Sarah Banta moved to Brown County two years ago to live with family after splitting from her husband. She was able to find factory work in Bartholomew County, but finding someone to watch her children was a problem, especially while she worked second shift.

Though her mother and stepfather were around, they are still working as well and weren’t available. Banta had a friend baby-sitting for a time, but she couldn’t continue, so Banta had to quit her job.

With her boys now ages 2 and 4, Banta is considering moving out of Brown County to Bloomington, where she now works part-time at a gas station on days when her children are with their father. She sees “more opportunities” in Bloomington for herself and for her children, like more and better-paying jobs, more child care options, and more affordable public housing.

If child care wasn’t an issue, she would go back to factory work so she could better afford to pay her bills, she said.

“Improve child care availability and affordability” was the No. 2 most popular answer on a recent “amenities” survey of Brown County residents conducted by the Brown County Community Foundation — behind “expand broadband and WiFi access.”

Next month, the foundation plans to apply for a Regional Opportunity Initiatives Ready Communities Implementation Grant to support an expansion of child care.

The central concepts of the application, which is still being written, are to support the development of child care centers in the county and the training of people to work in that field, said Maddison Miller, CEO of the Brown County Community Foundation.

In 2018, the Indiana Early Learning Advisory Committee identified five known “family child care” homes and three school-based child care centers in Brown County.

Taking into account all the known facilities here, 75 percent of children ages birth to 5 living in Brown County were in need of care, the ELAC’s report said. Care for some or all of them could be coming from stay-at-home parents or other relatives, who were not listed as an option in the report.

If a new child care center is needed, where to put it is one question the grant committee will be looking into. Most working adults who live in Brown County commute outside the county, so it might make more sense for them schedule-wise to find care close to their workplaces.

However, having options inside the county is important not only for people who currently work here, but also for people who may want to move here.

“We work regularly with the schools, and with their declining enrollment, it’s trying to figure out ways you can attract younger families and think about what they need. Child care is always on top of the list outside of broadband,” Miller said. “It just made sense for us to go in that direction.”

Miller has been talking with Brown County’s biggest employers about the challenges their employees face. On the question of whether or not they believe child care access is important, “the answer was a resounding, ‘Yes! Can you help us?’” she said.

How local businesses could be part of a solution, Miller doesn’t know yet. The grant committee has been looking at successful child care models in other communities to figure out what could work, “in addition to identifying funding opportunities, such as social impact or tax-exempt bonds, tax credit programs, business consortium models, and the like,” she said.

The foundation will face competition from three other counties in this first round of grant funding from the Lilly Foundation, during which $1 million will be awarded. Entities can apply for three rounds of funding, up to $250,000 per round. Last week, Miller didn’t know yet how much money the foundation would be requesting for this project.

At least one other local group, the Brown County Regional Sewer District board, also plans to apply this round. That group would use the money to help create a wider sewer plan for the county. Lack of access to sewer has been cited as a concern that could hamper future business and home development.

Other Brown County entities besides the community foundation can apply for ROI grants, and that’s not something that is widely known, Miller said.

Applications are due by April 15.

“(Applications) can come from any other group that has identified an area where they can help,” she said. “That’s been my challenge is trying to get the word out to people so they know, though the Brown County Community Foundation has been leading the effort … as long as it’s an activity that was identified in our (Quality of Place and Workforce Attraction) plan, certainly, any other group can apply for funding.”

The need

The foundation’s grant committee is still gathering Brown County-specific data for how child care availability is affecting the local work force. However, state sources have some data from the past few years.

As of 2017, Brown County had no licensed child care centers and only four licensed child care homes, according to the Indiana Youth Institute.

In 2018, the Indiana Early Learning Advisory Committee identified five known “family child care” homes and three school-based child care centers — which are the preschool programs in Sprunica, Helmsburg and Van Buren elementary schools. Four of the “family child care” homes were enrolled in Paths to Quality, a statewide rating and improvement system, and one was rated as “high quality,” the report said.

For each 100 children ages birth to 5 in Brown County, only 10.7 spots were available in licensed care in 2017, according to the Indiana Youth Institute. Statistics about availability do not take into account any local child care centers or homes that are unlicensed. Licensed centers follow limits on how many children of a certain age can be under the center’s care and how many people are watching them, as well what the facilities provide, such as meals, space and nap time.

A single parent living at poverty level in Brown County — which is $16,460 for a family of two — would have to pay 64 percent of their income to put one child in “high-quality care,” according to the ELAC.

Of the 224 Brown County children enrolled in any known child care program in 2018, only 34 of them ages birth to 5 were in a “high-quality” program, the ELAC reported.

A program is “high-quality” if it has achieved a Level 3 or 4 in Paths to Quality, which means it provides a planned curriculum to get children ready for kindergarten and/or it is nationally accredited. Level 1 and 2 programs provide for children’s basic health and safety needs and provide a “learning environment.”

Lori’s Ton’ O Fun on State Road 135 North is the only Level 4-rated high-quality program through Paths to Quality in Brown County as of 2019, according to the state’s Child Care Answers database. Brown County Schools’ three preschools just earned Level 3 high-quality status this month.

The average cost of high-quality care in Brown County in 2018 was the third-highest among all of Indiana’s 92 counties, the ELAC reported.

Yet, the pay that some child care professionals receive is well below the county’s per capita income of $42,554. The median salary that preschool teachers received in 2016 in Brown County was $22,230, according to the ELAC. Statewide, the median salary for preschool teachers isn’t much more, at $23,370.

Paths forward?

Developing a work force to provide child care is one avenue that the grant committee is considering.

Brown County High School already offers a child development associate path of study through C4, which is a career education partnership with Columbus schools, Miller said. A lot of that curriculum is online, and students are bused to Columbus for that program. Perhaps those students could utilize the Career Resource Center of Brown County for training, Miller said.

This year, Brown County C4 students studying early childhood education began shadowing teachers in local preschool and kindergarten classrooms, said Debbie Harman, director of student learning for the school district.

Another possible partnership with the schools, which the grant committee has just started looking at, is extending summer school to open up care for preschool-aged children, ages 3 to 5. That discussion is “super-preliminary,” Miller said; they don’t know if parents would even be interested yet.

In terms of creating a community child care center, the committee has been talking with rural Perry County, where a volunteer board of directors runs a child care center that serves 60 children. It opened in 2015 partly because employers were not able to find workers. The center’s board of directors is made up of some leaders of those local businesses.

Miller said her grant committee has had a couple conversations with the folks from Perry County, trying to understand how they pulled their center together.

“It could go a number of ways with local businesses, depending on how ready they are to provide funding,” she said. “We will be talking to them.”

Before submitting this grant application by April 15, Miller said she’d like to do another “town hall meeting” to present the plan and receive feedback.

In the meantime, she said they’ve been talking to day care centers that are no longer in business — such as Nashville Methodist Church’s Parents Day Out, which was demolished in 2015 — to understand why they closed. They’ll also be talking with existing centers to understand what support they need to remain open, Miller said.