Nancey Patten is the director of Child Care Partners, a state-funded Child Care Resource and Referral program serving Wasco and neighboring counties. The program helps child care providers meet state licensing requirements and recruits new providers through trainings and enrollment in early childhood education classes. This past spring, there was not a single vacancy for an infant, toddler or preschooler at any child care provider in Wasco County, according to Patten. While the shortage has eased slightly since then, many parents continue to struggle to find full-time care which costs roughly $800 for a toddler or infant in Wasco County per month. Meanwhile, child care providers in the county and throughout Oregon have struggled to find help for a job which may only pay minimum wage.
Ana Rivera is the owner and operator of Rivera’s Bilingual Preschool and Child Care in The Dalles. Rebecca Schwartz is the dean of academic pathways at Columbia Gorge Community College and the mother of 8-month-old twins. They join Nancey Patten to share their perspectives on child care access in the Dalles and new efforts to ease the crisis.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today and all this week from The Dalles. This is one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in Oregon – a fishing and trading and meeting place for many Indigenous peoples for more than 10,000 years. In some ways, it served a similar purpose for the first European American arrivals in the early to mid 1800s. It was a stopping point for settlers heading west to the Willamette Valley or for fur traders, gold miners going the other direction. On March 10th, 1957, the landscape changed profoundly. That is when the Dalles Dam went into operation. Within a few hours, Celilo Falls – a hallowed site – was inundated under about 40 feet of water.
Over the course of this week, we’re going to bring you conversations about the past, the present, and the future of The Dalles. We’ll talk about history, and culture, and trade, and music, and some of the most pressing issues the city is facing right now, including housing. We start today with child care – specifically, the lack of it. This past spring, there wasn’t a single non-Head Start vacancy for an infant, toddler, or preschooler in Wasco County. That has ripple effects for kids, for their parents, for employers.
Nancey Patten is working to address this shortage. She is the director of Child Care Partners – that’s a state-funded Child Care Resource and Referral program serving Wasco and neighboring counties. Rebecca Schwartz is the dean of academic pathways at Columbia Gorge Community College – that includes pathways to work in child care. As a mother of eight-month-old twins, she is also very eager to find child care herself. Ana Rivera is with us as well. She is the owner and operator of Rivera’s Bilingual Preschool and Child Care here in The Dalles. They all join me now. It’s great to have the three of you on our show. Thanks very much for coming to the high school here to talk with us.
Nancey Patten, I want to start with you. I mentioned that back in the spring there were no available spots for any ages – infants on up. How are you able to ascertain that? How do you know the overall picture of child care or preschool in a county?
Nancey Patten: Part of our job as a Child Care Resource and Referral Program is to keep track of those vacancies. We contact all programs quarterly to find out their vacancies and then annually just to update all of their information. Every three years we do the market price survey – we do that together with the Early Learning Division and Oregon State University – to look at the cost of care.
Miller: The cost of care to families who are paying for it.
Patten: Yes.
Miller: But is that also connected to how much the people working at those centers can make on an hourly basis?
Patten: No.
Miller: Is that separate?
Patten: That’s a separate issue, yes.
Miller: Okay. Which we’ll get to – a lot of interrelated issues here. How much has changed since the spring when there were no spots?
Patten: We have a few spots available now. Of course that changes daily – we don’t know, on a daily basis. But we’ve also added a handful of new family child care providers in the community, so we’re excited about that. That’s a few more slots available for families, but they fill up quickly.
Miller: What’s the official definition of a child care desert – a phrase that I’ve heard in recent years?
Patten: That is any region that has three children per child care slot.
Miller: Are we, right now, in a child care desert?
Patten: We are definitely – the entire state of Oregon is in a child care desert currently.
Miller: And just to be clear, this is for all different ages of care? So, infants, young kids, and also preschool for three- or four-year-olds?
Patten: And school-agers for before- and after-school care.
Miller: And there’s not enough for all of those kinds of care and schooling.
Patten: No.
Miller: Ana Rivera, I’m curious – as we just heard that we are in a child care desert. As somebody who runs a bilingual preschool and child care yourself, how often do you get a call from parents saying, “Do you have any openings?”
Ana Rivera: Weekly, at least. Weekly, or text, or email.
Miller: What do people say?
Rivera: “Do you have openings?”
Miller: And you say?
Rivera: “Unfortunately, I don’t. You could be added to the waiting list.” Right now, it’s a two-year waiting list I have.
Miller: And, so what do they say? You say two years – and I’ve heard some similar numbers in Portland, here and there, but it’s such – the scale of the city is so different. There are about 16,000 people in The Dalles. So there, I imagine there’s just many fewer alternate options. What do parents say when you say it’s a two-year wait?
Rivera: Normally, it’s pretty much a lot of parents that are – they have infants – will put me down for when they’re preschoolers. They’ll be down the list.
Miller: Nancey Patten, can you remind us – because we’re talking about not just different age groups here, but also different kinds of state-licensed facilities – can you remind us what the spectrum is?
Patten: I can. I’ll try to keep it simple. There are licensed programs that are based – that are in family homes. So we have both small family homes and large family homes that are registered and certified. Then we have child care centers. We also as – child care is included, Head Start programs that do preschoolers. Our Head Start also has Early Head Start – so that’s 0-3. And private preschools, school-age programs.
Miller: When you say a daycare center, that would be a standalone building as opposed to somebody’s home?
Patten: Correct.
Miller: And most likely, or likely, a higher number of kids or infants or three-year-olds who would be there?
Patten: Typically that’s the case.
Miller: And maybe more teachers as well, or more aids.
Patten: Yes.
Miller: Obviously, it’s not just North-Central Oregon that’s dealing with the child care shortage. We’ve talked about it, as I mentioned a number of times, in the Portland area, we talked to folks in Eugene and other cities. But what do you think is unique or special about a place like The Dalles or a rural county like Wasco County? What makes the situation different here?
Patten: One of the things that makes it different – and when you think about Wasco County – is the distance between communities. And in small communities – I live in a small community – there’s limited options. There’s limited people who are willing to do child care. We struggle with that in The Dalles as well, which really narrows the options for families. We’ve been working hard to recruit for new child care programs, but it’s complicated.
Miller: So as bad as it might be in The Dalles right now, it may be even worse in rural parts of Sherman County, Wasco County or surrounding areas?
Patten: Correct.
Miller: Ana, how did you get into child care in the first place?
Rivera: I started because my oldest – she’s a junior here in The Dallas High School – she has really bad allergies, so I had to take her twice a week to get allergy shots. And my job didn’t like that, me leaving. So that’s when I decided, you know what, I’m going to stay home and make some income and take care of kids.
Miller: So, you had to figure out a way to create a new job based on the daily challenges of the way you had been living your life.
Rivera: Correct.
Miller: That was your thinking. How smooth was it – switching jobs and entering a whole new world and also creating your own small business, right?
Rivera: Yes. It was different, but honestly I’m here because of Nancey, Noemí Ochoa, and Kristen that – I mean, I started from having one hour to, I’m almost to Step Nine right now.
Miller: What does “Step Nine” mean?
Rivera: [to Patten] Do you want to tell them about…?
Patten: What Step Nine means is that she has had training, a large number of hours of training in 10 different core knowledge categories – things like diversity, special needs, human growth and development, all of those things. We look at the Step Nine as a similar equivalent in training hours as a two-year degree.
Miller: And so this is because you’ve done continuing education or more courses and it gives you the ability to offer more services as a child care provider.
Patten: Yes. Quality.
Miller: Can you describe the setup that you have right now?
Rivera: In terms – I have toddlers and then I have my preschoolers. So I have [inaudible] art, sensory for my kids there and outdoor play.
Miller: And what ages do you serve?
Rivera: Two to five.
Miller: As I noted, Rebecca Schwartz is with us as well, the dean of academic pathways at Columbia Gorge Community College and the parent of twin eight-month-olds. Rebecca, how much did you know about the child care situation in The Dalles before you became a mother?
Rebecca Schwartz: I had actually moved to The Dalles just a few months before I got pregnant and I knew I was gonna do that, so I actually did some research into the area. I looked at pricing of what child care on average costs and went, “Okay, this should be fine.” I didn’t see anything, though, indicating the desert part of the situation. So, it was a very interesting awakening to discover, “Here’s the cost of child care, but you can’t have it, it just will not exist.”
Miller: Oh, because for you, as an academic dean, it seems like you’re fortunate enough to be able to pay for care, but there is no care for you to pay for? [silence] Alright, that silence is the silence of a Zoom link that has ceased to be a link in a meaningful way. We’re gonna – we will, we’ll work on that. Let’s turn, Nancey, to the price of childcare – and hopefully we’ll be able to get Rebecca back on the line. What is the average price that parents of different aged kids are paying right now?
Patten: I looked up – I had staff pull data so I could give you something a little more accurate. It depends on the age. So for infants, the average is running about $795.
Miller: Per month?
Patten: This is per month. That’s about the same for toddlers. Preschoolers is less – $576. And then school-agers are $610 a month. The preschool numbers – I always have to talk about this because they’re skewed by programs like Head Start that don’t charge. So it skews the numbers a bit when you start looking at data. So in general, for most families, preschool care is more expensive than school-age, just simply by the fact that school-agers are only there a few hours a day.
Miller: And then the younger the kids, the higher the ratio, in terms of adults who have to be there.
Patten: Correct. For infants – I will give you center-based because it’s very different than family child care. A family child care provider can have only two children under the age of two. In centers, it’s a 4 to 1 ratio. So that’s a big staffing issue.
Miller: So let’s say that there were three times more available slots, magically right now, in the city than you currently have. How many families can afford to pay six or seven or nearly $800 a month per child?
Patten: Not a lot of families can afford to pay that. And that’s one of the huge dilemmas with child care right now, families can’t afford to pay very much. Family child care providers, or any child care, can’t operate because they’re making very little money, but you can’t raise your rates because families can’t afford it. So it’s this balance of, “What do we do?” And we find that, in our rural communities, providers’ rates are lower. One, families are not making as much money in general. But also, I will say that they are a very kind and caring group of people who want to do their best for the children and families they serve. And so some of them don’t raise their rates simply because they know families can’t afford it.
Miller: And that has a direct connection, though, to how much they are able to pay their workers.
Patten: Absolutely.
Miller: Which we’ll get to as we go. Rebecca Schwartz, I think you’re back with us. Can you hear me and can we hear you? [silence] Okay, doesn’t seem like it. So then let’s turn, Ana Rivera, to this question of labor – of actually having enough people that you can hire. What’s it been like for you to find and to keep people working at your daycare?
Rivera: First of all, what was holding me back of not having employees, – everybody’s searching for employees, nobody wants to work. And then when I found one, it took her three months to get her fingerprints done.
Miller: With the background check, there’s a huge backlog there.
Riviera: Yup. So now I have two. I’ve been blessed with two. One of them works with the toddlers, the other one helps me because we do the Preschool Promise also.
Miller: And what is Preschool Promise?
Rivera: Nancey?
Patten: Preschool Promise is a new state-funded preschool program. It’s free to families at or below 200% of poverty level. We are fairly new to that in our region – this is only our second year. So, Ana is just getting started on that. It’s a blessing for families. It doesn’t pay for – Preschool Promise is a – in general, a six-hour-a-day program. So if families need care beyond that, then they do have to pay for that care.
Miller: It’s money from the state that goes directly to the provider?
Patten: Correct.
Miller: That then you can use to operate, and then families, if they qualify then they can take advantage of this?
Patten: Yes.
Miller: What does it take to qualify?
Patten: It’s a process. Currently the Early Learning hubs across the state are in charge of enrollment into Preschool Promise programs. They get an application from a family saying they’re interested, then they have to verify their income. Once that is done, then they place children in a program.
Miller: Rebecca, can you hear me?
Schwartz: Yes, can you hear me?
Miller: I sure can. Ah, that’s music to my ears. Words and music. So you were saying that, when you were pregnant, you did a search and you saw what seemed like options for child care for when your kids are gonna be born. When did you learn the ugly truth, that it wasn’t there?
Schwartz: Just before they were born I started to look and see if there were waitlists. I started calling around and was surprised to find out, not only were there no open slots, but a lot of places that I would call would say, “Yeah, we’re not even putting you on the waitlist. Don’t bother.”
Miller: Not even a two-year waitlist, but there is no wait list right now for you.
Schwartz: Yeah. It’s just too long a wait list. There’s too many people, your twins, or you know they’re a month old, they’re two months old. Just don’t bother.
Miller: Wow. What was going through your mind at that time?
Schwartz: I started to get pretty desperate. I had thought I had planned well, I thought there were all these places. I had seen Nancey and Child Care Partners and it seemed like there was so much support and then to find out that there just weren’t spots. And I looked for things like – could there be one spot, so that at least one of the twins could be somewhere, maybe they could switch off. I looked for full-time nannies. I looked for anything. I tried to do this math where even if it was beyond my means to pay for it, I have to keep my job, which means I have to have child care. I will go into debt if need be for two years. And at this point it’s 16 more months before they’re two and my options change a little bit. But there was just – were no options, no matter what avenue I went down.
Miller: So even the idea of throwing money at this problem, money that you sort of had, it seems – going into debt means only sort of having that kind of money. But, so for example, having somebody come into your home and take care of your kids part- or full-time, what kind of options did you find?
Schwartz: So I found – I do have a wonderful woman, Haley, who comes a couple hours a week. She is very hard-out. She can only work part-time, so she can come in the mornings but no later. I found her through care.com which was advised to me as a place to look. I posted a couple of times there. I posted in English and Spanish and she was the only respondent. Luckily she’s wonderful. But, there is certainly no full-time, no one to even fill up if I could have a part-time in the morning and a part-time in the evening. She was the only one.
Miller: Well, so where does this leave you? What have you been doing for the last eight months?
Schwartz: Well, when I got pregnant, my wonderful mother said that she would come for three months to help out and I was delighted. And now it has been eight months and she is still here because I begged her to stay. I don’t know what will happen should she leave, because there’s just – I looked at getting an au pair, I looked at all sorts of things and none of them have worked out for this area.
Miller: For this area, what’s the issue with an au pair in this area?
Schwartz: To get an au pair – so, a nanny who will come from abroad – you have to work through an agency because they need visas and that agency needs to do what’s best for their employees as well. And they have requirements for public transportation The Dalles do not meet. I looked at the three agencies that were operating in Oregon. They all said, “We can’t send someone to Wasco County because you don’t have enough public transportation there.”
Miller: What’s it been like for you to be a dean of academic pathways at the community college, which if I understand correctly, one aspect of your job means that you’re a part of helping students at the college prepare for careers that could include early childhood education at the same time that you can’t find anybody to take care of your own kids?
Schwartz: It has certainly inspired me to help with the recruitment efforts towards that particular program.
Miller: For other people though, right? I mean, we’re talking – the pipeline here seems key. If you’re – you could be helping people out now, but they’re not gonna help you.
Schwartz: No, and sometimes it’s a little bittersweet because I also help with student support. So if I have a student who needs child care, depending on their income level, there might be child care available for them. But when I got – as Nancey said, there were those different levels and I think I made like $85 a month more than qualified me to get any kind of state help or have a spot in some of the state facilities. But most of my students do qualify for that. So I help students sometimes get into places that I myself don’t qualify for.
Miller: Nancey, I’ve heard stories in recent years of child care workers leaving their jobs, and in some cases making it so what had been a full-time operating daycare center, it ceases to be full-time. In one case it went to part-time, because two of the people in one place I heard about, they went to go to work at Taco Bell instead, where the starting salary was higher than what they’re making shaping our youth, taking care of and teaching the youngest people among us. What is the labor situation in terms of pay people are getting and what that means for staying in these jobs?
Patten: It’s difficult, because they can make more money. As we were in the midst of the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, fast food places were offering higher wages. Child care providers can’t offer higher wages. And one of the other –
Miller: Because their customers can’t pay more.
Patten: Because their parents can’t pay more. That’s the problem. If child care providers charge more, they either price out some of their clientele or parents just can’t do it. It’s hard work. A lot of people don’t realize when you hire them to come and work in child care, just how hard of work it is.
Miller: I have to say, as a parent I – maybe I don’t know – but I imagine it to be one of the hardest jobs there is in the world. I think that’s why a lot of parents are so thankful when they do get child care, the parents maybe more than most people, do have a sense for just how hard it is because they’re at their wits end with their own kids, perhaps?
Patten: I think that’s very true and I think that one of the other issues right now that we’re finding is that one child care provider will get a new employee, but in reality they came from another child care program. So we’re shuffling people but we’re not increasing the workforce.
Miller: How much do you talk about this with prospective students? It seems like the only fair way to talk about this as a possible career is to be fully honest about it. At the same time, I don’t imagine that, at Child Care Partners or at the community college, you want to say, “Hey, have you considered Taco Bell?” For all the reasons – not to, you know, say anything bad about that fast food restaurant, but that’s not why you’re here. So what do you tell prospective child care workers or students?
Patten: That’s been a challenge for years. Academic advisors are supposed to be advising students into livable wage jobs and child care isn’t always a livable wage. But we work hard to talk to them about their passions and their passion for early learning. I’m optimistic. I see in the future the potential of some change somewhere because we’re all much more aware of the issue now than we’ve ever been before.
Miller: Because of the pandemic. Because showing people who maybe weren’t aware before just how the repercussions of not having child care in terms of so many aspects of a functioning economy.
Patten: Correct. People that have never talked to me about child care before are calling now and talking with. OPB for one, city councilors, county commissioners, people that typically would have never been concerned about child care because they looked at it as a parent issue. Now, it’s definitely an economic development issue.
Miller: That seems like a necessary first step, but not the final one to make changes. People are now aware of just how important child care is to not just a family’s functioning, but societal functioning and workforce functioning. What are the policy changes you’d like to see now that people’s eyes are opened?
Patten: Okay, I’m gonna walk that one closely, carefully. But I think that at some point our country has to look at how we fund childcare. If we’re going to increase our workforce in all levels, we’re going to have to look to how can we help to fund childcare. So child care providers make the money they need to have a living wage and the burden isn’t totally on the back of parents.
Miller: Rebecca Schwartz, what policy changes would you advocate for as a way out of this shortage and towards a sustainable child care future?
Schwartz: If it was a policy change, I think Nancey is correct that we should value it more and they should be paid more. I think that some government subsidies for people would be great. But in terms of policies, what I think would help is – might have an opinion on this too – is something where like, some kind of contractual rules for having your kids in daycare. Because that seems like it’s one of the most precarious parts of opening a center, is you’re at the whims of the parents in terms of putting your kids in and taking the kids out. So it’s not even though it might be more lucrative – we can make it more lucrative than working at Taco Bell. It’s not as sustainable necessarily, because Taco Bell, if you’re working 20 hours a week, you know what your paycheck is every week. But if you have kids who are coming and going and their parents might decide to pull them out every time, it’s a little bit more – it can be, it can be daunting.
Miller: I should say, Ana has been nodding with looks like nods of sad experience as you were saying that. Meaning, so parents, they’ll drop their kids off with you for weeks or months and then one day call up and say, “Sorry, we’re out” and you’re out that money?
Rivera: Yes, this is where it comes – that’s why providers have to have a contract or either they – you could charge by week, by month, every two weeks. But it comes to the burden where like, let’s say, like she mentioned, they leave. You’re with that spot and by the time you fill it up, say there was no child care crisis, it would take you a month at least to fill up that spot. And if you have employees, how are you going to pay that employee?
Miller: Now though, just because of the shortage, I imagine it’s easier to fill it up?
Rivera: Yes.
Miller: You call somebody up and say, “Hey, good news, you can come” and they say, “Maybe I’ll come tomorrow”?
Rivera: Yes.
Miller: What would make a big difference for you, in terms of dealing with this shortage as a provider yourself? What would you like to see?
Rivera: I would like to see the city start helping more with Child Care Partners, opening more buildings here. I’m in the process of opening a center right now. I applied for a grant through Child Care Partners, the Early Learning Division, in order for me to proceed and start working on that. I’m hoping to have it open by summer at least and that’s gonna just take care of infants and toddlers.
Miller: Rebecca, we’ve been focusing on –
[inaudible speaking among guests]
Rivera: Well, not just that, I’m hoping the city – if the new requirements now for Early Learning Division, if you look at the rules, they’re requiring us, if we’re opening a new place, to install sprinklers. You know how much sprinklers cost? $25,000. How is the provider going to come up with $25,000? We work long hours. We don’t get enough paid.
Miller: Although, I can imagine from the state’s perspective – I’m not sure we went into it, but the idea of not having your daycare center burned down when there’s a small fire, it also seems like a good idea in and of itself. You’re saying that added together, the requirements are a lot for a provider to deal with.
Patten: Yes. And I just want to say that’s actually not an Early Learning Division rule. That’s a building codes rule.
Miller: At the city or county level?
Patten: At the state level.
Miller: Okay.
Patten: Not only are child care providers who are trying to open programs dealing with the Early Learning Division and licensing regulations, but they’re dealing with city codes, county codes, state codes that they’re also having to meet. So it’s a whole different world for them and can sometimes be challenging to try to navigate your way through that.
Miller: Rebecca, before we go, this is the first conversation of this whole week we’re gonna be doing from The Dalles. Obviously we’ve been focusing on childcare, but it seems like you have an interesting vantage point at the community college to look at the bigger picture here. How does the child care shortage fit into the evolving economic and labor picture in The Dalles?
Schwartz: So I think it’s – as an academic, I say I think it’s an area worthy of study. My general perspective is that what we’re seeing is a shift in climate of the area. That this was an area of fishing and mining and lumber for a very long time, and agriculture. For those groups, child care is a luxury or child care had more traditional stay-at-home models. And now, as we’re moving towards like medical fields or Google comes in, we have this growing population where they are at a desk, they’re working 9-5 and child care is a necessity for them. And there’s this gap between the traditional area and this new area and the services across the board haven’t come in to meet it. So things like construction, we’re seeing there’s not enough contractors. We see it at Columbia Gorge all the time that as soon as somebody gets licensed, they have a job because we don’t have enough people doing contract. We don’t have enough plumbers and electricians. We don’t have enough automotive people because those are all services that just weren’t as needed for public use as they are now. And so I think it’s a systemic issue as the community changes.
Miller: Have you considered moving to another job, another place where there are more child care options for you?
Schwartz: I’m sorry to say I have. I really like Columbia Gorge Community College. I don’t want to leave, but there was a job at another location that, it paid about the same, but it included child care and that was one of the benefits of that position. I didn’t apply, I looked really closely, but that’s the equivalent of like $20,000 more a year for the – so I don’t want to leave. Ana, I hope that you and I can talk offline. I would like to be on your waiting list.
Miller: I hope we can make that happen. Rebecca, Ana, and Nancey, thanks very much. Rebecca Schwartz is the dean of academic pathways at Columbia Gorge Community College and the mother of twin eight-month-olds. Ana Rivera is the owner of Rivera’s Bilingual Preschool and Child Care and Nancey Patten is the director of Child Care Partners.
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