The Daily Agenda: A fragmented child care landscape

Child care for two kids costs more than rent ... The county is taking steps to ease the burden for its employees ... Other news.

They say raising a child takes a village, and many parents are intimately familiar with the maneuvering it takes to find reliable and affordable child care.

Pima County officials said last month that Arizona is losing $4.7 billion each year because of insufficient child care, with more than half the state living in a child care desert. And nationwide, the cost of care for two children exceeds the national monthly average rent payment.

The county surveyed its employees about their child care needs and experiences earlier this year, gathering feedback from 1,400 members of its workforce. Nearly 80% of people who took the survey said affordability is the biggest problem they face in finding child care, and more than 50% said finding high-quality care is also a challenge.

These aren’t new complaints, but as the cost of living continues to rise, they’re complaints employers need to address, County Administrator Jan Lesher wrote in a July memo.

“These economic considerations provide an economically fragmented landscape for parents, at best, and are financially debilitating, at worst,” she said.

Data about the cost of child care in 2022 from the Center for American Progress.

The county has created six action items to explore future and potential benefits to increase its employees' access to affordable, high-quality child care. These include:

1. Create a child care review and implementation team to explore options prioritized by employees and steps the county can take to implement short- and long-term strategies.

2. Review the possibility of increasing flexibility in scheduling.

3. Explore partnership options with other private or public sector employers.

4. Advocate for legislative reform.

5. Assess the potential for onsite child care.

6. Consider providing financial assistance to eligible employees.

The plan would help county employees and also further the goals of the Prosperity Initiative, designed to reduce generational poverty and improve opportunity in the region, Lesher said.

“That report and numerous other local, state and national reports and publications make it clear that Pima County – and all employers – must investigate how best to support working parents in a fragmented childcare landscape,” Lesher said.

For local parents struggling to afford child care, these types of employer-backed efforts are welcomed.

There are more than 2,500 licensed child care providers in Arizona, but they vary greatly in price and quality.

Tucker Bungard, a local high school teacher with three children between the ages of two and 10, said he and his wife struggled in their children’s early years, before school was an option.

“We are lucky enough that my wife works from home, so she can make her own schedule and occasionally has time during the day to take care of the babies,” Bungard told the Tucson Agenda. “However, there is a time when the kids are young … that tends to be the most expensive time period, and I would say that it has gone up incrementally from when our 10-year-old was in that stage.”

Bungard said that finding options outside of child care centers, which can include hefty fees and tuition, has been one of the biggest challenges and that he and his wife have been lucky to know someone who runs a home-based day care.

But even with that, he says it’s difficult to afford child care five days a week.

“Right now we are paying $120 dollars a week for three days,” he said, pointing to another area business that he says costs at least twice as much.

While Bungard’s wife is fortunate enough to work from home with a flexible schedule, many parents don’t have that option.

More than 75% of Pima County employees surveyed said they missed a partial or full work day due to child care issues and 55% have had to adjust their work schedule, including cutting back on the hours they’re able to work.

A November 2023 survey of Arizona’s working parents shows that 35% said they have left a job in the past year due to child care issues, according to First Things First

Unfortunately, this is a common reality for many, something the county’s plan will hopefully address.

Another local parent who asked to remain anonymous said that she lost a job when her children were younger because of her inability to find affordable, stable child care. She says she looked into assistance from the state, but the timeline was a dealbreaker.

“State help wasn't a realistic option. The waiting period to even have your application looked at was over a year,” she said.

As a divorced, single mom who didn’t receive child support and didn’t have family members that could help, child care was an immense struggle.

Now that her kids are older, she no longer needs child care, but the effects of what she went through a decade ago are still a reality for parents today.

“I missed a lot of work at one of my jobs because of child care and was eventually fired after a few years,” she said. “Childcare for the working poor and lower and middle class families, especially single parent homes, is such a painful pursuit.”

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Small town, big data: As they try to revive the city’s shopping district, Nogales officials are going to use geolocation data pulled from cell phones to track consumer behavior, the Nogales International’s Daisy Zavala Magaña reports. The idea is to track (anonymous) data that shows, for example, a large number of Nogales residents shopping at a store in Tucson. If that happens, officials could encourage the owner of the Tucson store to open up a store in Nogales.

263%: The increase in the cost of child care over the last 30 years. By comparison, overall inflation has increased 133%, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2023 Report and the U.S. Department of Labor Consumer Price Index.