Not long ago, Tiny Tot Adventures daycare was a hubbub of children’s voices from infants all the way up to five years olds. Jess Unger ran the center in Dubois for five years and did her best to shuffle around 21 kids so their parents could work. She had a long waitlist but couldn’t afford the staff or rent to grow the school. Eventually, Unger realized she had to put an end to all that hubbub.
“You would have to charge families over $10 an hour, roughly, for their child to be a daycare, and I don't know who could afford that. I certainly couldn’t. It's almost as if the wages need to come from somewhere else,” Unger says. “There's just no feasible way that in Wyoming, at least in these smaller areas, that you'll ever have enough enrollment to make it work there. I racked my brain for a long time trying to figure out how to make it work, and I just couldn't.”
The tipping point came when the school district opened a pre-kindergarten and Unger’s whole class of older kids left. If she wanted to take on more younger kids, she’d need more teachers to adhere to state guidelines. And that meant less income to keep the daycare alive. But Unger also just felt exhausted. She changed diapers, lifted heavy children, did the bookkeeping. It started to affect her health.
“You're sick a lot because kids are just germs germs germs,” she says. “I’ve been thrown up on, I've been used as a toilet, I’ve been used as a tissue, I've had other people's child’s snot in my mouth.”
She also couldn’t pay herself enough to make it worth it. She says the real issue is that, culturally, we lack respect for child caregivers and the role they play.
“I know a lot of people who think, well, it's just babysitting,” Unger says. “To diminish it and belittle it, it's really almost borderline disgusting. Because if I asked any parent, ‘What's the most important thing in your life?’ Most of us are going to say our kids. And yet, you dismiss the person that you're letting the most important thing in your life be with, more than they’re with you? And you think so little of what that person does for a living? It's really disheartening.”
After Unger closed Tiny Tot Adventures, Dubois had zero licensed child care. The closest was Lander, 75 miles away, or Jackson, 85 miles away.
Casey Sedlack’s two boys were both forced to stay home. Sedlack runs a life coaching and organizational consulting business, plus helps run a family ranch. Right away, her family went into emergency mode. Now Sedlack does whatever she has to to keep them busy. Today, she’s got them doing chores. Seven-year-old Levi waters the flowers while 5-year-old Charlie takes care of the chickens. He rattles off his to-do list.
“Get their eggs. Check their feed. Check their water.”
But 3-year-old Tilly says no chores for her. “I was supposed to do dog poop, but I hate dog poop!”
But still it isn’t easy getting the kids settled so their mom can chat. Tilly lets out a squeal of distress. “Sorry,” Sedlack says, then heads down the hall to the kids’ rooms to settle the spat. “Hey, hey, that’s not okay. There’s no hitting,” she says patiently but with a note of exasperation.
Since the daycare closed, it’s been hard to get her work done around incidents like this. Lots of Dubois parents worked for the school district and some had to stay home with their kids. A recent study on the childcare crisis in rural America shows that about 10,000 Wyomingites aren’t able to work because of a lack of childcare. So Sedlack decided to get proactive. She joined the local Wyoming Community Foundation board and found that there was unanimous consensus that solving the childcare shortage was a priority.
“We started sort of this broader thing, saying, ‘Okay, what's the needs of the community? How can we tend to those? How can we get to know those better? What solutions are there for us, given the context of where we live and the fluctuating population of young people and young kids in the valley?’” Sedlack says.
In the meantime, she was also just looking to solve her own family crisis. She proposed a nanny share to some other families she knew.
“The answer was, ‘That's great.’ And then DFS [Wyoming Department of Family Services] is like, ‘That's illegal.’ So I was like, ‘Wait. Why?’ Why is that illegal?” Sedlack says with a laugh.
One of the barriers to solving the childcare crisis is the number of regulations the Department of Family Services has about who’s allowed to care for kids and how many. Wyoming currently says an unlicensed nanny can only care for two unrelated children at a time. Sedlack was so perplexed by this, she testified to lawmakers at a committee meeting. It worked. Now they’re drafting a bill to allow a nanny to care for up to five families.
But Micah Richardson with the Wyoming Women’s Foundation says, sure, it needs to be easier to get childcare. But lawmakers shouldn’t throw out too many rules, like child-caregiver ratios.
“We have also heard from a group of providers who are like, ‘I don't want to have one person watching 20 kids like that. That is not helpful. That is stressful.’”
Richardson says, this could potentially worsen caregiver burnout.
What she really wants to see is some state funding to help parents afford care and to pay caregivers better. She’d also like to see the state develop a statewide caregiver substitute pool that could work like a travel nursing program in which caregivers are on call to travel to a daycare to provide help when needed. Another option is a tri-care share, something proposed by Rep. Mike Yin (D-Jackson) in a recent legislative session, in which employer, employee and the state split the cost of childcare.
These options would be worth the money, Richardson says, since the childcare crisis is really a labor problem.
“It just becomes a larger economic issue of having the support we need and the people available to do the jobs in Wyoming.”
The staffing shortages are obvious when you wander around Dubois. A sign at the pizza parlor notifies customers that their hours are shortened due to a lack of staff. The motel clerk cleans room and mans the desk by herself because she can’t find help.
It’s all part of why parent Sara Domek and other Dubois parents plan to reopen Tiny Tots under a new name – Little Lambs. They’ve applied for grants and are hosting an upcoming golf fundraiser to try to raise the money. Inside, piles of toys, miniature tables and chairs, and infant beds wait for a caregiver to put it in order.
“We've got the bathrooms,” she says, giving a tour of the small house that’s been retrofitted as a daycare. “And then two rooms that can be used for nap times.”
They also plan to use a new business model they hope will be less impacted by low child enrollment and staff turnover: Little Lambs will be a nonprofit daycare.
“[A nonprofit] seemed to be the most sustainable model because you could tap into other granting sources and that's what we want. We want sustainability,” says Domek.
For months, they’ve been trying to hire people to fill positions: a director, an assistant director and a substitute to help with the burnout. Recently, they had a couple solid interviews and Domek is hopeful. For her, it’s urgent that this new daycare gets up and running. She works full time for a national conservation group and will desperately need childcare in a few months – she’s expecting a baby just two weeks from now. Otherwise, she’s not sure she can stay in Dubois.
“We've even looked at, well, do we move to Pinedale for a few years and closer to my folks and they could help?” Domek says.
When her first child was a baby, her son was on the daycare’s waitlist and her mother had to provide childcare so Domek could work. She commuted through Jackson and over Togwotee Pass to take care of him. One time, her mom got into a car accident on bad winter roads.
Domek says, even if they get the daycare open, it doesn’t solve the childcare problem permanently.
“We're just skimming the surface to meet the urgency of it. The sustainability of it is what we care about the most. This is just kind of a little fix, it’s a Band-Aid for now. It's not a long term solution.”
As for parent Casey Sedlack, she’s optimistic Wyoming can find a way to care for its youngest citizens.
“When you live in a community that's this rural, you've got to get creative,” Sedlack says. “You've got to say, ‘Okay, we've had to think outside the box to live here. How do we think outside the box to keep living here?’”
