Duluth child care center closures exacerbate growing crunch facing families

Mikayla Kruschke gave birth to her first child in July, a girl. And so far, Kruschke said, her daughter has been a great baby, an amazing addition to their family. She smiles a lot, she’s not very fussy and she goes to bed fairly easily.

But a couple weeks ago, that blissful new mother mood was shattered when Kruschke learned the child care center where she and her husband had reserved a spot for their daughter is slated to unexpectedly close on Sept. 20.

“I had immediate panic mode set in,” Kruschke recalled, describing a “heart-sinking feeling.”

She called every child care provider in the region she could find, but the answer was always the same — no one had any openings, for months.

“I thought that maternity leave would really be just focusing on figuring out what is my life like now? How do I care for her? And then this added stress on top of it has just been awful,” she said.

Kruschke is a clinical social worker; her husband is a nurse. They don’t have any family in the area to help. Now they’re considering hiring a nanny. She’s also thought about not returning to work.

They are one of more than 100 families in the Duluth area who have been frantically searching for replacement care over the past couple weeks after two large child care centers announced they would soon be closing.

The Building Blocks Learning Center will close on Sept. 20; the Observation Hill Children’s Center is shuttering on Nov. 1. Together the two centers are licensed to care for 141 children.

Meanwhile a third facility, the Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center, which is licensed for 54 children and is run by YWCA Duluth, is seeking a new group to run the center.

That cumulative loss exacerbates a shortage of child care space in Duluth. Even before these closures, there was a shortfall of more than 1,000 child care slots in the Duluth region, according to data compiled by the Northland Foundation and the economic development group Northspan.

And while space at child care centers has until this point remained stable, the area has lost more than half of its in-home child care providers in the past five years alone, resulting in a drop of more than 700 slots.

“We’ve been saying this is coming,” said Courtney Greiner, an organizer with the Kids Count On Us child care campaign who also runs her own child care center in nearby Esko.

“This is bringing more attention to a crisis we’ve been talking about for years.”

A broken model

What’s happening in Duluth is not unique. The YMCA of Rochester closed its child care center last month, resulting in a loss of space for 160 children.

A report from the Center for Rural Policy and Development estimates a shortage of more than 40,000 child care spots outside of the Twin Cities metro area. 

Owners of the soon-to-be-shuttered child care centers in Duluth declined interview requests. Greiner, who said she’s spoken to both of them, said child care providers view their work as a passion as much as a livelihood.

“You feel like you fail, when in reality it’s a system failure and a state failure and a community failure. That’s not their fault. Our business model does not work.”

At the YWCA Duluth’s Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center last week, toddlers constructed wobbly block towers in a classroom with light streaming through giant windows, while teachers led them in a rousing, quacking chorus of “Five Little Ducks.”

YWCA Duluth has operated child care programs since the 1980s but the organization says it can’t sustain them any longer.

“We’re just seeing that the costs, as they’re going up, are just making this impossible,” said the YWCA’s strategic advisor Beth Burt. “Many times, the way child cares have worked in the past is on the backs of the women who worked there, and they’ve made nothing.”

Burt said they've raised wages but still can't attract and retain enough staff. They’ve also had to invest $650,000 into their aging building over the past few years, costs she said are impossible to recoup in a business with such thin margins. Now they hope to turn over the space and the equipment to another nonprofit to run the center.

“We’ve had our families in tears, and our staff,” said early childhood director Loni Stallsmith about the announcement of their plans. “So we’d like to find someone really, really badly, to take it over and keep it going and keep our staff and our families.”

Years-long waiting lists

Over the past two weeks parents who just received word of the closing centers have frantically called other care providers around town. They’ve asked for help on social media. But the response is almost always the same.

“Our answer is, we’re full with a pretty long wait list, and we’re not projected to have openings soon,” said Nate Byrne, co-director of Summit School, which provides early childhood care to 115 kids. It’s been flooded with calls from anxious parents.

“And then the places that we would usually send them are also all full. It’s heartbreaking.”

The earliest opening at Summit School, and many other centers in Duluth, isn’t until 2026.

“A frequent description that’s given to me by people is the first person they tell when they’re pregnant with a child is a family member and the second person they tell is their day care provider, or their future provider, just to get on the wait list,” said Duluth City Council member Arik Forsman.

In fact many parents say you need to start even earlier. They say you have to tell a prospective child care center before even starting to try to have a baby.

Forsman, who’s worked on the shortage issue for the past several years since he experienced firsthand the difficulty in finding care for his young children, agreed that the child care model needs to be fundamentally changed.

“There’s this truth that exists that’s in conflict with each other, where it’s very expensive for families to afford child care. But at the same time, these providers hardly make any money,” he said.

In recent years, the city has invested money into creating new child care spots. Now, Forsman said officials are looking to shift to providing forgivable loans and grants to help existing child care centers stay afloat.

Jade Goran, a mother of two young children in Duluth, said her 3-year old is already at his fifth child care center. The previous four all closed.

“It has been incredibly stressful on us when, whenever we get one of these notices,” Goran said. “It’s all consuming. I’m talking phone call after phone call after phone call, trying to find a place to tour, trying to secure a spot.”

Meanwhile parents in western Duluth are fighting to keep the Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center open.

Kaitlin Reinl, who has two kids at the center, said there are no other openings for her children if the center were to close.

“I really feel like the only option I have is to fight this, for both myself and for others,” Reinl said. “We’re trying to just go to work, and we feel really kind of abandoned in this situation.”

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