HELENA - More than 200,000 Montana children require some kind of child care almost every day. Together, their ranks number almost twice the population of the state's largest city. Some of these children will spend more waking hours with a paid caregiver than with their own parents.
Child care is an enormous industry in Montana, employing more than 6,600 people - significantly more than trucking, real estate, logging or coal mining.
Yet according to child care experts, providers and employees, Montana's child care system has serious flaws.
"It's broken," said Roger Wright, co-owner of Edu-Care Preschool and Childcare in Great Falls. "Our system is broken."
The system suffers from low status and low wages. Benefits like health insurance and retirement accounts are almost unheard of. Many facilities struggle to find - and keep - qualified staff. There isn't enough care, particularly for children ages 2 and under. Most licensed facilities have waiting lists - in some places, such lists can be longer than a nine-month pregnancy.
For all this, child care remains expensive, easily topping more than $1,100 a month for two children in most Montana cities. Many providers say they don't dare raise their rates - even to meet expenses - because the costs are already high and parents can't afford more.
None of these problems is new, experts say. But Montana is one of a handful of states where a baby boom that started in 2007 is still going strong, so more young children are feeding into the fractured system.
There are bright spots. A growing number of Montana preschools, child care centers and in-home facilities are seeking accreditation through the private National Association for the Education of Young Children, a kind of "gold standard" for quality programs.
The state of Montana is also beginning a voluntary rating program for child care providers. It's supposed to both provide incentives for caregivers to offer higher quality care and make it easier for parents to identify quality providers.
Plus, said Jamie Palagi, chief of the state's Early Childhood Services Bureau in the Department of Public Health and Human Services, more and more scientific evidence has been published showing the importance of early childhood education and brain development.
And more Montana businesses and foundations, particularly the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation of Missoula, which helped pay for a landmark study of the benefits of early childhood education last year, are showing an interest in the field.
The drive for improvement was on display here earlier this month when child care providers came to annual industry conference and the main topic of conversation was raising the quality and status of child care.
"I think it's a really hopeful time," Palagi said.
However, she and many others in the field agree that without more money - either from businesses or the government - early childhood education and care will continue to struggle, often to the detriment of Montana children. The true cost of quality early childhood care, Palagi said, is simply more than parents alone can pay.
"There is no way we can charge what we need to," said Gina Young, executive director of the Community Day Care and Enrichment Center, a nonprofit center in downtown Billings. "Funding is a major problem."
The economics of child care start coming undone almost at birth. The United States is one of four nations that does not promise any kind of paid leave to new mothers. (The other nations are Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and Lesotho.)
The American system means that child care begins for many children when they are still in newborn-sized diapers. But finding licensed care for infants in Montana is increasingly difficult.
Many centers lose money on infants, Wright said. Licensed providers must have one employee for every four children under age 2. That ratio drives up the cost of infant care, even as it guarantees more adult interaction and, ideally, better care.
Oftentimes, infants "are a loss leader," Wright said. Many centers take them, hoping to recoup their losses once the children are old enough for preschool, where the adult-to-child ratio drops. Preschools can have one adult for every 10 children.
Palagi said the state considered changing the ratio, allowing one worker to be alone with an increasing number of infants. Regulators rejected it, she said, after national quality guidelines suggested an even lower ratio - 3-to-1 - was best for kids.
But even as the adult-child ratio increases, it's hard for providers to make much money and hard for them to offer good salaries to workers.
The average yearly salary of a child care worker in Montana was $16,390 - or about $7.88 an hour - according to a 2008 report by the Montana Child Care Resource and Referral Network. That is $20,000 less than the average public school teacher's salary in Montana.
If that early childhood worker is single with two children, that wage puts her under the 2009 federal poverty line. Even as a single person, she still earns just 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
Preschool teachers generally earn a little more, but their average wage is still $20,566, or $9.89 an hour.
Once a child turns 5 and enters the public school system, government investment in education is extensive and continues through college. But government money in early childhood education is rare and, for most parents, nonexistent.
In Montana, Palagi said, the state contributes millions to the Best Beginnings Scholarship Program, which subsidizes the cost of private child care and preschool for qualifying low-income families. In that program, the state pays 75 percent of the cost of child care based upon surveys of the average cost of child care in various Montana communities.
The state also licenses child care facilities and administers several quality improvement programs, including one open to all child care workers that offers a stipend payment if they take the state's 60-hour infant and toddler care class.
The federal government makes an enormous contribution in early child care and education for the poor in the form of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs. The federal government spent almost $7 billion in the year ending June 30, 2009, on preschool and daycare for poor children up to age 5. The program also works with families on a host of things, including nutrition and parenting.
Last year, about
$33.6 million was spent on Head Start and Early Head Start in Montana, where around 4,606 children were enrolled.
Federal statistics show almost three-quarters of Head Start teachers have at least an associate's degree in early childhood education. Such education is rare in the private system.
Many providers say they often lose trained, educated staff to local Head Start programs because the wages are higher and they offer benefits.
But there's a catch: Head Start is only for very poor children; in order to attend Head Start, families must be living at or below the federal poverty line. And, said Christy Hill-Larson, executive director of the Montana Head Start Association, there's not enough federal money to cover every child under poverty. Most local Head Start programs in the state have long waiting lists.
Low wages often mean high turnover, Palagi said. Other directors said the low wages make it difficult to attract teachers with degrees in their field because many of those employees would have student loans and, on $8 an hour, people can't finance their college debt.
Many experts said they thought the government or businesses should play a greater role.
"Parents can't pay for it alone," Palagi said. "Everyone should have the opportunity for high-quality care if they want it."
Despite challenges, there is hope, many say. A growing number of Montana facilities have become accredited through the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Sharon DiBrito, founder and co-director of the NAEYC-accredited Lolo Pre-School, now travels the state helping other centers become accredited. Many providers are excited to improve.