As a mother of three, Ashlie Fitzpatrick is lucky that the St. Peter childcare center she works at, SP3C, is able to care for her kids while she’s on the job.
But the assistant director remembers a time when it was difficult to find care for her twins.
“I actually had a job that I didn’t work in a daycare, and so keeping and finding daycare for them was extremely hard, especially having twin infants at the time,” she said.
“It’s already hard to find an infant slot, so trying to find it for twins was extremely hard. That’s why I ended up staying home with them for a few years.”
Fitzpatrick said it took about two months before they made progress.
In the meantime, she used a nanny or had family help watch the kids.
SP3C Director Kathy Link said childcare demand is high at their center, which offers infant through school age care.
“Definitely the one age group that is in high demand is the school agers. That would be from kindergarten up to fifth grade,” Link said.
“There’s very limited facilities in the area that accommodate school agers. We do, and another facility in the building (also does), but there’s a waiting list of probably 10 to 15 kids per center.”
Link also said that she has infants on her waiting list to get in next June and July.
“As soon as they are finding out (they are expecting) they are calling and seeing if there is space,” said Link.
But as demand for childcare continues to rise, childcare centers continue to face other challenges themselves.
For example, Link said SP3C has plenty of staff, but sometimes there’s a lot of turnover.
“So one leaves, we need to find another replacement to fill that slot,” she said, adding that they try to hire quickly.
“Qualified candidates are kind of thin… we try to keep up with competitive wages.”
As Greater Mankato Growth Business Development Director Ryan Vesey explained, childcare has a triple problem.
“First is, childcare as it stands is not affordable for the vast number of community members. The problem is, our childcare, whether it’s home care or centers, their profit margins are also incredibly small,” he said.
Vesey added that providers can’t afford to reduce rates but that increasing rates would make care more unaffordable.
“The other challenge is because their margins are so slim or even negative, they can’t increase what they’re paying toward their staff and to keep up with wage growth elsewhere. So then it becomes difficult to retain staff,” he said.
“All three of these projects just continue to compound on each other to the point where it’s very difficult to make childcare work financially for the providers at this point.”
Vesey, who also leads GMG’s economic development work on behalf of the Regional Economic Development Alliance, said these issues began to come to light as the alliance started to expand its focus.
The alliance, a partnership between several cities and Blue Earth and Nicollet Counties, has in the past typically only worked towards bringing businesses to the region.
Vesey said in 2021 and 2022, that focus expanded to resident recruitment.
“That led to a need to make sure that we’re also developing the types of amenities that are needed,” he said.
“What we began to discover was that many of our childcare providers aren’t able to fill the slots that they have either through a mismatch between supply and demand or through an inability to fill their own open positions because of primarily the nationwide staffing challenges combined with very slim margins on childcare.”
That led to Vesey’s team realizing they needed to take a broader approach.
Right now, they’re involved in two programs; one is in Eagle Lake called the Rural Childcare Innovation Program.
“Then the program in Mankato and North Mankato is called the Whole Community Approach that we’re doing with the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation to really look at the issue broadly and help find some potential solutions,” he said.
Through their efforts, the teams plan to meet with several stakeholders — including childcare centers, home care providers, community leaders, elected officials, nonprofits and workforce leaders — later this month.
“The goal of these… is to uncover issues and themes that are shared by all of those different stakeholders and then the outcome is to develop an action plan that we can use as a community to help address the specific issues within the community’s childcare needs,” Vesey said.
“So, we’re not going into this right now with a pre-existing notion of this is what we’re going to do.”
Vesey said this is the first time they’ve facilitated an effort like this on this scale.
He added that while Mankato and North Mankato are key communities in the effort, they’re also paying attention to what’s happening in the region.
“So that we can take what all of these communities are discovering and figure out both the community solutions but what can we do as a region?” he said.
The Rural Childcare Innovation Program will also be holding a town hall event in Eagle Lake next month.
The event is aimed at providers, parents, employees and employers to evaluate the need for childcare in the city.
The town hall will take place on Nov. 20 at 5:30 p.m. at the Eagle Lake American Legion. Attendees are encouraged to sign up by scanning the barcode on the flier.
Rae Jean Hansen, vice president of early childhood at SMIF, said she hopes these efforts will get a broad base of individuals involved to help make a plan.
“What are the opportunities we can look at within the community and work together with the existing providers and the existing centers,” she said.
She added that she sees a lot of demand for infant care in the region.
“They might be able to find toddler care or afterschool care or something like that, but infant care is a real need that’s out there,” she said.
To combat wage challenges, Link said SP3C gets a grant through the state of Minnesota that helps provide bonus pay to her employees.
It’s called the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program and was signed into law in May 2023 to create a new program designed to support the industry.
The program issues monthly payments to eligible childcare providers to fund increases in compensation.
“We fill out the application monthly. The state goes by how many staff we have, how many children we have enrolled and they issue us a check, which we call a bonus check,” she said.
“That is offered to our employees regarding how many hours they work.”
Link said employees can earn anywhere from $2 to $3.50 extra an hour.
“That’s kind of a perk that we like to do in an interview to get somebody to come in is that, this is our starting wage, however, we do have bonuses that are coming in monthly. Hopefully the state of Minnesota will continue that for us, so that has been a major help for retaining staff and encouraging them to come work for us,” she said.