Montana’s Child Care Conundrum

Despite bitter disagreements on a range of politically hot topics in recent years, Montana lawmakers from both sides of the aisle often find common ground on policy proposals impacting children and families. The 2023 Legislature passed a slate of bipartisan laws that enhanced state funding for kindergarten readiness programs and boosted a poverty-based child care subsidy called Best Beginnings by $14 million.

Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has lauded those investments, saying child care providers “support hardworking families, strengthen our economy and build a brighter future for our state.” The work remains an ongoing priority for the Department of Public Health and Human Services, which is now crafting a three-year plan to utilize $32 million in federal funds designed to make child care more accessible for low-income families. Part of that plan, slated to go into effect in October, involves distributing Best Beginnings reimbursements to providers on behalf of eligible families at the start of the month rather than the end, directly addressing a challenge reported by 40% of home-based and center-based providers surveyed by the department last year.

Other regulatory proposals meant to bolster the child care workforce and enhance early childhood instruction have stalled out. Legislators this spring rejected a complete overhaul of Montana’s child care rulebook by the state health department. The agency pushed back, defending its work as a multi-year, stakeholder-led effort to fix “confusing, poorly arranged” regulations that discourage new child care providers from entering the system.

The rewrite tried to alleviate concerns about provider licensing, safety requirements, environmental definitions and age-based distinctions. Changes regarding vaccine requirements and religious exemptions proved to be a particular point of friction with Republican members of a legislative interim committee, which extended its months-long objection to the new rules package on May 9.

Such developments have many child care advocates looking ahead to the 2025 legislative session as an opportunity to advance reforms.

Grace Decker, who heads the Montana Budget and Policy Center’s statewide child care initiative, said building bipartisan coalitions and crafting policies that foster financial stability and growth for child care providers will be critical next year if lawmakers want to improve the lives of Montana families.

“There are a couple of really important levers in this system that we need to be paying attention to,” Decker said, “to just continue to protect the things that have already moved forward and also advance an infrastructure for child care that looks at the needs of families and providers and the whole community.”

Stability and growth are front of mind for provider Felicity Day as she maneuvers to meet the heightened demand among families in her small community. Walking in the door of Day’s learning center along Alberton’s quiet main drag is like stepping onto the set of a PBS Kids program. Color dances in every corner, from the bright yellow rain suits hanging in cubbies to the lettered plastic popsicle sticks clutched in the hands of half a dozen small children. In the center of the room a turtle named Tim hovers in a murky aquarium, and on a recent spring morning students sang a special song about Tim before diving into a morning of lessons about the letter N, rhyming words and peaceful conflict resolution.

“Everything we do has a ‘why’ behind it,” said Sheri Arnett, one of Day’s two full-time employees, as she prepared the center’s handful of toddlers for a pre-lunch excursion into the freshly rain-sodden backyard.

Day, a third-generation child care provider, built the Alberton Early Learning Center on a Montessori model. Schedules revolve around play-based learning, with presentations and group crafts built around a weekly theme. Day doesn’t simply discuss the weather. She demonstrates the physics of it by dropping plastic bags and tissues into a plastic wind tunnel and helping students affix paper raindrops to cotton-ball clouds.

Day is actively working to hire more employees this summer, and said attracting quality educators requires offering them an hourly wage well above $14 — the national median for child care workers. Paying her employees an attractive wage and expanding her business to accommodate more children are important goals for Day. But for her and many other providers, child care is about much more than keeping a watchful eye on youngsters. It’s about recognizing a child’s earliest years as a key point in human development and nurturing inquisitiveness, social responsibility, and healthy emotional regulation. Alberton area mother Kim Williams, who enrolled her daughter Hadley here in late 2023, has already noticed a shift in her child’s formerly shy demeanor.

“It’s been so awesome to see her blossom,” Williams said, standing on the front porch after dropping Hadley off. “She’s becoming a little person here.”

How future policy can support such services is a foundational question for Montana families, providers, and college students looking to join the child care workforce. The rates families pay, the wages child care workers make, and the costs those workers incur in training to enter the profession are all strands in an intricate web. Pluck one, and the effects reverberate across the system.

The state’s universities are still trying to find solutions, too. For Allison Wilson at the University of Montana’s Institute for Early Childhood Education, the inclusion of state funding in any state-level conversation is critical to strengthening the system for everyone and signaling to prospective child care workers that Montana truly values the profession.

“There needs to be some sort of public investment in child care,” said Wilson, who earlier this spring hosted her institute’s second statewide summit at UM, drawing early childhood education professionals from across the state and region. “Because if we can’t pay professionals a living wage to work in child care programs, we’re not going to have enough child care programs to operate for families to have slots. And then it becomes a family issue.”

Kelly Petersen stood next to a large terrarium in the dimly lit preschool room at Salish Kootenai College’s Early Learning Center, gazing at the saucer-sized leaves of the pumpkins planted there by her students. Beyond the large windows, ponderosa pines lined the maze of parking lots and buildings at the center of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ campus.

Petersen applied for a position at the center shortly after arriving in the Missoula Valley from Gillette, Wyoming. The job, she said, provides an outlet for “just about everything” she’s learning in the college’s classrooms on her way to a certificate in early childhood education. It’s a credential she expects to be a good professional complement to her bachelor’s degree in art education.

“I want to be here for quite a long time, just because they give us so much support here and I think it’s a really great place to grow,” Petersen said of the center. “Then if I want to I can go teach middle school art or I can go teach high school art. Right now, though, I’m just really liking the preschoolers. They’re so much fun.”

No two origin stories are quite the same in the child care profession, but the underlying draw — caring for children — is consistent among new recruits and veterans alike. Julie Allen, a fellow student of Petersen’s at SKC, ran her own child care business on the Flathead Indian Reservation for roughly 40 years before returning to school for an associate degree. Amanda Wiseman, who will start on her master’s degree at UM this fall, traces her own passion for early childhood education to her high school days as a peer mentor in Helena’s Head Start program.

“I love that 3- to 6-year-old age range. It’s my favorite,” Wiseman said.

BriAnne Moline first discovered her love of early education 16 years ago, after the birth of her first son. She initially looked to UM to pursue her aspirations, but at the time the flagship campus offered only an elementary education degree, so she pivoted to UM-Western in Dillon, where she earned an associate degree in 2014.

Today, Moline owns and operates Wild Wonders Early Learning Center out of her home on the Clark Fork between Missoula and Frenchtown and has emerged as a statewide advocate for families and fellow providers.

She facilitates online leadership training programs for the National Association for Family Child Care, is part of a national provider collaborative called Home Grown Child Care, and co-founded and co-directs the Montana Family Child Care Network. In 2022, Moline helped spearhead a rally on the steps of the Missoula County Courthouse to raise public awareness about low wages and employee retention in the child care business. She organized a similar event in Missoula earlier this month.

But the profession has not been easy on Moline. In 2018, she was forced to relocate her business twice due to the reluctance of property owners to rent to child care operations. The second relocation came when she was several months pregnant. And in order to support her own four children, Moline cut operational costs last year by eliminating the last of her staff and downsizing her focus to infants and toddlers. She now flies solo as a provider and estimates she made $35,000 in 2023 — the same year she was able to complete a bachelor’s degree she’d started more than a decade prior.

“Now I have $60,000 in [student] loans and I still qualify for Medicaid and food stamps,” Moline said, estimating that she works well above 40 hours a week in child care.

Despite the financial headwinds, Moline continues to serve a cluster of families who are facing similar struggles and view her as an essential part of their daily lives.

And like other providers, Moline is actively pushing new ideas she hopes will bolster the system with new recruits, easing the pressure on both families and other child care workers. During the 2023 legislative session, she advocated for the establishment of a tax credit for licensed early childhood educators working in registered programs. It didn’t pass, but Moline said she’s also been lending her insight to state-level conversations about expanding apprenticeship opportunities for the early education field.

Montana officials have already invested considerable focus and funding in similar initiatives for the construction, teaching, and health care professions. For such an effort to be successful in the child care sphere, Moline said, “there needs to be financial supports for these people coming in, there needs to be financial supports for these programs who are offering these opportunities.”

Change in child care needs to account for shifts in the working lives of families, too, said Angie Armour, executive director of the nonprofit Raise Montana. Like Moline, Armour has devoted much of her professional energy to raising awareness about the challenges facing providers and the families they serve. It’s not enough to support an outdated model of child care, Armour said. The modern workforce is different than it was half a century ago, and improvements to Montana’s child care system should account for the needs of parents navigating an altered employment landscape.

“A lot of people are not working that 9-to-5 job anymore,” Armour said. “So the traditional hours that child care was providing is not fitting that need for a lot of families.”

Back in Frenchtown, high on their forested hillside, Lauren and Kyle Cochrane remain all too aware that they’re not the only ones piecing together temporary solutions to a complex and frustrating problem. They appreciate the quality experience Felicity Day has provided for their son at the Alberton Early Learning Center, and in light of their family’s financial stability, Lauren said, they’d be willing to pay more to support Day’s operation. But they also recognize that the systemic nature of Montana’s child care challenges means some solutions will have to come from within their own family, even if that means keeping one eye on a child and the other one on work.

“It does make you feel a little bit like you’re on an island,” Lauren said. “I think that’s broadly applicable to anything child care-related or parenting-related. You’re on an island, and you’ve got to do the work and figure it out for your family. Nobody else is going to do it for you.”