- You ready?

We love our kids, we love our families.

We also love to be our own individual as well and put our stamp on the world.

It's a struggle I think all moms face.

- We have a workforce shortage, and child care directly links to that shortage.

- There's been countless families with like qualified workforce people that we really need, and they're not coming.

If you don't have a good roof over your head and you can't feel comfortable with what you're gonna do with your kids, you're not gonna move.

- I don't advocate for child care so I can go back to work.

I do it so my daughter doesn't have to choose between a career that she probably will have invested in, like I have.

Four years of education and student loans to now not be doing that because it's not worth it.

- [Narrator] How the child care crisis is holding everyone back, that's tonight's South Dakota Focus.

- [Announcer] This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

(inspirational music) - [Narrator] Companies are desperate for employees as the post pandemic workforce continues to adjust.

But when families can't afford child care costs or even find an option that works for their schedule, someone stays home.

- [Jackie] How about since we've got everyone nicely gathered at the top of everything, either Stephanie if you want to introduce everybody or if we wanna go around and have people say their names and their ages.

- Yeah, we can do that.

So I have four kiddos and my sister has two.

So out of this group, I'll start with my oldest.

Can you say your name and age?

- I'm Isabel and I'm 15.

- I'm Eli and I'm 10.

- I'm Savannah and I'm eight.

- Can you say your name?

Can you say Alia?

- Alia.

- Alia, and she's four.

And then my sister's two kids.

We'll start with him.

- I'm Gabe, and I'm seven.

- I'm five and my name is Emma.

- I'm a nurse.

I'm an RN, four-year graduate, trained out of UND, and my husband is a physician assistant here and he works in the ER and he does 24-hour shifts.

- [Narrator] Stephanie Wiegan moved to Lead in the spring of 2020.

Wiegan sister and her family followed shortly after.

Wiegan's sister also works in healthcare and her brother-in-law is a teacher.

These are high demand positions in South Dakota.

There's just one problem.

- My brother-in-law and my sister worked and my husband worked, and I chose to stay home because I could not find daycare in the facility that, or in the area that was able to care for all these kiddos.

There is one facility that is available in Deadwood for families, and that, unfortunately, did not meet our needs because of the hours in which it was open.

I had 12-hour shifts, he has 24-hour shifts, and Jake needs to be at work at 6:15, or leave by 6:15.

It just...

There was no way we could get our kids to be able to be dropped off between these certain hours.

- [Narrator] With those schedules, Wiegan knew that they would need child care with some flexibility, just like so many others in the area who worked different shift hours at Deadwood casinos or the Homestake Mine.

So, she turned to the state's online directory, but the state only lists licensed or registered facilities.

- And I just learned recently, too, you know, as a parent, that not all daycare providers have to register with the state.

There is no standard that they have to meet, and that was also a little kind of mind blowing.

- [Narrator] In South Dakota, most in-home or family daycares do not require a license, and even registration can be voluntary.

In fact, child care providers don't need to register with the state until they have more than 12 children.

That threshold is one of the highest in the region.

The Wiegans moved here for job opportunities.

What they discovered is a child care crisis that faces nearly every family in the state, finding care they can trust and afford.

- 'Cause we're here, but now we're stuck.

You know, I can't work.

I just literally can't work.

I'm able to pick up PRN now, which is as needed because my kids are starting to get older.

But for those first two years, I stayed home.

I even took care of some somebody's infant for six to seven months after they were born because they could not find child care.

And that was two people that also worked at the hospital that my husband works at.

So this is not something abnormal to just people moving in.

They were locals that have lived here for 20 years and knew everybody in the area.

- [Narrator] In Sioux Falls, RiAnna Kolovsky also stepped away from her career to care for her kids.

Two-year-old Sylvie and little Wolfgang, who's almost one.

- Child care was just not feasible.

I mean, I was paying 27,000 dollars a year.

This year, I would have paid over 27,000 a year to have both of these kids in child care.

Granted it's a good center, you know, and had accreditation outside of regular state regulations, but it's just not... What job can you work that makes that feasible?

The State Department of Health says that for a medium income for the state of South Dakota, that we shouldn't pay hardly any more than $9,000 a year.

Most families in the state pay at least 10 per kid.

- [Narrator] Kolovsky understands the issue better than most because she used to work in child care.

She helped families search for assistance.

Very few qualify for government subsidies and fewer still can manage the complexities of the application.

- You have to use it at a place that has state licensure.

So there's another thing.

Say, you are a family, that you have that child care support, you have that child care assistance, but the only place in your hometown is an in-home daycare that's not licensed.

What do you do then?

- [Narrator] Today, Kolovsky is a stay-at-home mom.

Since she doesn't have a typical day job, she's able to take advantage of kid-friendly programs at the local library and other resources in Sioux Falls.

But because her family is down to just one income, they've been priced out of their rental property.

Now they're moving 60 miles away to small town, Ethan, where her husband's family has a house and a job waiting for them.

- We're gonna be moving here in a couple of months, a several weeks, and I don't see a lot available in the in the region.

And that does make me a little bit anxious.

How am I gonna endure the winter, long winter with two kids at home?

- These are two examples of women who left the workforce to care for their kids.

And I just wanna be very clear, there's nothing wrong with choosing to stay home and raise a family.

The point is having the choice.

Kids count data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that 75% of South Dakota families with kids under the age of six have all parents working outside the home.

And in most cases, that's an economic necessity for those families.

We also know South Dakota is seeing historically low unemployment and plenty of open jobs.

So this is about more than families being forced to make really difficult choices.

It's also about the economic health of the entire state.

And that idea is getting more attention.

Kayla Klein is the director of Early Learner South Dakota.

The group advocates for early childhood education.

She says access to child care isn't the only problem.

- So not only is child care availability a crisis, but the workforce within child care is a crisis.

When the pandemic happened, that shifted.

We've always had issue with retaining workforce in child care, but when this all happened, we saw wages skyrocket in every other industry.

So if you're gonna get paid $5 more an hour to go work at McDonald's or Target, why would you necessarily stay in child care when you are on the clock all the time?

- [Narrator] Klein says the business model of child care isn't sustainable.

- What would a business naturally do?

You increase your rates on your products because you are not gonna eat the cost.

With child care, they sell one service.

The state gives zero dollars, zero state dollars to child care in any form or fashion, so the one way you get money is through parent fees.

There's just too much on the parents' backs and not enough to make the program successful or to pay the people who are working in these fields what they truly deserve.

- [Narrator] Early Learner South Dakota offers some potential solutions to this problem on its website.

Black Hills Energy has a collaborative child care strategy that could work for other companies.

It's a partnership between the company and the Rapid City YMCA.

- I think as a corporation, they understood the value and the benefit to their staff and to their employees to have onsite child care.

And so again, not only could they offer it as a benefit to their employees, they were actually able to help subsidize that operation.

- [Narrator] Keiz Larson is the CEO of the YMCA of Rapid City, which offers child care options at its downtown location.

They also contract with Black Hills Energy to operate a child care center for its nearly 600 employees at the company's Rapid City headquarters.

- We bring in our expertise in early learning and quality child care and quality education.

And they provide the facility and they provide those kind of overhead operating costs.

- [Narrator] Larson is blunt about the nature of the current child care business model.

- Child care has to be a subsidized entity.

The YMCA has been very fortunate because we rely on our membership base of health and wellness and it's that membership base that allows us to continue to operate child care programming because of its cost.

- [Narrator] The success of the YMCA's partnership with Black Hills Energy has caught the attention of other businesses.

But between this center and the Y's other child care programs, the staff is stretched to the limit.

- Well, I can tell you that we get approached pretty much monthly from other organizations and other businesses here in the Rapid City community.

We have 286 kids under the age of six right now, and we have 310 on the wait list.

But Larson thinks the partnership between non-profit child care providers and businesses can be adapted to other communities.

Every community probably has some physical buildings that aren't in use, and it's gonna take the community to come together and actually, how do we put this project together?

Who do we need at the table?

Who can help with the utility bills?

Who can help donate or have really low rent on a space of a building that's actually in their community?

- [Narrator] Turns out, some places are already working on that, like one small town in Northeastern South Dakota.

- My name's Darin Waldner, I live in Webster, South Dakota with my wife.

And we've got a family, two girls, three-year-old and a seven year old.

- [Narrator] Their daughters were in an in-home daycare in Webster as infants and toddlers.

But then a couple years ago, things changed.

- There was a conversation that took place that, you know, "Hey, we need to make some space."

Your seven year old, what other options can we do with her?

Can we send her somewhere here after school?

And basically it wasn't, "Hey, we don't have a spot for you," but it was, "Hey, we don't have a spot for you.

And we started kind of getting that feeling in our stomachs.

Like, what are we gonna do?

- [Narrator] Darin and his wife both work in Watertown about a 50-minute drive each way.

Now, when school isn't in session, their oldest spends time in the Watertown Boys and Girls Club, But that arrangement will soon change.

- Along the same road, we also discovered that we weren't alone.

- [Narrator] Turns out lots of people were feeling the strain a lack of child care was putting on their community.

Kelly Hanson is the president of the Webster Area Development Corporation.

He says the problem came to his attention about five years ago, as in-home providers began to retire or change careers.

- I know that we weren't in, as, I would say, crisis then as we are now, but we were seeing a decline.

And lately, then we just kind of, we were talking about workforce and housing and business development and how do we go and which way do we go.

And child care seemed to be the one after we had heard a couple stories of individuals wanting to work but couldn't because they couldn't find daycare and businesses worried about coming to town because don't know if the workforce is there.

So kind of all snowballing and we decided to start with this, tackle this first.

- [Narrator] After a Town Hall in May, families in Webster decided they wanted a child care center in town.

Darin Waldner became the sort of unofficial business manager for the project.

- You start to centralize it and you bring in a lot more resources.

There's connections there that are made that are, you know, you're able to do things with those kids if you aren't just by yourself.

You know, can we spend a little bit more time?

Can we go on field trips?

Do we have staffing of three, four people, where you can rotate your staffing through those age groups instead of one person getting burned out with the same kids.

You know, everybody loves the kids, but kids are tough.

Am I the guy to sit in a daycare center?

Absolutely not.

But I can help, I can help get things together, get a building, get a game plan.

- [Narrator] Getting the building was the first puzzle.

There's a housing shortage in Webster and affordable property is hard to come by.

But then.

- As the talks and publicity from our town hall kept going, we had a husband and wife come to us that owned a building and they said that they were willing to donate it to us, specifically for daycare and to try to, if it would help.

And we said, "For sure," and we worked with them and got that closed here about a month and a half ago.

- [Narrator] The donation of the property came with a request that any lease proceeds from the child care center be funneled back to the community.

Hanson and Waldner hope that will keep the project sustainable.

- You know, the second piece of that puzzle, you know, just as important as that brick and mortar, is the personnel.

Basically the heart and soul that are the people there day in and day out working with these kids.

- [Narrator] Waldner says they've hired a director for the new center, but he won't say much else for the time being.

- We're keeping her under wraps 'cause she's still working right now.

- [Narrator] He says other staff members have accepted positions too.

They're all planning to open the center next summer.

It seems like they've done well on their own, but I had to ask.

Does the state government need to help?

What do you need from the state side of things?

- There's definitely been some hurdles.

Part of it is the application process.

And my knowledge is limited compared to what my director knows.

My director is living this day in and day out.

She's reading between the lines and the fine print and what it's gonna actually take to get the level of accreditation we are looking for.

You know, I don't think there's anything the state has that they're not throwing at us right now.

I'm not one to say, "Hey, let's let's yank all the regulations and let people go crazy."

That's not the answer either.

Finding efficient ways to get through that application process and helping maybe streamline that would be helpful.

- [Narrator] The state does offer some grant programs for child care.

The Webster group is working on an application through the Governor's Office of Economic Development.

- Whether it be through grant opportunities or through advice, our GOED rep recently has been very helpful for our executive director.

They talk quite often and bring new ideas, and we are very much looking forward to the opportunity to apply for this grant.

And hopeful for the seed money that will get this program going that, to our knowledge, has not been done in any other area that we know of.

- [Narrator] When it opens, the Webster Center will have room for 48 kids.

- And then from there, we can use that foundation to build further onto networking it into the school, tying into the communities around day county.

We've got other small communities that have kids too.

Waubay, Bristol, Roslyn, they're all in the same boat we are.

The adversity here, we're feeling is a wonderful opportunity to create something better than it has been even in the past.

- [Narrator] Projects like this one in Webster have real potential to solve the child care problem on a community-wide scale.

But keeping the doors open also means maintaining a workforce and keeping prices low enough that families can afford it.

That's a systemic issue, and it's one that lawmakers may be able to address.

Representative Taylor Rehfeldt is the assistant majority leader in the House of Representatives.

She and her husband both work in healthcare, which gives her firsthand experience with the costs of child care.

- So, for instance, my daughter Tally, she is going to daycare in about six to 10 weeks, and it's $275 per week.

So it's $1,100 per month to send our one child to child care.

And then we have before and afterschool care for our other two children, which is about 150 to $200 per week.

So we're looking just at $2,000 per month in child care expenses.

Now, we're lucky and fortunate that both of us are nurses and we have an income that is supportive of that, but we all know that most people can't afford that, and $24,000 a year is not attainable for most families to be able to pay.

- [Narrator] Rehfeldt proposed a legislative study on child care after this year's session.

Those studies bring experts and lawmakers together and can lead to proposed legislation, but the executive board that decides on study topics chose different areas this year, in part because the issues surrounding child care are so broad.

- From a policy standpoint of what I think the legislature's responsibility is, I think we can explore some things that make life easier for daycare centers and in-home centers.

I think that there's some regulatory issues that we could take up and look at.

- [Narrator] That's on top of changes state regulators made earlier this year.

The goal was to make registration and licensing requirements with the state easier for business operators.

So one of those changes increased the ratio of adult providers to kids aged five and up, from 10 kids per adult to 15 kids per adult.

Another change cut the required hours of training in half for staff members at a child care center.

That's not including CPR and first aid training.

But Rehfeldt sees other opportunities for improvement.

- I think we could look at how are we subsidizing child care and is that still accurate from a standpoint of income?

Do we need to look at expanding that a little bit or do we need to look at business partnerships where businesses could be rewarded for their investment into child care?

- [Narrator] Rehfeldt is far from the only lawmaker that sees that something needs to change.

In lieu of a legislative study, Republican Senator Tim Reed is leading an unofficial group looking into the problem.

He's also CEO of the Brookings Economic Development Corporation, Reed joined SDPB's Town Hall on child care earlier this month.

- And the number one thing I think we have to do is figure out how we're gonna raise the rates that are being paid.

And I think that's gonna be, the government taking a look at how we're subsidizing.

And then I think that, then also, and it's been talked about, businesses are also gonna have to get involved and realize that they're gonna have to pay more if they want these employees.

- Senator Reed, is an ad hoc look at this this year enough to bring something in this upcoming 2024 session, or are we looking down the road?

- I would hope to bring something in this session, but what I talked about there was increasing the amount that's being paid.

And, you know, we just got done.

We're happen to be at an event that was talking about the future and where we think, you know, the short-term economy is, and we're not gonna have the revenue coming the next year as far as we can see.

So, yes, we'd like to bring something, but I think the problem's gonna be, is there gonna be any money that's available to help with the issue?

- [Narrator] Like many other social challenges, the costs of child care are key here.

But there's a case to be made that the state has more to lose if it does not invest in child care.

There are many parents out of the workforce, some in high need professions, who stay at home because they cannot find or afford child care.

For families, child care is an emotional and financial problem.

For the state, child care is a workforce problem.

Kayla Klein of Early Learner South Dakota points to a recent nationwide report.

- We're losing over $300 million in lost work productivity in the state of South Dakota on an annual basis because of the lack of child care.

I mean, the issues are just, they're growing, not getting any better.

- [Stephanie] What kinds of appetite have you sensed from your colleagues and peer for some of those suggestions that you just ran through?

- Well, when you talk about child care as a workforce issue, people listen.

And it's not just a urban problem, it's a problem throughout our state, in rural communities too, and access tends to be more of a problem there.

But we need to address both those things, the cost and the access, in order to make sure that we have workers available.

- [Narrator] There are industry-specific impacts too.

Stephanie Wiegan, the RN in Lead who's at home caring for her and her sister's children, knows that firsthand.

- The state is already short of nurses.

We know that there's shortages within the big hospitals, as well as the community small town hospitals.

And this is, in turn, has caused a lot of these places to hire a lot of travel nurses.

So we have nurses that are registered and licensed and, you know, unfortunately, just can't get to work on these 12-hour shifts because of the fact that they don't have child care.

- [Narrator] And the cost is more than just economic.

- For me, yes, there are jobs from the eight to five in my field, but I really like to be in the hospital setting and in the acute care more so than the clinic.

And so with that, it's hard emotionally to step back from that because it is a passion of mine.

I love my kids, I love staying home, and I love being able to be a stay-at-home mom.

I'm very blessed that my significant other, my husband, is able to provide for us.

But emotionally, it does drain you because that was an outlet.

I wish I could be able to figure out the, kind of juggle it and make it a little bit more doable for both my emotional and my, you know, the needs of my family.

- I don't advocate for child care so I can go back to work.

I do it so my daughter doesn't have to choose between a career that she probably will have invested in, like I have.

Four years of education and student loans to now not be doing that because it's not worth it.

- [Narrator] South Dakota prides itself on its hardworking citizens and family values, but the broken child care system is forcing parents to make difficult decisions.

Some need to leave a job they love to stay home, others funnel untold dollars into care that barely pays its providers a living wage.

Some lawmakers like Tim Reed are gathering the evidence they need to make their case in the next legislative session.

- And so let's grab ahold of that one thing we can and get in to the state where, let's show some, we gotta show some good hard numbers of, if we increase what we're paying, what does it do to help these?

How many facilities will it keep open?

How does it improve the pay so we can improve workforce?

Will it get more parents that are able to get back into the workforce?

- [Narrator] The state's contribution to the solution is up in the air for now.

That leaves communities like Webster, organizations like Early Learner South Dakota and nonprofits like the YMCA in Rapid City, all to find their own solutions within a broken system.

But they all agree that collaboration is the only way forward.

- I think anytime that a community comes together for a common good, I think there's success.

And it can't be just one entity, it has to be everybody working together.

I mean, I love the saying it takes a village.

It does take a village.

The child care crisis is not going away.

Labor shortages are not going away.

And as we look at those two factors, how can we be creative in providing early learning and quality child care?

And, you know, we gotta think outside the box.

(gentle music)