Child care ‘is like paying a mortgage.’

Nina Ward began looking for child care when she was only a few months pregnant. 

Ward and her husband created a list of child care centers and set up tours, but the Kansas City couple repeatedly ran into the same problem: there were no infant spaces available.

So they broadened their search and eventually found a center in Grandview that could take their daughter, A’ja. The center could initially only care for her on a part-time basis, and its location meant Ward had to backtrack on her commute. But it was the best they could find.

A’ja’s part-time care cost the Wards $285 per week, and her full-time care now costs $325 per week, or $1,300 per month. Laughing, Ward called it “reasonable.”

“I know folks paying upwards of $450 (per week),” she said. “It’s like paying a mortgage. I’m not quite sure how folks who have multiple children in child care are managing it.”

A wider problem

Cost and availability are two major barriers for families navigating the child care system in the Kansas City area, according to Toni Sturdivant, director of early learning at the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC).

In 2022, the median price Jackson County families paid for child care was more than $11,500 per year, or 13.5% of the county’s median family income. Clay County families paid a median price of $12,700, or 12.8% of the median family income, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. 

A MARC survey of Kansas City-area families found that “some people were choosing to live in a neighborhood that they felt was unsafe because that’s how they could afford the child care program that they wanted,” Sturdivant said.

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“They’re literally counting down the days until their children could get into kindergarten,” she added.

Ward — A’ja’s mother — works as the director of programs and events for Show Me KC Schools, a nonprofit focused on helping families explore pre-K and K-12 options for their children.

She said her organization has some free pre-K options available for families who qualify for free and reduced-price meals, but spots fill up quickly and “it’s tricky if you don’t qualify.”

“We find that the families that have the most challenging time are the ones that don’t qualify for that free-and-reduced-lunch (program) because they make slightly more but are still having a hard time affording pre-K for their 3- or 4-year-old … and they don’t qualify for state subsidies,” she said.

One of those parents is Fahima Osman, a drug safety specialist living in Lee’s Summit. She and her husband earned too much to qualify for state child subsidies “even though I barely made much,” she said. 

But they were able to qualify for Head Start, a free child care program through the federal government, which helped them find appropriate care for their son, Kamal, who has a speech delay. 

Through that program, Kamal is able to attend an early education center where he receives physical, occupational and speech therapies.

But Head Start only runs for a few hours every day, so the Osmans still had to find before- and after-school care. After a long search for a day care with good ratings and an opening nearby, they found a center for Kamal that costs them $250 a week.

Osman said that if she hadn’t been able to get him into Head Start, “I would have had to take a lot of time off of work so my child can get those services.”

Sturdivant said there’s been a drop in workforce participation as employees — especially women — leave their jobs or cut back on their hours to care for children because they can’t afford to pay for child care.

“That has a cumulative effect and it hurts the workforce for employers, but it also impacts the child care providers and their stability,” Sturdivant said. “When someone suddenly leaves their job to just handle child care on their own, that’s a source of income that leaves the child care program, too.”

Child care deserts are “neighborhoods or communities that are either lacking any child care options or have so few providers that there are more than three children for every licensed child care slot,” according to Child Care Aware of Missouri.

In 10 counties in the Kansas City area — including four in Kansas and six in Missouri — there are large swaths MARC considers child care deserts, including several tracts in the center of Kansas City. 

Osman said the current child care landscape is “frustrating.”

“You want parents to be in the workforce, but you’re making child care so difficult,” she said. “I would love to stay home with my son, but everything’s so expensive, we can’t afford to be at home with him. So he has to be in care, but the care takes more than half of your income, and it sucks. I don’t know how else to live this life.”

A potential solution

To try to address this gap, MARC is developing a new program, called the Child Care Exchange, to share the cost of care among families, employers, local organizations and the state. 

The exchange would help cover the cost of care for children in day care, pre-K and after-school programs offered by registered child care providers.

Through the program, MARC hopes to ease the financial burden on families while also stabilizing and expanding the provider market.

Sturdivant said MARC hopes to have the Kansas City-area exchange operational by October. Currently, MARC is working on recruiting employers and other funders so that in August or September it can report to the state how much local support it has received. 

That number will then be used to determine how much state funding the program can receive, as 30% of each participating child’s tuition will need to be covered by local sources in order to qualify for state money.

The creation of the Kansas City exchange — one of a handful around the state — was set in motion by a $5 million line item in Missouri’s 2026 budget to ease the burden for families in child care deserts and low-income families that don’t qualify for preexisting state subsidies. 

Despite Gov. Mike Kehoe saying child care accessibility is “a personal issue to me” and a priority of his administration, he used a line-item veto to cut the exchange’s funding in half to $2.5 million.

Initially, the funding was going to be divided between at least two application periods. But with a smaller pot to draw from, Sturdivant said there may not be a second period “because once the money is spent, it’s gone.”

“The funding is sort of first-come, first-served, so the quicker the community is able to show its pledges, the quicker we can access the funds,” she said.

Community contributions can come from foundations, religious organizations, city and county governments and other private and public entities, as well as employers, Sturdivant said.

The program will be overseen by the Missouri Office of Administration, not the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The latter manages the Missouri Child Care Subsidy Program that has recently come under fire for long delays in payments to child care providers. 

Stabilizing the child care industry

One reason the Wards had a particularly hard time finding care for A’ja was that under state rules, child care providers must follow strict staff-to-child ratios.

For 3- and 4-year-olds, one staff member can watch up to 10 children. For 2-year-olds, that number drops to eight, and for infants and toddlers, that number drops to four.

While these rules were put in place to ensure children’s safety, they’ve also meant that “a lot of centers only have one infant classroom because of staffing costs,” Ward said.

Sturdivant said staffing has been a major challenge for the child care industry in the Kansas City area.

“We have child care centers right now that don’t have all of their classrooms open because they need more teachers,” she said. The number of providers “is something that we’re definitely thinking about, which is why this program is not just about affordability, but stabilization.”

In addition to assisting the industry by stabilizing its customer base, Sturdivant said MARC hopes to support providers through efforts to recruit more early childhood educators and help them find pathways to training and employment.

“We want to provide relief to parents that are able to access child care now, and while we’re doing that, also increase the supply of child care for those who aren’t able to access it, so that we’re growing the system as we’re supporting families,” Sturdivant said.

Sturdivant said she is part of a group of stakeholders in Missouri and Kansas working on “strategies to recruit and train and get people in front of different providers that have openings, all in one place.” 

Increasing the number of workers in the child care industry — and, by extension, expanding the number of seats Kansas City-area centers can make available — would also provide more flexibility for families like the Osmans.

Osman recently had to take time off of work and work remotely to care for Kamal, who has been dealing with health issues, but she hasn’t felt comfortable taking him off of his center’s list.

“I’m still paying into care that I’m not really utilizing, but I don’t want to get off the child care list, because if I get off of it I don’t know who the next person will be that’s going to be open to take him,” she said. “You can have the money, but you may not have the care that your son needs.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.