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Recent reports tell us something important that has been clear to families, employers and communities for years: Indiana’s child care crisis has enormous costs for our state.
Insufficient care costs Indiana $4.2 billion annually in lost economic activity. Employers have trouble filling open jobs, and some parents can’t work or obtain higher-paying jobs because they can’t find and afford child care.
While Indiana has taken recent steps to increase its investments in child care and expand opportunities for families, one group of people is especially critical to any long-term solution to expanding access and affordability: child care workers.
Yet in Indiana, lead child care educators, who often have bachelor’s degrees, earn wages equivalent to restaurant cooks or motor vehicle operators—fields that don’t require education beyond high school.
Child care workers play a vital role in our early education system. Robust staffing ensures facilities can operate at capacity and serve more families, not to mention the impact that excellent teachers can have on our youngest learners.
It is in everyone’s best interest that we improve conditions for child care workers so we can ensure stability for current educators and make the profession more attractive for future generations.
Child care workers face low wages, lack of benefits and challenging working conditions—all of which pose obstacles to attracting and retaining talent in the field.
Nearly 81% of child care workers earn below the $20.44 per hour required to support a single adult, despite the economic and social importance of the work they do. Many child care workers lack access to any type of health insurance or rely on Medicaid because their wages are so low. And lead teachers in Indiana’s early childhood education settings make, on average, $8.20 an hour less than the state’s average for a kindergarten teacher, according to data compiled by TalentFirst on behalf of Indiana’s Early Learning Advisory Committee.
What can Indiana do to reverse these conditions? A new report from the state’s Early Learning Advisory Committee outlines several important steps stakeholders can take to improve compensation for the sector.
These recommendations include refundable tax credits to help increase the amount of money child care workers take home, increasing support for child care providers to share back-end services to realize cost savings that can go toward salaries and expanding opportunities for public and private entities to share in the cost of child care.
In addition to addressing the compensation issue, the recommendations include ways to support the growth and development of the future child care workforce and create new revenue streams, including by creating economic development incentives for employers to invest in child care.
Statewide, Indiana serves only 61% of children who need care with our existing capacity. We cannot expand capacity without having the people necessary to staff classrooms. And we cannot retain the child care workforce of today or build the workforce of tomorrow without targeted investments in our child care workers.
If we are truly committed to greater opportunities for Hoosiers, we need to build on our recent momentum and improve opportunities for child care workers. When we invest in care, our families, employers and communities benefit.•
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Snideman is vice president of government relations for United Way of Central Indiana and a member of Indiana’s Early Learning Advisory Committee.
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