Citizen group assists with childcare startups
- Chilkat Valley News
- Nov 17
- 5 min read
By Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
A citizen group working to increase childcare availability is finding some early success, but says a far more significant intervention is still needed.
The Chilkat Valley currently has four licensed childcare providers: Head Start, Chilkat Valley Preschool, pre-school at the Klukwan school, and longtime home-provider Kim Larson.
But many people say that’s not enough. A survey earlier this year of area residents under the age of 40 found childcare to be one of the top challenges faced by young families in the Chilkat Valley — both availability and affordability.
“There are plenty of young adults who can’t work because of lack of affordable childcare,” one respondent, Forest Podsiki, wrote.
The numbers seem to back that up. Larson, who has run her business for 27 years, is licensed to care for up to eight children at a time, only three of which may be younger than 30 months, according to state regulations. The norm in her career has been a full roster of kids, plus a waitlist. That’s true right now — mostly. While she isn’t currently at capacity overall, Larson does have a waitlist for the three designated spots for infants.
That age group is where the current glut is, and where it tends to be all over the state, said Blue Shibler, executive director of the Juneau-based Southeast Childhood Collective. Because infants need more care than older children, providers are limited to fewer total slots for the age group, which also increases the cost of care per infant for the provider.
“Right now we have this glaring need for infant daycare. When they get older they’ll need preschool, and Head Start is full,” mayor Tom Morphet said.
Morphet this year has organized two open-to-the-public sessions to discuss possible solutions to the problem. A third is scheduled for Nov. 17. After a meeting last month, residents Jeanne Kitayama and Sheri Loomis decided to offer help to community members interested in becoming licensed childcare providers. With a state license, people, like Larson, can run childcare businesses out of their own homes.
“There’s a wealth of info on the (state Childcare Program Office) website, but you really have to research,” Loomis said. “There are pages and pages and links after links, and it can be overwhelming. We wanted to let them know they had help if they wanted to go through this.”
Loomis previously served for 22 years as the area’s local administrator for the state’s Childcare Assistance Program. In that role she was an advocate for families, helping sign them up for childcare subsidies, but also providers — helping with licensing paperwork and the basics of running a business.
The position no longer exists, and even though potential providers can now access the necessary paperwork online, and get remote help from state employees, Loomis and Kitiyama’s offer of help seems to have made a difference.
“We put up simple posters around town and posted on social media, and within the first week, two people reached out to us and said they were interested,” Loomis said.
TeoLani Baker is one of those prospective childcare providers, and called it a “dream job,” being able to be employed caring for kids. But she said the signup process has so far seemed complex, and she welcomed the offer of help.
Loomis, however, said she sees her role as something temporary — a way to pitch in — and not a solution to the problem. There’s agreement in town and with outside experts, that the childcare shortage isn’t just a paperwork and bureaucracy issue. The economics may just not pencil out.
According to a 2024 report commissioned by the state, childcare providers in the state on average would have to charge $1,406 per month per pre-schooler to break even on the cost of care. For infants, that number rises to $1,780. Those costs assume staff are earning a “living wage,” which in the study was defined as $29.56 for the average pre-school teacher in the state. Overall costs of care were estimated slightly lower for at-home childcare businesses.
The high costs to provide childcare either mean staff aren’t paid enough, or families are charged more than they can afford, Shibler said.
The federal government defines “affordable” childcare as no more than 7% of a family’s monthly income. That would mean for a family to be able to afford a $1,780 monthly childcare bill, they’d have to be making over $300,000 per year.
“We have relied for a long time on people working in (childcare) as a second career or people who don’t need the money,” Shibler said. “We have a situation in Alaska where it’s expensive for parents, and revenue still doesn’t cover operational costs for providers.”
Larson, who said she charges $850 per month for preschoolers, including all their meals, emphasized the difficulty of the job — even beyond the economics.
“You’re with eight kids for the whole day,” Larson said. “The ability to do that five days a week — it’s a very stressful job.”
Combine the two — the difficulty of the job and the poor economic outlook — and it’s hard to find or retain providers. According to a state taskforce, in four years, from the start of 2020 through 2023, Alaska lost almost 10% of its childcare providers.
Morphet thinks the solution is a subsidy. Shibler, and some others in the area, agree.
“Childcare has for decades been expected to operate in a free-market model, and it has failed,” Shibler said. “When we have a public good that can’t survive in the market, what do we do? We subsidize it.”
There’s a range of possible ways local governments could subsidize childcare providers.
Larson is concerned that a subsidy might be chosen that would unfairly help some, and not others. But Morphet said his solution would be to just give money to all licensed providers, whether they were new or established. “There’s no way we would offer an incentive to one group and not the other,” Morphet said.
Finding the money for direct subsidies could be difficult for Haines, which has an existing budget deficit. In Juneau, each licensed childcare provider receives $400 monthly for each infant and toddler enrolled, and another $600 monthly per employee.
While Juneau pays that money out of its general fund revenue, Shibler said other communities have funded childcare from so-called “sin taxes” — extra taxes on products like marijuana and alcohol. Anchorage, for instance, pays a childcare subsidy from marijuana sales tax revenue.
Haines’ marijuana sales tax rate is 2%, lower than other municipalities like Juneau at 3%, Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Ketchikan at 5%, and Sitka at 8%.
While raising taxes in general could be unpopular, Morphet described finding funds to bolster Haines’ childcare options as a necessity. “I don’t have a problem with giving them money because it’s less than the cost of losing young people,” Morphet said.
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
