- This is a production of SDPD - Research is finding the first five years of a child's life are critical for brain development.

That knowledge is fueling calls for higher quality child care and early education, but accessing any kind of child care is increasingly difficult.

The ongoing efforts to improve access to child care, that's tonight's South Dakota Focus.

- South Dakota Focus is made possible with help from our members.

Thank you.

And by Black Hills State University, Cody, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park and Sanford - Children's.

Finding child care is a challenge throughout the nation and South Dakota is no exception.

Recent data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows about 75% of South Dakota kids under the age of six have all available parents working outside the home.

Meanwhile, child development research is finding the first five years of a child's life can have a significant impact on future learning outcomes.

child care is a complicated topic, so if you're new to this conversation, we're gonna set a foundation.

More and more parents are working outside the home.

They may not have relatives or anyone else who's close to them who would be willing to care for their kids for free, or they might want more of an educational component to their child's care.

So they seek outside help from a child care provider.

Well, child care providers are among some of the lowest paid professionals in the United States.

That means it's harder and harder to recruit people to become child care providers or to stay in the profession.

The obvious solution would be for child care providers to raise their prices, but if they do that, they risk pricing out the very families that they're trying to serve.

A basic business model for child care doesn't work, and there are a lot of opinions about how to fix that problem.

We spent a lot of time last season talking about child care.

So we thought with the start of a new legislative session, now would be a good time to circle back to some of those folks who are working to improve access to child care.

We're going to start with a parent who left her job at a child care facility to care for her own kids.

- You want the little flower clip in your hair.

- In 2023, we met RiAnna Kalovsky.

She recognizes the importance of those first five years and wanted a high quality care option for her kids, but that care wasn't economically viable.

- I was paying $27,000 a year this year.

I would've paid over $27,000 a year to have both of these kids in child care.

Granted, it's a good center, you know, and had accreditation outside of regular state accreditation, you know, state regulations, but it's just not.

What job can you work that makes that feasible?

- So she ultimately left her job to care for her kids.

She kept them engaged with help from programming at the local library and other kid friendly attractions.

But moving to a single income meant some changes for the family, including a move from Sioux Falls to small town Ethan, just south of Mitchell.

- I don't see a lot available in the, in the region, and that does make me a little bit anxious.

What?

How am I gonna endure the winter, long winter with two kids at home?

- We followed up with Rihanna in December of 2024.

Now her kids are two and four years old.

- The Long winter with two small children at home.

I hope everyone watching this recognizes the work it takes to care for children for extended periods of time.

It can be very draining.

We have made it work.

I have also enrolled my eldest in a part-time preschool, which has alleviated a lot of tension in that.

She gets a little bit of an outlet, some peer interaction, some other interaction with other adults, which is really nice.

And it gives me an opportunity to go to the store with only one child instead of two.

So it, it's getting better.

Every day gets a little bit better too as we get out of diapers and out of bottles and away from that, those infant things and we're able to play more.

- But she stayed up to date with the issues surrounding child care, thanks to an online community of other frustrated parents.

- Around the same time that I was considering leaving the workforce, I saw a Reddit post on a working mom's subreddit or message board, and the post was written from a woman in North Carolina who said, this child care thing is hard for me and is likely hard for you.

Let's organize around the issue.

Would anyone like to attend a Zoom?

And I don't think pre pandemic, I would've been as inclined to send my email to an internet stranger and log onto a Zoom with them.

But obviously I gained Zoom skills and felt comfortable doing that.

So we just started meeting in January of 2023.

- Since then, RiAnna has remained active with Mother Forward, a nationwide organization that advocates for issues like child care access.

- Like everything is so different because I don't like different things that why.

- How has that helped your adjustment, like having that online community?

- Having an online community to discuss the child care crisis has meant that I have a set of people to bounce ideas off of and to hear ideas or to hear solutions.

What's worked for you?

What's worked for your community, how have you gotten a hold of your representatives?

And it has meant that I'm able to bring that knowledge and crowdsource those sorts of solutions to my in real life community.

- And it's kept her motivated to advocate for change.

Last year, she took both kids to Children's Day at the state Capitol building in Pierre.

- I made the decision to go to Children's Day at the Capitol, not entirely understanding what Children's Day at the Capitol was.

I knew it was organizations in South Dakota promoting, promoting children's welfare, but I thought there would be more kids there.

And my kids were the only kids there, aside from a high school group.

And I find that really telling about the work being done in South Dakota, in the child care space.

We aren't bringing everyone to the table.

We don't have enough parents and we don't have enough child care providers being brought to the, this conversation at a legislative level because it's hard.

Someone showed my daughter the blue tiles in the floor at the Capitol building that I didn't even know about.

We had other adults taking them around and showing them important things while I was able to talk to people and ask, what brings you to the Capitol building?

Oh, I'm here because I couldn't afford to send my children to child care, a child care center as a child care provider.

- But before policymakers can work to solve a problem, they need to understand it.

Senator Tim Reed is a Republican from Brookings, where he works in economic development.

He'd been in conversations about the child care issue leading up to last year's legislative session.

- What does it take to make sure that these child care centers can survive?

So how do we use this information?

And so we had put forth a bill that was going to have a cost study done for child care because during that time period, as we were looking at this, there was a lot of discussion about what is the true cost of child care?

What does it really cost compared to, you know, what actually is being spent on child care?

And so we went to the session with a bill that was gonna pay for a study.

And during that time we found out the Department of Social Services was also looking at doing a study.

And so we basically negotiated with them to get some of the information that we thought was also needed.

In that study.

- DSS released that report last fall.

It breaks down the annual costs and revenue for average sized child care programs.

The results are based on the kind of program, geographic location, and other factors.

For example, the report finds an average licensed child care center in a rural part of South Dakota might spend a total of $927,000 a year on staff wages and other expenses.

That same center may only bring in $688,000 of revenue.

That kind of deficit makes it nearly impossible for a business to make it long term.

The DSS report found similar deficits across most of the other categories of care with others just barely making a profit.

Senator Reed says that information from DSS informed part of a larger report from an ad hoc task force he's been heading over the past year.

- This task force that was put together for child care in South Dakota then was a lot of the stakeholders, but it really wasn't operated by the state.

And so we had private funds to help us out get some of this done.

And plus it was people just giving up their time to can work on this.

We also had assistance from the Hunt Institute and they're a leader, kind of a think tank when it comes to child care.

And we had been conversing with them several legislators over time and, and went to some of their summits that they had on child care.

And we knew that we needed some kind of field experts that could help us.

- Reed was one of a handful of South Dakota leaders who participated in the Hunt Institute's Early Learning Nation Fellowship this last fall.

Another was Kayla Klein, director of the advocacy group, Early Learner South Dakota.

She explained the importance of involving policy makers in the child care discussion during a recent round table on SDPB's In the Moment.

- Yeah, I think that's what I appreciate so much about the Hunt Institute, is they really do focus on policy makers.

Because at the end of the day, that's what's going to help really kind of step us forward and, and move us forward.

Early childhood, if you even scratch the surface, you'll start to realize that is such a tangled web, that it's not just one party who needs to start focusing on this.

It is everyone.

It's, it is the child.

It starts with the child, the family, but then it's also the businesses and communities and then our state.

We all need to be working in tandem to really help the youngest and most vulnerable kids in our state.

- A key strand in that web of early childhood care is its impact on the workforce.

And in South Dakota where unemployment remains low, strategies to maintain a steady workforce are in demand.

The task force took that to heart.

- We really talked about workforce a lot, but there's actually kind of three parts of that workforce right there is the current workforce, right?

And we wanna make sure that parents that wanna work, you know, have the ability to find child care, you know, so that accessibility for child care is really important for those parents that wanna work now.

We also started to focus on the workforce for child care, and we found there was a very high attrition rate.

They were really struggling, retaining the the workforce in child care.

And we had even heard that was as high as 80% as we started using some of the information over the summer.

It's really, you know, in the mid forties.

Now, that's still pretty high when we talk about turnover, but, so that's an important place when we talk about workforce.

And then this is also about, and I'm also an economic developer.

I, you know, I'm responsible for economic development in my community here in Brookings.

And what about the future workforce, right?

It, we wanna make sure that this child care helps you know, that when the students, the young students are getting into kindergarten, into first grade, that they're ready.

And so really, when we say workforce, we're talking about quite a bit - Some policy suggestions from the task force address, child care wages, and reimbursement rates for the providers who accept clients who use government assistance.

Reed says they found the average hourly pay for South Dakota child care providers is $12 and 67 cents an hour.

- Well, a lot, a lot of reports say that a living wage is $19 and 58 cents.

That's some, that's a number that we kinda, that we're using in the report.

Well, you can see the difference there.

So the policy has to be aimed on, you know, what can we do to increase what we're paying those in child care.

One of the areas is, you know, in, in the child care assistance programs that we have, what they're paying at a rate, you know, is tough for, for those child care facilities to be able to make it, you know, to be able to, to, you know, at least break even.

And so I think that's an area that we really have to focus on.

I think another area that we're looking at to try to maybe get some more child care workforce is there could be, you know, a parent that's at home and maybe they could go to work at a child care facility and maybe get, we could somehow supply, you know, free child care for their kids as long as that they, they, they were working at a facility and that's something else I think needs to be looked at.

So everything we're talking policy-wise really has to do with the workforce for child care.

- Any kind of state investment will be a hard sell this session.

It's shaping up to be a tight budget year, especially with expensive ongoing projects like the new men's prison.

- It really, all this really comes down to money.

And so if we don't have the money available, this is gonna be very tough to do.

But the issue is, and we went through it when it came to skilled care facilities, right?

We were, we were starving them, right?

And they were closing.

And that's gonna continue to happen here.

So we have to figure this out.

Like we figured it out, you know, to increase the funding that was needed for skilled care facilities to make sure that they could stay viable, especially in our rural communities, the same thing's gonna happen.

We're gonna lose child care, you know, in the rural communities first.

And that's really hard for those smaller towns to be able to grow.

- And the budget isn't the only hurdle.

child care advocates are starting from scratch with a host of new lawmakers this session.

- When child care facilities are closing, they're, everybody hears about that.

I think it'll be interesting as there is, you know, quite a few new people in the, in the legislature, probably a little more than normal, especially in the Senate.

You know, we really have a big turnover of, of senators.

I think there will will be a little bit of learning that needs to happen and a little bit talking about it and trying to understand if they understand where the problem's at and listen to what they're saying about what's happening in their communities.

- Some communities, including Senator Reeds, have seen success from grant funding.

In 2024, the Governor's Office of Economic Development awarded nearly $5 million to support child care projects around the state.

Those one-time dollars came from the Federal American Rescue Plan Act following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brookings is beginning to reap the benefits of a partnership supported by some of that grant funding along with further investment from the city council - Is that we've got programs like the school district in this case and the Boys and Girls Club that already have the facilities in place.

They also have the, you know, the back office kind of things that are needed when it comes to payroll, you know, HR kind of things and such, and janitors.

And so we've realized that you probably need to have organizations like that to help reduce those costs.

So those organizations can cover some of those costs, allowing you to be able to, you know, either break even or also put more money into the labor aspect of it.

And that's what we've done here in Brookings.

Those two organizations have gotten together and partnered to figure all of this out and have been able to increase the capacity in the community and be able to still pay the child care workers, you know, a wage that will keep 'em there.

- A 2022 survey found a need for 495 child care slots in Brookings.

This partnership between the school district and the Boys and Girls Club will result in 360 new openings for children ages, birth to five years old.

Similar partnerships are cropping up around the state and municipal governments are considering their role.

Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken was also part of the Hunt Institute Early Learning Nation Summit mentioned earlier in the program.

On SDPB's In the Moment, he says local governments can provide training and other resources for in-home child care providers.

- And we do a lot of early literacy and early childhood education programming through our library.

I mean, I have a statistic here in 2023, we, we held more than 1000 early learning programs.

We have parent child workshops, we have free resources for daycares so that if you decide to open a daycare in your home, you can come to our library and we provide you bins of resources and toys and books that you can check out every week, which is relevant programming.

So the kids can be learning different stuff every week.

So we're doing things to try to reduce the barrier to entry for some of those in-home daycares.

And then on some of the bigger centers, making sure that when it comes to rezoning or people who wanna bring in business to Sioux Falls and they want to open a larger center, are we putting any, any kind of restrictions or requirements on them that are making that difficult for them to do that?

Not cutting corners, but making sure that we're helping them along the way so that those much needed centers can open and can open easily.

- The Sioux Falls City Council is also considering a trishare program, which splits the cost of child care between parents, employers, and a third party.

On the other side of the state, In Rapid City, the John T. Vucurevich Foundation is funding a trishare pilot program that's still in its infancy.

So much of the conversation around child care is about affordability, but sometimes just finding child care is the challenge.

A new web portal is designed to make it easier for parents and providers to connect.

It's called Black Hills Find child care.

We heard from Kayla Klein earlier in the program.

She's CEO of the consulting firm that manages the portal.

Rather than scouring the internet for options, Klein sees the site as a one-stop-shop for families.

- Let's say I have an infant and I am looking for someone who is on the C-A-C-F-P food program and they have a certain curriculum, I can put all of those filters in and maybe I, I don't wanna drive more than five miles from my house, or I need it to be on the way on the commute to my work.

I can put in all of those parameters and I can even ask it to filter out only providers who have current openings.

And then you'll get your exact options.

Now, of course, as we know, child care is a little bit sparse sometimes.

So you may end up not getting any providers that pop up, then you just change your filters, go back and just say, okay, I want anyone anywhere in the Rapid City area in the Lead Deadwood area, filter it that way.

And then all of the providers within that area will, will pop up.

- The portal is free for both parents and providers thanks to funding from the John T. Vucurevich Foundation.

But its true success depends on the number of providers who sign up to be listed.

In the few months since launch, about 60 providers throughout the region have signed up.

- And then after that it's really in the hands of the providers.

They can add as little or as much as they want.

They can add pictures and talk about their curriculum in detail.

They can give bios, they can take pictures of their exterior so people kind of know what they're looking for.

They can schedule, parents can actually schedule tours of the facility on, through the websites too.

So we're hoping that it's really just something that kind of makes this whole process for providers easier and more fluid.

- The portal includes child care centers and in-home providers.

The only requirement is providers need to be operating legally.

- So essentially what that means is in South Dakota, you may only have 12 children on your own in an in-home before you have to become regulated.

So if you're operating with more than 12 children in your home, that's technically illegal, and so you will not be allowed to participate on the platform.

However, a lot of people will ask, do I need to be registered with the state or regulated with the state in order to be on the platform?

You do not.

- In South Dakota, it's optional for in-home child care providers to register with the State Department of Social Services.

But only registered providers are listed on the DSS site for finding child care.

The same is true of another statewide resource.

In addition to calling 2 1 1 for help, finding child care, families can now access an updated child care helpline portal online.

The Helpline Center's Care Coordination Program Director, Shauna Batcheller, said in an email, families can search online on their own through the family search portal, or they can submit an intake form to the Child Care Helpline to do the search for them and email them a list of providers who meet their needs.

The Child Care Helpline portal is in partnership with DSS and the South Dakota Early Childhood Enrichment System.

The partners work together to keep listings updated and encourage providers to join the platform.

There are currently 914 child care providers listed on the statewide Child Care Helpline site.

Bachelor goes on to say, we do not list unregistered providers and do not have plans to list them at this time.

Meanwhile, Black Hills Find Child Care will list any legal providers in the region.

- We allow unregulated and unregistered.

Now, why that's important to note is that in South Dakota, we know based on income tax returns, that there are about 60% of providers who have chosen not to be regulated in South Dakota.

That means in Rapid City for example, there could essentially be 60% of the market that you don't know about.

- Many families are connected with in-home providers through Facebook, often through local child care and parenting groups.

- But that's really hard for a provider to constantly be having to check Facebook and update it and let parents know.

This way it's completely done for you.

So how we track those openings on a regular basis is Bridgecare.

The platform that the platform that runs the website will text these providers on a monthly basis, get their openings, and then automatically update it on the website.

- However, unregistered providers aren't beholden to state inspections or other regulatory standards.

A disclaimer on the Black Hills portal links to a DSS Guide for families on choosing a child care provider.

- We highly recommend that anytime a parent go and choose a provider.

You talk with them, interview them, ask them questions that you wanna know, talk to them about their health and safety standards, their curriculum, how they view discipline, those types of things.

So again, we're putting the onus a bit back onto the parents to make sure that they're informed about the care that they're choosing for their children.

- Conversations about child care can be tense.

There are conversations about the role of parents and the role of government in society.

They're conversations about entrepreneurs looking to solve a problem by starting a child care business and facing challenge after challenge.

Kayla Klein's work to support child care access is driven by her own experience, as a former child care provider.

- I'd have families come in and talk about how they couldn't afford my services.

And one time I found out that a mother was actually living out of her car with her child and she couldn't qualify for child care assistance because she didn't have an open child support case.

But she said, I have not seen him grow so much in, in such a short period that this is, I'm gonna prioritize this.

And you know, another thing she mentioned to me was, as long as she could, she was gonna continue to pay that bill.

And you know, that's heartbreaking.

And at the same time, on the other hand, I was paying people poverty level wages.

- The emotional strain wears on parents too.

When we met RiAnna Kalovsky last year, she had recently left the workforce to care for her two kids.

It wasn't an easy decision.

- I don't advocate for child care so I can go back to work.

I do it so my kids, I do it so my kids don't have to choose between their, I do it so my daughter doesn't have to choose between a career that she probably will have invested in.

Right?

Like I have four years of education and student loans to now not be doing that because it's not worth it.

Oh, you wanna play with this?

But yeah, I do it.

So they have that - choice.

I read those words back to her when we visited in December.

- I still firmly believe in it.

It brings up a moment of like the work is worth it.

The time and energy in this advocacy, we know we're in it for the long haul.

Child care advocates say all the time, your barista needs child care, your pharmacist needs child care, your police officer needs child care.

And that's a big deal.

Those folks should be allowed to make a living and still have their kids in care at an affordable and accessible, like in an affordable and in an accessible way.

- child care, early childhood education will always be something I fight for because I've been in the trenches and I've seen I think some of the worst sides of it.

And I don't think my job will ever be done.

I don't think I'll ever see what I've, what I aspire to see.

But I think there's positive change coming and I think there's great people who are willing to help make that change.

And I see, I see the movement taking strides.

So that hope is what motivates me to keep going every day and continue to be an advocate.