“My fiancé’s sister watches my son full-time, but I’m not sure how sustainable that’s going to be as we enter the fall season as she has two children of her own and works with the school district,” she said.
Child care professionals say this isn’t at all uncommon.
“We call a lot of people who have family members that they’ve flown out to watch their children, people who haven’t been able to find care who decide to stay home,” said Colleen Brody, assistant director of Gold Creek Child Development Center that’s on the ground flood of the federal building in downtown Juneau.
State Department of Labor data reports there are about 2,400 children 6 and younger in Juneau, yet there are just 560 spaces at licensed child care centers, according to the Association for the Education of Young Children.
It’s gotten so bad, Brody said, that she gets calls from parents offered jobs in Juneau who then change their mind about relocating when they take a look at child care options.
“Multiple families that we’ve called that that’s an issue,” Brody said. “By the time we’ve offered them a spot, they’ve already left.”
A group of child care advocates recently approached the Juneau Assembly to allocate sales tax revenue to help.
The Assembly will likely ask voters in October to extend a 1 percent sales tax for another five years that would create a pool of about $47 million available for projects in the community.
The working group is calling it Best Starts and is asking the city to earmark $14 million over five years to subsidize child care and pre-school programs.
“Right now, our infrastructure for our kids is broken,” said former Juneau City Manager Kevin Ritchie, who recently made a pitch to the Assembly to fund the Best Starts initiative. “Economically, we can’t say we have a great economic development effort unless we have affordable and available child care.”
The proposal would expand pre-school programs and subsidies for low-income families. It would also boost wages for child care providers who have trouble keeping staff.
All this would build on programs already in place but thinly stretched.
“What we’re talking about doing is simply allowing child care centers that develop either from the private sector or the nonprofit sector to be successful financially,” Ritchie said. “The problem is now economically is there’s a huge pent-up demand for good quality child care but the people who demand it and want it can’t afford to pay for it, even fairly high-income families.”
The subsidy would be structured as $3.3 million annually.
It’s competing with a wish list totaling $125 million that includes renovating the downtown swimming pool, a new performance arts center and improved harbor facilities – to name a just few projects under consideration.
The Assembly will finalize what proposals would qualify for funding at its July 12 meeting next week.
“There’s been a lot of interest, we’re getting a lot of email about it,” Finance Committee Chairman Jesse Kiehl said. “We’re going to see where the group comes out here in our mid-July finance meeting.”
In the meantime, Meghan Stangeland and other working parents say they’re caught in a conundrum.
“It’s one thing if you can find a day care that will take your child, it’s another if you can afford to keep them in that day care,” Stangeland said. “And then you have the question of whether does it make more sense for one parent to stay home, because if their entire income is going towards day care, that doesn’t really pan out in the end.”
An online petition urging the Juneau Assembly to support Best Starts already has gathered more than 600 signatures.
