“If we don’t have high-quality child care, we will not thrive in this business,” KSC President Melinda Treadwell remarked at the Feb. 13 State of the College address. Treadwell went on to reference how United States Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s office helped secure $1 million in federally directed funds for the college’s Child Development Center (CDC), in partnership with the local nonprofit organization Monadnock United Way.
According to an Apr. 14, 2022 press release from Shaheen’s office, the funds were secured in the federal budget for the fiscal year 2022. The release stated that the purpose of the spending was to “bolster training for child care workers, including training and professional development for current workers.”
Shaheen, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in the release, “This money will make a real difference in supporting this essential field while expanding access to quality child care across the region.” Deirdre McPartlin, the Director of the CDC, explained that the CDC and Monadnock United Way are co-directors of the grant.
“It really is a community-based grant, the money is not coming to the Child Development Center,” McPartlin said. McPartlin also noted that the grant would help the CDC reach several strategic goals in relation to recruiting staff locally. “Actual people will be ‘trained up’ in child care centers, and we see that there is a connection between training and investment, and staying with program, and then of course quality,” she said. McPartlin explained that the money could be used for delivering free coursework or free training.
According to a 2020 analysis by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at University of California-Berkeley, the median wage for a child care worker in New Hampshire is $11.69. The analysis also found that child care centers in the state lacked paid time in professional development, as well as paid planning/preparation time.
When asked if enough was being done by the state to incentivize people to go into the field of child care, McPartlin said she feels “very positive about the effort at this point, but I think always more could be done.”
One sticking point that Treadwell made about child care during her State of the College address was the need for “available slots” in early childhood support. McPartlin shared Treadwell’s sentiment. “We recognize that there are not enough child care slots, they call them ‘child care deserts’ in our community, we need more child care,” she said. McPartlin also described the local infrastructure for child care as “fairly weak” and noted that many teachers left during the COVID-19 pandemic.
NH Connections, a consumer education website for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), made an interactive map of the state in 2019, displaying which regions have a gap in terms of supply and demand for child care. The data shows that the Keene area has a total of nine child care programs with a total capacity of 751 children. However, there are 966 children under six years old with both parents in the workforce, creating a supply-and-demand gap of 215 children.
“I think [the] government needs to see [child care] not as a luxury, but really it’s a need for families,” McPartlin said.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
