Early winter snow still blanketed the hills above her Helena home last December as Aileen Gleizer turned her mind to summer. Calendars and spreadsheets began to take shape, mapping out the days, times, costs and registration deadlines for a dizzying number of weeklong camps — camps that would help her and her husband secure enriching weekday childcare for their two daughters, ages 6 and 4.
“Pretty quickly I found that in almost no camp is there an overlap where both of my kids can go at the same time,” Gleizer said. “That’s where I and many parents I know start this kind of color-coded drawn-out calendar to really visually map out what it looks like to have one kid in a camp from 9 to 11:30 and the other one from 10 to 12, and try to see where we can get the most amount of coverage as a working parent while giving them different experiences and different opportunities to try new things.”
Childcare presents a significant challenge for Montana parents at any time of the year, with workforce shortages, high costs and limited availability fueling access and affordability issues for families across the state, the Montana Free Press reports. But summer raises the ante as school-age children exit their classrooms for a months-long break, adding to the existing population of preschool-age kids already requiring daylong care. Most private childcare providers operate year-round and, as Zero to Five Montana Executive Director Caitlin Jensen noted, may already be at capacity with lengthy waiting lists for open slots or may not accept school-age enrollees. Based on what her nonprofit has heard, Jensen added, many providers are also still reeling from recent legislative changes that increased the ratio of children they can enroll.
“They already have a lengthy waitlist, and they’re probably already just tapped out,” Jensen said.
Local community organizations and governments serve a critical role in filling that void through various summer camps and programs. According to data from the Montana Afterschool Alliance, 18,076 Montana students were enrolled in summer afterschool programs in 2020. However, as Grace Decker, head of the Montana Budget and Policy Center’s statewide childcare initiative, told Montana Free Press, those entities often face challenges of their own in hiring enough workers to meet demand. Registrations tend to open in the dead of winter and slots can fill up in a matter of hours. Decker described the result, for children, as a “patchwork of structured activity” with a different group of kids and supervising adults every week.
While some local initiatives have been formed to provide resources for families, parents like Gleizer are often left to their own devices when it comes to tracking down information on summer camps and programs available in their communities.
“It really is a logistical nightmare for parents to get this stuff figured out, and it’s a real privilege to be able to figure it all out ahead of time and then be right where you’re supposed to be at a certain time with internet access and money ready to go,” Decker said. “Because guess what? You have to put down a deposit on all of those camps typically, or pay for them right up front. So it’s a huge expense for parents to lock down or even pay in advance for all of these summer camps.”
High costs also create inequalities for low-income families who might otherwise look for the same opportunities, Decker added. Summer camps don’t fall under the state licensing requirements applied to childcare operations, meaning they may not be able to access government-sponsored scholarships and other financial assistance. Decker noted there have been efforts recently to address the issue through an expansion of Montana’s licensing regulations, but the proposal has so far stalled out with state lawmakers.
To better understand how the childcare challenges unique to a Montana summer are impacting families, MTFP spoke at length with Gleizer and two other parents about their reflections on preparing for and navigating the past few months.
A view from Helena
Gleizer’s original hand-drawn calendar for July 2024 was a frenzy of blue and purple ink, streaks of yellow highlighter and notes of “babysitter afternoon” scrawled in pen. During one week alone, her mornings were stacked with staggered drop-offs as her eldest daughter attended a theater camp at Helena’s Grandstreet Theatre and her youngest dabbled in paleontology at ExplorationWorks. She’d put in an hour and a half of remote work at her own consulting firm before picking the girls up, returning home by 12:30 and relying on a babysitter for the remainder of the day.
“I just really underestimated how much coordination and shuttling there was,” Gleizer said, adding that she and her husband, who also works remotely, often juggled drop-off and pick-up duties. “And different camps need different prep. For the dance camp, they need to be in a leotard and have their dance gear, and for the science camp they need to wear their special t-shirt from that camp, and for the rock-climbing camp they need to have close-toed shoes.”
Gleizer estimated the camp fees totaled as much as $500 some weeks. The difference in their ages meant her daughters were frequently attending separate programs in separate locations, and they were still often home for several hours of the day. Gleizer felt at times as though she had little to no uninterrupted time to focus on work, though the COVID-19 pandemic had already “fundamentally shifted” her perception of working life. Nowadays, she said, work is “always secondary” to the well-being and needs of her children — needs that are ever-changing as their interests evolve.
“Some days this feels untenable and is untenable, and yet I am very aware of the immense privilege we have both in the opportunity to have childcare at all and to be able to offer different enrichment programs to the kids,” Gleizer said.
A view from Bozeman
Montana State University psychology professor Kate Kujawa’s plans for summer 2024 began, as they do every year, way back in January. Kujawa’s story is similar to Gleizer’s: winter hours spent researching camp schedules, populating spreadsheets and sitting at a computer, credit card in hand, ready to pounce on slots the moment registration opened. With their youngest already enrolled in year-round preschool, Kujawa and their husband were only looking to fill out the summer for their 7-year-old daughter. Even so, Kujawa described it as a “mad dash to get childcare.”
“I admittedly missed a couple camps because I ended up having a last-minute meeting with some of my students for work and wasn’t able to log on to sign up for the camp,” Kujawa told MTFP. “Within 30 minutes, all of the camps had been filled.”
Passes are now on sale for Free Press Fest 2024 September 5-7, 2024 at the University of Montana! Looking for the VIP experience and more to do during your visit to Missoula for FPF24? Check out the menu of pass options on our registration page.Buy passesBy late spring, Kujawa had the summer fairly well sketched out with a mixture of science camps, nature camps and sports camps. In the months since, Kujawa has usually arrived at their office around 9:30 a.m. after staggered morning drop-offs at different locations and left around 2:30 p.m. to make mid-afternoon pick-up times.
The family’s meticulous planning did hit one notable snag. Kujawa recalled that during one week, road construction turned the crosstown commute to a camp into a more than hour-long drive. But for the most part, the schedule Kujawa developed last spring — coupled with occasional help from Kujawa’s mother in Libby — kept their children cared for and engaged. With back-to-school prep already well underway for the fall, Kujawa said the family hopes to debrief with their oldest kid about her experiences this summer and start developing a game plan for summer 2025 that works best for her.
“We’re trying to think if it would work to do one week on, one week off of camps, or if it would be better to do a huge block where she’s at one single type of camp and hopefully have a little bit more of a schedule for her to rely on,” Kujawa said.
A view from Florence
Tiffany Williams joked that it “feels unnatural” to start thinking about summer in February. But like Gleizer, Kujawa and so many other Montana parents, doing so has become something of a winter tradition for her and her husband. Williams sees the flurry of advance planning not only as a way to ensure the couple has childcare covered once school lets out but also to give their 10-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son a crack at “dipping their toes in the water of something that they’re interested in.”
This summer, their toes dipped everywhere: sports camps, a computer coding camp, camps dedicated to drone flying and videography. Those opportunities often meant a lengthy commute down the Bitterroot Valley from the family’s Florence home to Missoula. After dropping her kids off, Williams, who works remotely in writing, communications and photography, would post up at a coffee shop, a friend’s house or the Missoula Public Library for several hours of virtual office time before afternoon pick-ups. Some days she’d trade that schedule with her husband, an attorney who also works from home.
As smoothly as things went at times, Williams noted that long commutes and shifting weekly schedules do raise challenges with work and other obligations — doctor appointments, dentist appointments, oil changes.
“I did have one week where I signed my kids up for half-day camps,” she said. “I dropped them off at nine and then I picked up at noon, and I was lucky if I was able to get a solid few hours of work done. Those half-day camps are great for younger kids because younger kids sometimes can’t handle a full day. But if your kids are old enough to do a full day, it can be really hard to get from point A to point B and then still have any time at all for yourself or for the activities that you need to do.”
Such challenges have served as continued inspiration for an initiative called 406 Families, launched by Williams and several friends five years ago, to provide summertime childcare resources to other families throughout the Missoula area. What began as a website compiling information on various summer camp opportunities has since branched into a series of robust online guides for afterschool programs, birthday party rentals, drop-in activities and children’s health care professionals. Last March, Williams’ group also held its second annual “Summer Camp Expo” at the Missoula Public Library in partnership with the local nonprofit Families First, giving parents an opportunity to meet directly with the organizations hosting summer camps and obtain details on dates, registration deadlines and costs.
“We knew from our own experiences that this was a need that was out there in the community for parents that were our peers,” Williams said. “I was always looking for things for my kids to do that would enrich their lives in the summer and help them make and stay connected to friends, and then also would give me some peace of mind that they were well taken care of while I was able to focus on work.”
For Williams, that peace of mind starts in the dead of winter with a piece of paper, a calendar, a calculator and a pencil. Only when the registrations are locked in and the summer’s a go, she added, does she switch to ink.
