The rising cost of child care is squeezing the budgets of Greater Orlando families.

For many families in Florida, the cost of child care is a significant burden. In fact, it is often a family’s second biggest expense—right behind rent or a mortgage payment.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit think tank, the average annual cost of infant care in Florida is $9,238. Meanwhile, the cost for 4-year-olds is on average $7,282 per year. For new parents, the numbers can cause sticker shock.

That’s the feeling Orlando mom Ashley Cisneros Mejia remembers having when she had her first child and started to look for day care facilities for her baby to attend.

“It was a huge expense—coming in second to the mortgage,” she says. “Our car notes, utility bill, student loan payment, food, etc. was lower than the child care line item.”

When Cisneros Mejia had her second child a few years later, the even higher cost of child care for two young children was a big reason that she decided to start working from home.

“It wasn’t perfect, as I learned very quickly how difficult it is to work from home with small kids who also need your attention,” she says.

Today, Cisneros Mejia’s oldest is in kindergarten and she and her husband are paying for their 2-year-old to attend preschool for three hours a day Monday through Friday at a cost of $645 a month, while she is at home with a new baby.

Cisneros Mejia and her husband are not alone in struggling to find affordable care. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says child care should take up no more than 7% of a family’s income, a Florida family making the state’s median household income can expect to spend 17.2% on infant care and 13.5% on care for a 4-year-old, according to information from EPI and 2017 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Rising Costs and Low Wages
As researchers have learned more about childhood development, child care centers have shifted from just providing basic care to giving educational instruction, says Tripp Crouch, president of the board for the Florida Association for Child Care Management (FACCM), a statewide membership organization that advocates for the interests of child care providers.

“We’ve learned so much more about how children that age learn and how they grow and how their brains develop and the best way we can prepare them to get ready for elementary school,” he says.

As a result, many child care facilities now also call themselves early learning centers and employ trained teachers who instruct on specialized curricula created to adhere to what research says is ideal for children to learn during each stage of their development. The professionalization of the industry is one reason that the cost for care has gone up; parents are now paying for professional curriculum and more highly trained caretakers.

“You know, 20 years ago, I don’t think you had a curriculum in your 2-year-old’s classroom,” Crouch says.

Child care employees working in a classroom are required by the state to have a certain number of hours of instruction but many have education beyond that including advanced certifications and college degrees.

According to Deanna Gustafson, director of Children’s Lighthouse in Winter Garden, professional development for staff has become a huge focus for early learning centers.

“Some staff could have just the minimum 45 hours that are required from the state, which basically anyone who is working in a classroom needs to have that,” she says. “But then there’s some that can take it a step further and get their CDA, which is the childhood development associate [credential]. There’s some that can go on to get their [associate’s] in early childhood. There’s some that could have their bachelor’s in early childhood.”

Of course a more highly educated staff is not without greater cost to parents. Child care is also a labor intensive industry. Unlike other businesses that have been able to shrink labor costs with new technology, no such movement has happened in child care and, in fact, there are regulations that determine how many caretakers need to be present at all times with the children.

“One of the things that originally made child care expensive and what still till this day is probably the primary driver of it is the child-to-teacher ratio that has to be adhered to at all times,” Crouch says. “So, if you take infants in your school, it’s one to four. You can have four infants for every one staff member. Those ratios always have to be kept in place.”

Regulations drive up the cost of child care as well. Child care centers are overseen by the Florida Department of Children and Families (FDCF) and new rules imposed by the agency can be costly to providers and, in turn, cause higher prices for families. FACCM’s 2019 legislative agenda includes advocating to reduce excessive regulation.

“They rarely take away a regulation, but they tend to add things,” Crouch says.

Many of these regulations are intended to increase safety, something that is top of mind for all child care providers, according to Andrew Lund, franchise owner of Primrose School at Vista Lakes and Primrose School of Ocoee.

“I think the world at large has become a scarier place in some ways so safety is a bigger issue and concern than it has been historically,” he says.

Ultimately, it all drives the price of care up.

“Child care is just like any other industry,” says Karen Willis, CEO of the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County. “They’ve got to pay their rent; they’ve got to pay their teachers. … They’ve got to meet all of the requirements that are set forth in Florida Statutes associated with child care. And if they choose to be accredited, there are other standards that are required. So all those things cost money and unfortunately the cost of living has not stayed up. What people make today has not stayed up with some of those costs.”

The United States has had a low unemployment rate for the past few years but until recently, wage gains had been mostly stagnant, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

If you drill down further to just the Central Florida region, the picture doesn’t get any rosier. A 2019 report by the Orlando Sentinel using data from the BLS found that Central Florida ranks dead last for median wage among the 50 largest metro areas in the United States. And Central Florida did not have the lowest cost of living of all the metros on the list either.

Programs in Place
The state of Florida offers two early learning access programs for families. The first is School Readiness, a program available to low-income families that provides financial assistance for early learning and child care.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of investment, both programs have not been working optimally. The School Readiness program, in particular, is unable to support the number of families that need it.

According to the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County, which helps connect families to these programs, there are 3,000 children currently on Orange County’s waiting list for School Readiness and about 62% of those kids are under the age of 5.

“Because we haven’t made huge investments in child care, in our child care subsidy program, we have a significant number of families that could be eligible,” Willis says, “but we simply do not have sufficient resources to be able to offer subsidies to those parents to help offset the cost of child care.”

The School Readiness program is financed by a federal grant, along with state funds. To that effect, Willis says both the state and the federal government need to offer up more money so more families can take advantage of these programs.

“In order for us to take those children off the waitlist, we have to have resources,” she says. “The federal government has increased by small amounts the child care subsidy program over the last two years. Now that is the first increase in many, many years. Add to that the fact that we still haven’t made up for the money that the state legislature took out of the program in 2008 when we hit the recession. There was about $100 million taken out of the child care budget and it has not been fully replaced since 2008.”

The second early learning access program offered in Florida is Voluntary Prekindergarten, known as VPK. It prepares children for entering elementary school and is free for all 4-year-olds who live in Florida.

Through VPK, children are given 540 instructional hours during the school year, which works out to three hours a day for a child attending Monday through Friday. The program is offered through early learning providers, public and private schools and accredited faith-based centers. Providers are then reimbursed for the children they take in for this program.

Funded by taxpayers, VPK in Orange County serves about 14,000 children a year, according to Willis.

But, again, this program also suffers from disinvestment.

“The per child amount that we are paying for the VPK program is less than what it was in 2005 when the program started,” Willis says. “So you go from 2005 to 14 years later and we’re paying less and the costs have gone up. So what happens is the wraparound care that children are receiving has to go up because the provider is fixed in terms of what they can charge for the VPK program because that’s all I’m going to pay is what the legislature appropriates.”

According to a 2018 report from the National Institute for Early Education Research, Florida ranks 41st for state spending on VPK out of 44 states and the District of Columbia. At the same time, Florida is one of the states that serves the most students with 77% of 4-year-olds having enrolled in the program.

Possible Solutions
Willis and Crouch say there are a few structural changes that can be made to make child care more affordable and available to more Florida families.

First up is having Early Learning Coalitions provide more training for child care professionals. Florida’s Early Learning Coalitions, including Orange County’s, do offer some training courses and professional development but with the education credentials that many early learning employees need to have these days, Crouch says he would like to see more done.

“Paying for a lot of that training could take a lot off the individual providers and would be a great way to both increase the education of early learning teachers and professionals and take some of the financial burden off child care providers without paying directly to them or to families that live below the poverty line,” he says.

Next, both Willis and Crouch would like to see the state invest more money into the VPK program, which they believe would help providers keep prices for child care in reach for more families.

Willis would also like to see the state of Florida offer child care subsidies to more families. Right now to qualify, families must have a gross income that is at or below 150% of the federal poverty level for their family size. Willis would like to see that expanded to 185% of the federal poverty level.

“That would expand the child care subsidy to more families” she says. “And it would give more opportunities for families to increase their earning without having to worry about going off what is referred to as the fiscal cliff, which is to say they make too much money and they lose their child care.”

Beyond what the state of Florida could do, local businesses could also step up to help their employees afford care. The Early Learning Coalition of Orange County has a match program for employers who want to help offset the cost of child care for their employees. Although, employees still have to meet certain eligibility requirements to participate.

“Lack of child care is one of the largest reasons why there is so much absenteeism in the workforce,” Willis says.

As for what parents can do? It comes down to just starting the search early, says Shelby Feinberg, executive director for StarChild Academy Winter Garden.

“Parents need to begin their research early and visit different schools before choosing the program that best fits their child’s needs,” she says. “Early research and planning allows parents more time to consider their financial capabilities and the options available to them.”

This article originally appeared in Orlando Family Magazine’s October 2019 issue.