Earlier this month the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership launched a pair of surveys to better understand issues related to a lack of child care in the Southern Adirondack region.
Shelby Schneider, President and CEO of the Saratoga Partnership, is a mother of four. She says she experienced the challenges of finding affordable child care firsthand.
“I’ve worked through the birth of all of my kids. And finding quality childcare, especially infant and toddler care, was a challenge then. But in the Capital Region, and there’s a lot data to support this pre-COVID, we have nearly 60 percent fewer child care spots in the Capital Region than we had in 2008. So we definitely have in this region a shortage of childcare.”
Schneider explained to me that the shortage in childcare is compounded by several factors. The Capital Region pre-COVID had a low unemployment rate. At the same time, upstate New York is experiencing what some call the “silver tsunami”, where an older generation of workers is retiring, and younger workers are being stretched to fill their absence.
The Saratoga Partnership is teaming up with the Saratoga County Employment & Training Center, Warren County Employment & Training, non-profit Brightside Up, and the Southern Adirondack Child Care Network to identify the challenges and potential solutions related to child care.
Schneider says the community’s response to the surveys has been good so far.
“We have a family, a user-based survey. We’ve had over 122 people take that survey, so far, since it was released last week. And we’ve had 53 employers participate in the survey since last week. So what we need to do is identify obviously the need, the age ranges – so what is the demand – and how is this also impacting employers, because this does impact employers’ abilities to not only recruit but retain talent. And we don’t want people to have to make a choice between caring for their children or going to work. And a lot of folks have to do that, especially if you’re working an hourly wage. We know that the average cost of childcare in this region, is roughly $15,000 per year, which is expensive for a lot of folks. And they don’t want to necessarily break even to go to work and sacrifice that valuable time with their children.”
Saratoga and Washington Counties are largely rural counties, and that reduces the availability of nearby traditional child care centers to many families, says Schneider. A solution may be home-based childcare.
“We know that in some rural areas they don’t have centers. So how do we work with folks to help people create home-based child care centers?”
Schneider says the data from the surveys could be used to find ways to support and train people to open their own home-based child care businesses in the region.
And the key to a solution, says Schneider, is a partnership between state and local government, education and training centers, and the private sector.
For more inormation, visit: https://saratogapartnership.org/child-care-surveys/
