University Police Department Lt. David Huff enrolls his two-year-old daughter and four-year-old son in half-day child care. For both of them, he pays $12,000 total.
“We chose to sacrifice other things, like maybe we would like to take an extra vacation in a year, but I’d much rather them go and get good quality daycare and a good start,” Huff said.
Huff’s story is not uncommon in Delaware County. According to newly-released Indiana Youth Institute statistics, Delaware County has the second-highest cost of high-quality child care, averaging out to $10,866 per year.
Delaware County is second only to Hamilton County, which has an average cost of $12,773. By comparison, the statewide average is $8,818. In the same report, Hamilton County has the highest median household income in the state, but out of 92 Indiana counties, Delaware County sits at the 90 spot, meaning it has one of the lowest median household incomes but one of the highest costs of child care.
Carrie Bale is the executive director of Muncie BY5, an organization that aims to revitalize the community through supporting kindergarten readiness.
Bale said she realizes the cost can be shocking — when the Indiana Youth Institute presented its 2018 statistics about child care, Bale said she heard an audible gasp from the room.
However, she said this high cost is driven by the dense concentration of high-quality child care Delaware County residents have asked for over the years.
A higher concentration of high-quality child care options leads to an increased cost since different locations must compete with each other to not only provide a quality education but also pay its staff enough.
When she used to run a child care center in Delaware County, Bale experienced one consequence of not paying staff a competitive wage — they left.
“One of the things that we saw was, federally, Head Start [was] funded at a pretty good rate, and if we didn’t match what Head Start’s rate was for paying their teachers, it was a constant revolving door,” Bale said. “We could never keep staff because we weren’t able to pay them what other competitors and partners were able to pay.”
The high-quality label for childcare is not an arbitrary distinction — the Indiana Early Learning Advisory Committee (ELAC) defines a high-quality program based on a number of levels.
Child care programs are ranked level one through four, with levels three and four being considered high quality by the Indiana ELAC. Level three is distinguished from level two in that its child care programs include a planned curriculum. Level four, the highest level of program, includes national accreditation.
Robin Box, a professor of family, consumer and technology education at Ball State, used to help maintain accreditation for high-quality child care run by Ball State in Muncie, which includes the Child Study Center.
She, too, said Delaware County places great emphasis on high-quality child care, which cannot be offered without adequate resources for teachers and children.
Not only must teachers be paid an adequate wage, Box said, but the child care facility at which they work likely has a mortgage to pay, cleaning supplies and labor to provide and benefits, like insurance, to ensure its teachers can take care of their own families while working to take care of someone else’s.
It’s also possible qualified teachers for child care programs are also more prevalent in Delaware County because of professional development programs for child development and early childhood education majors, professors Linda Taylor and Pat Clark said.
Professional development programs work similarly to how onsite job experience works, said chairperson of the department of elementary education Clark.
“It’s unusual for a university to have a professional development school with an early childhood center and we have two of them here in Delaware County,” Clark said.
Taylor, a Ball State elementary education professor, said Ball State has set the precedent for pre-kindergarten professional development programs and other universities have yet to adopt it into their own curricula.
“Nobody’s really followed our lead yet, at least not that we know of,” Taylor said.
Seeing Ball State students working with his children is a point of pride for Lt. Huff.
“Whenever I’m interacting with our students, I look at [them] as my own kid,” Huff said. “It’s like, I want you to be successful, and I know the kids who work there. They’re getting a good experience.”
Despite multiple options for families to enroll their children in child care, some families wanting to enroll their children can’t afford to pay the price.
Lt. Huff did not enroll his older son in child care, since his family could not financially support it at the time.
“I can totally see a difference between [my younger son] and maybe my older son that’s a junior here at Ball State when he was a kiddo to where we are now with [my younger son],” Huff said.
Bale recognizes not every family can afford high-quality child care in Delaware County, and the largest group where she sees a gap in enrollment is with lower-middle class families whose incomes are just above the threshold to qualify for a child care voucher.
“There’s this group of families that fall in there that don’t qualify for assistance, but they sure the heck can’t pay the full rate of child care,” Bale said. “Those are our families right now that are really missing out on the opportunity.”
In order to close this enrollment gap, Bale said Muncie BY5 is working to secure funding for 125 child care slots for the families in this income range to enroll their children with no cost to them.
Contact Sara Barker with comments at slbarker3@bsu.edu or on Twitter at @sarabarker326.
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