Sentinel Opinion: Another workforce hurdle; Childcare in NH is costly, but even more, it's unavailable to many parents

First, the bad: There’s a dearth of child care in the state. A year ago — the last time the state Department of Health and Human Services published survey data — there were 765 licensed day care providers in the state serving just over 45,000 kids. DHHS found that just prior to the COVID pandemic, Granite State day care options were meeting just 60 percent of the demand.

That’s troubling for kids, parents and — in a not-so-ancillary way — employers.

As we noted in this space several weeks ago, according to a national survey conducted jointly last year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and the Marshall Plan for Moms, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping mothers thrive, 45 percent of mothers with children under 6 who left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic cited child care as a major reason for their departure.

But women aren’t alone in that; 18 percent of men said the same. And the situation hasn’t improved.

New Hampshire law requires all child care providers caring for more than three children to be licensed. Of course there are unlicensed, under-the-radar options — in-home, improvised settings where parents already watching their own children take in some extras as a favor or to make some additional income. These can be lifelines for working parents whose kids aren’t in school or who need care outside of school hours. But they risk the state’s ire or, worse, lawsuits if something goes wrong. And they often don’t involve trained staff or vetted spaces.

Licensing is a time-consuming, costly process. It involves proving all teachers/caregivers are trained to the state’s requirements; it means providing background checks; it means having expensive insurance; it means providing accommodations that meet DHHS guidelines and local codes. And, it means keeping up with all those things and being subject to site visits and audits.

And it means paying staff.

That’s where it gets ugly.

The Economic Policy Institute pegs the cost of infant care in New Hampshire at $1,066 per month — roughly the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Cheshire County.

New Hampshire has about $26 million per year in a Child Care Scholarship Program to help families pay for care. But as advocates testified last week, many families who could use that help can’t qualify because eligibility is based on gross income, not what parents have available after paying for rent, food, insurance and other necessary expenses.

And that’s if you can find it. Again, the child care needs of only three out of five children in the state are being met. And a big part of that is that for all their training and jumping through hoops, child care workers in the state earn far less than their contemporaries in Massachusetts: more than $10,000 less, Sarah Vanderhoof, child development director at Southern New Hampshire Services, told lawmakers, as reported by N.H. Bulletin. Vermont workers earn about $8,460 more a year, while Maine pays about $6,500 more. The average wage for a child care worker caring for infants in New Hampshire is under $12 per hour.

That may explain why in 2021 there were 1,500 unfilled child care positions in the state.

So, bad pay for workers, but high costs for families. That’s a particularly bad combination because fixing the former will almost certainly worsen the latter. Yet without fixing worker pay, many Granite State parents won’t have access to care and therefore won’t be able to fill the demand in other sectors begging for skilled workers.

Said Rep. Ross Berry, a Manchester Republican who owns a child care center in Epsom. “I’ve had grown men and women crying in my office because they don’t know how they’re going to pay for child care. I see the problems from the business side of it but also the human side of it as well. The child care situation in the state is horrible.”

But that’s where the “good” comes in.

Berry’s quote in the N.H. Bulletin came in his role as chairman of the new House Special Committee on Childcare, which is tasked with finding solutions to child care access. The fact that the Legislature is that invested in the issue is good news, even if Berry’s panel isn’t planning on putting forward any bills this year; it’s in more of an investigatory stage.

There are legislative efforts underway, however. Keene Rep. Nick Germana and Sen. Donovan Fenton are sponsoring HB 566, which would establish a child care workforce fund to provide grants to eligible child care employers for child care workforce recruitment and retention. And the “Childcare for New Hampshire Working Families Act” (SB 237), which Fenton is also cosponsoring, would modify the child care scholarship program, establish a child care workforce program and make appropriations for child caregiver supports, early childhood mental health and early childhood education scholarships.

Amid all the (deserved) noise about workforce housing, the state’s woeful child care situation poses another high hurdle for employers in hiring working parents. Fortunately, attention is being paid. The question — an eternal one for the notoriously over-frugal N.H. Legislature — is whether enough action, particularly funding, will be forthcoming to address it.