EXCERPTS
Dave Howe knows when children are engaged and when they’re learning.
The retired elementary school teacher now volunteers at Project SHARE’s Lunch and Learn program, putting together educational activities for a group of 30 to 40 summer campers.
“It’s phenomenal what’s happening in this community,” Howe said. “It’s the best thing for summer I’ve seen.”
At the very least, campers get a free lunch, and breakfast if they want it — Project SHARE uses funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program to provide meals.
But they’ll also get an opportunity to keep learning through the summer, and not backslide by the time school starts again. Reading, art projects, science experiments and other activities are all part of the curriculum at Lunch and Learn.
“As an educator, it’s a big deal for me,” Howe said. “We used to spend a quarter of the year with remedial material to make up for the summer gap.”
Project SHARE’s Lunch and Learn is one model of how to provide affordable summer child care, a need that — as detailed in Saturday’s article — has proven urgent given the Midstate’s high demand from working families, particularly single mothers.
Like a number of community programs, Project SHARE is dependent on volunteers, many of whom work their hours as summer camp counselors around other jobs.
“I just do it because I like working with the children,” teaching assistant Sylvia Darby said. “I just don’t like seeing the ‘brain drain’ over the summer.”
Similarly, the YWCA of Carlisle offers a low-cost summer camp that employs Dickinson College education students as counselors.
“They’ve either just graduated or are going into their senior year, usually students who are pursuing early education degrees,” said Katelynn Edger of the YWCA.
A nonprofit, the YWCA summer camps are break-even, with the $160 per-week fee covering the cost of food, field trips, swimming pool fees and other operating expenses, Edger said. Many students do not pay the whole fee, with United Way helping to subsidize low-income families.
“There is absolutely more competition, since there is so much need in this area, and more providers are popping up,” Edger said.
Likewise, the nonprofit Carlisle Early Education Center charges $165 per week during the summer and offers breaks based on family income. The center is expanding, said Executive Director Melissa Ocker, who added they could use more space.
Employment
Though some child care providers may be looking to expand, Ocker said finding personnel for expansions has proven difficult.
“We always have trouble,” she said. “We don’t want to hire just anybody, we want quality providers.”
But child care and early education work is not very lucrative, although the CEEC has been able to give small raises to child care workers in each of the past four years, Ocker said.
“It’s a known fact that if you’re in education, especially early education, you’re not in it for the money, you’re in it because you love working with children,” Ocker said.
Low unemployment has made finding workers difficult. And stagnant wages make it more difficult for families to afford care and make it more difficult for child care providers to raise pay to attract more workers.
The average child care worker in Cumberland County made $21,372 in 2017, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, reflecting relatively limited growth — the same worker was making the equivalent of $19,433 in 2001, adjusting for inflation.
At the same time, the median earnings for a single mother in Cumberland County in 2016 stood at $34,408, according to survey data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Generally speaking, there’s been no sign of a turn-around in the low-wage economy for working families. The bureau found last month that average wages for workers in “production and nonsupervisory roles” — i.e. not management — dropped about 3 cents an hour over the past year after adjusting for inflation.
This will likely have long-term consequences. A Morning Consult survey for The New York Times, published earlier this month, found that 64 percent of people who had fewer children than they wanted did so because child care was too expensive, the most frequent response out of all listed reasons for not having as many children as desired.
The altruism of volunteers and underpaid workers can only go so far, experts said. Ultimately, hard adjustments need to occur in costs.
“The long-term solution has to address the need to treat child care workers as professionals who earn suitable wages,” said Cristina Novoa of the Center for American Progress.
Solutions
Progressive groups have pushed for significantly more federal funds to be allocated to child care assistance. The Center for American Progress supports a measure in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would greatly expand the Child Care Development Block Grant, which the federal government makes to states.
The legislation would assign funds to states on the condition that they create and implement a child care subsidy program based on a sliding scale of income. Families making up to 150 percent of the state’s median income would receive subsidies so that they would not have to pay more than 7 percent of their total income for child care.
The legislation would appropriate $20 billion overall in the first year, doubling by the third year.
Child care subsidies are already administered in many states, although not to such a scale. In Pennsylvania, the Child Care Works program is budgeted at $685.3 million in both state funds and federal grants.
That funding does not fully cover demand, however. Approximately 122,000 children statewide receive Child Care Works assistance, and 10,584 children are on a waiting list, according to state Department of Human Services. Cumberland County has approximately 1,600 children in the program and another 65 on the waiting list, according to the department.
The statewide average subsidy level is $6,200 per child, and $3,700 in Cumberland County. That subsidy level is scaled to poverty, with families up to 200 percent of the poverty line eligible for assistance.
Ironically, however, 200 percent of the federal poverty line for a family of two, such as a single mother and child, is $33,930, meaning that a single parent who works full-time in child care at the median wage of $10.72 per hour would still need state subsidies to take care of their own child.