Parents see benefits of professional care

One of the more ambitious items in President Obama’s 2016 budget is his proposal to spend $200 billion over 10 years to support child care and early education, an agenda he gave full voice to during his visit to Lawrence last month.
A key feature of the proposal is a tax credit worth $3,000 per child per year — triple the current maximum — meant to ease the burden on low- and moderate-income families struggling to pay for child care.

“FOR ME, my daycare bill is as much as my mortgage. It absolutely is,” said Tiffany Johnson, of Iola.
Asked to consider where child care ranks in the catalog of her monthly expenses, Carri Campbell responded similarly: “Jeez, my highest payment is my rent. I’m paying $500 for rent. And then I’m paying $400 for daycare. It’s even more than what my car payment is a month, which is $300.”
Both Johnston and Campbell work as tellers at Emprise Bank, in Iola.
Johnston’s children, Sydney, 2, and Austin, 15 months, attend an in-home daycare run by Karen Keithly (“the best daycare in town,” according to Johnston). Johnston’s husband is a team leader at Gates. Both husband and wife work full-time.
“Last year — we just paid taxes, so I know — I paid $8,000 in daycare, for both kids. I pay $85 for my baby and $80 for my daughter. That’s a week. I pay bi-weekly, so I pay $330 every two weeks, $660 a month. Even then, I know my daycare is a little cheaper than a lot in town.”
According to Child Care Aware, the average annual cost of in-home infant child care in Kansas is $6,667 compared with $10,787 in a child care center.
Locally, child care runs anywhere from $60 to $90 a week, or about $4,000 a year, according to Beth Toland, early childhood education specialist at Allen Community College.
Allen County is dotted with child care providers, large and small, group and individual, professional and ad hoc. It’s not because these are extremely lucrative jobs, however — in Kansas, the average annual income for a child care worker is $19,800.
“Many facilities don’t have employees making over $10 an hour,” Toland said. The result, she said, is that fewer are going into early childcare as a field of study.
If Obama’s early childcare incentives were approved, that would allow centers to have more highly trained individuals and provide more comprehensive programs, Toland said.
Because so many households rely on two incomes, the demand for child care is sky high.
Campbell and her husband send their daughter, Tara, to Kids Kingdom, a child care center in Iola.
“But it’s really hard for us to come up with the money. Like, right now, I’m a little behind on paying them. We’ve got government assistance, because, you know, we don’t make a lot. My husband is a full-time student at Allen County, and he’s working full-time” — as assistant store manager at Hibbett Sports. “And so we went to the government; they’re throwing in $114 a month, which is awesome. I mean, even if they were giving me $20 — it helps.
“I was paying $100 a week and now I’m paying $90 since she turned 3. Now that she can potty on her own,” said Campbell, with a burst of thrilled laughter, “she’s cheaper!
“I told my parents: I’m going to save $40 a month — that’s a credit card payment. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot. But now I’ve got a credit card payment that I don’t have to say ‘Oh, my God, how am I going to come up with this?’ So even $10 a week is a heck of a difference.”
 
Contemporary claims in favor of subsidizing universal child care no longer rely on arguments of moral fairness or charity alone. Obama, in his State of the Union address, argued for affordable child care as “an economic priority for us all,” including the childless.
The economic claims put forward by proponents of comprehensive child care are two: 1) in the short-term, creating an inclusive system of affordable child care would make it possible for parents wanting to re-enter the workforce  — still, usually mothers — to do so, which would, by boosting the overall supply of labor, allow society as a whole to recoup the cost of that subsidy by way of increased economic activity; 2) regarding the long-term, Obama, in his speech at KU, insisted that “children who get a high-quality early education earn more over their lifetimes than their peers who don’t…which means that the entire economy is more productive…. Young people who get that good early start are more likely to finish school [and] they’re less likely to get in trouble with the law.”

Campbell said she could tell an immediate difference in her daughter once she was enrolled at Kids Kingdom.
“At first, we weren’t going to put her in daycare,” said Campbell. “This was like a year and a half ago. We thought we could work our schedules around so we didn’t have to. But once she started going, she started talking a lot more, and she was doing things that — I mean, I can’t do with her what she’s doing there with her friends. She just blossomed when she started going there.
“I think the daycare is a wonderful place. I just know that every morning, she is excited about going. She loves her teacher. Her teacher’s name is Jennifer Lower, but she calls her Jennifer Flower. ‘Oh, Jenny Flower did this with me, she did that.’ I’m like ‘That’s wonderful.’ She loves it, and that makes me feel like I made the right decision…. Before I took her there, she didn’t really talk. As soon as we put her over there, the first week, she came home and said ‘paper’ and I was like ‘paper!’” — Campbell makes an astonished face and grips her forehead with both hands — “‘How do you even know what paper is?’ and that’s awesome. I saw it instantly. She was talking and having conversations and knowing what stuff was, and you know, I was like ‘Heck yeah, that really is just awesome.’ And I know that once she goes to school, she’s not going to have any problems, because she’s already the most popular kid there. I mean, these days, she walks into the classroom like this” — Campbell pulls her shoulders back, hoists her chin and marches across the bright, empty lobby of the bank in imitation of her confident toddler — “and everyone there’s like ‘Hi, Tara!’ The teachers have pretty much taught her everything there. I like the fact that they know how to get through to kids.”