Officials search for more staff, other fixes for growing child care crunch in Duluth
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The recent news of the impending closure of three large child care centers in Duluth has sent parents frantically searching to line up alternative care for their children, and local and state stakeholders scrambling to identify solutions.
The Building Blocks Learning Center will close on Friday; the Observation Hill Children’s Center is shuttering on Nov. 1. The Duluth YWCA-led Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center, which had hoped to find a new organization to run it, now says it will close at the end of November. Together the three facilities serve about 200 children.
That comes on top of an existing shortfall of about 1,000 child care slots in Duluth, according to a report released Tuesday by a Duluth child care taskforce launched last year by then Mayor Emily Larson.
The city lost another three child care centers last year, according to the report. And data shows Duluth has lost about half its home-based child care centers in the past five years.
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“We are in crisis in Duluth,” said April Westman, who owns Auntie’s Child Care on the city’s east side, speaking at a press conference to announce the task force’s findings. “There are no fast and easy answers.”
Recommendations for future care
The task force report made several recommendations, including funding an existing program to provide free training for people interested in a child care career, and educating employers on methods to support their workers’ child care.
A key challenge identified by the report is staffing. Northspan, an economic group in Duluth, commissioned a survey two years ago that found 81 percent of local child care providers have employees who leave for other jobs with higher wages.
That means that child care centers often have space to accept more children; but they don’t have enough staff to provide care and meet minimum staffing requirements set by the state.
“The biggest challenges are the pay and the benefits,” said Nancy Thomas, who has worked at Happy Time Day Care Center in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for 40 years.
Her mom started the center in 1969, when she saw a growing need as more women started to enter the workforce. Now her daughter is running the center. Thomas says they’re limited with how much they can raise wages.
“It’s strapped to the back of parents because they have to pay tuition. And we can only go up so much, because parents are already struggling to get their ends to meet anyway. And so we’re really caught, we are barely making our ends meet.”
The center is licensed for 85 children, but they only have 60 kids right now because of their lack of staff.
The state has taken steps to raise wages for child care workers. Last year lawmakers invested $316 million into a program to increase pay for child care workers. But Thomas says at her center, that only allowed them to increase wages by 75 cents an hour.
She said they pay teachers with a two year degree up to $19 an hour to start. Despite that, they've lost teachers to places like Kwik Trip, which is only a couple blocks away from her center.
“Less stress, better money, good benefits, why wouldn’t they go? “Even though they don’t really like the job, they can make their ends meet,” Thomas said.
Local businesses concerned
The lack of available child care has become a major economic development issue in the city, said Matt Baumgartner, president of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce.
Ten years ago, he said it was barely on the group’s radar. Now, along with housing, it’s the number one issue facing employers and employees.
“We have people who are pulling themselves out of the workforce and out of the labor force. So they’re not even showing up in unemployment numbers,” said Baumgartner. “We have people who are coming here to be a part of our 148th Fighter Wing who have trailing partners who would love to go to work in health care or would love to go to work in higher education, but they’re unable to because they cannot find a spot for child care.”
At a roundtable event with parents and child care providers Wednesday morning in Duluth, state lawmakers heard sadness and anger from providers who are closing their doors, and frustration from parents who feel like they have nowhere else to turn.
‘It’s not going to be easy’
Parents say child care providers tell them their waitlists are often full until the fall of 2026.
State legislators discussed a need for emergency action funding to help child care centers stay afloat, and also potentially to help parents who can’t find child care to pay for nannies or babysitters.
Some also advocated for investing in a long-term plan to make child care more accessible and affordable for middle class families by limiting them to spending no more than seven percent of their income on child care.
“It's not going to be easy,” said Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, who introduced the proposal. “There are a lot of folks that don’t think we should put a dime into child care. That ends now. We see the crisis. It’s real. It’s impacting families, and we’re going to do something this next session.”
But in the meantime, families in Duluth are trying to figure out what’s next for their children. Some are looking at hiring a nanny. Most are getting on every wait list they can find.
And some are leaving their jobs. Morgan Beryl, director of YWCA Duluth, had planned to send her 5-month old to the center that is now closing at the end of November. Her organization tried to find another group to take over the center, but failed.
“Believe us, we tried,” Beryl said. “We need robust and sustained funding to fill the gap between what is affordable for families and what child care needs to provide high quality care and pay teachers what they deserve.”