Monthly rent is one of the biggest financial barriers for child care centers and can lead to increased tuition cost for families.
Early child care providers gathered in Bridgeport to discuss the financial strains on day care centers and teachers.
Georgia Goldburn is the executive director of Hope for New Haven, a nonprofit that provides child care for newborns to 12-year-olds.
One of the main expenses for child care centers is the rising cost of rent, which leads to increased tuition costs for parents often struggling to make ends meet, Goldburn said.
“The cost for us has been measured in more than dollars and cents,” Goldburn said. “Limited access to capital to purchase a facility has stymied not only our growth, but more tragically, our dreams for our organization and our community.”
Goldburn was one of several panelists who spoke at a conference Thursday in Bridgeport, focusing on the financing of early child care facilities and new initiatives to increase affordability.
Hope for New Haven spends 16% of its annual revenue on rent, Goldburn said.
“We have paid close to half a million dollars in real estate taxes, because even though we are tax exempt in the city and the state, our landlords are not,” Goldburn said.
Tomas Olivo, director of the Working Cities Challenge Initiative in Waterbury, helps facilitate and train residents to form at-home day cares.
When parents can’t find child care, they’re prevented from earning GEDs, learning English or securing a job, Olivo said.
“What it entails, who cares for a child, the responsibilities, how to operate a business, opening a bank account,” Olivo said. “All of those simple, simple things that we should know, or that people should know when opening and starting a business.”
The Working Cities Challenge Initiative’s training program is one recent solution to the state’s lack of affordable child care. It increases care options and provides more employment opportunities.
Child care centers often operate with limited revenue, making it more difficult for providers to get access to funding and loans to purchase properties or expand their services.
Recent initiatives to tackle the child care affordability issue include programs to increase the number of at-home day cares, free housing for teachers and ways to facilitate land ownership.
One such initiative is New Haven’s Friends Center for Children teacher housing program.
By 2028, Friends Center plans to expand its teacher force to 80 and provide free housing for 24 teachers, or 30% of its staff, according to Executive Director Allyx Schiavone.
The program enables the school to avoid raising tuition and allows teacher salaries to be increased.
“We do this work, just like all of us, in a broken, racist and sexist system that's fiscally designed for failure,” Schiavone said. “The true cost of providing care is higher than what most parents can afford to spend. So we accept less, and that math really puts us in a bind.”
