PROVINCETOWN — With a mix of federal and municipal funds already secured, a third infant-toddler room at the Provincetown Schools is ready to open its doors. There’s just one thing missing: the two new staff members required.
“We’re waiting for the ship to sail, but we don’t have any sailors,” said Tessa Bry Taylor, manager of the Provincetown Schools Early Learning Center. “We can’t do it without them.”
At the beginning of June, the school won $362,801 in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to open another room for its infant-toddler program, which serves children from eight weeks to three years old. With $25,000 in reserve funding from the finance committee and an additional $100,000 earmarked in the school budget, the ARPA grant brought the total capital available for expanding the program to just under half a million dollars.
With that money, the school has already done much of the legwork to set up the third room, including retrofitting a pre-K classroom in the Veterans Memorial Community Center to meet infant-toddler requirements. The goal was to be up and running by Aug. 1, Bry Taylor said.
The schools began trying to hire additional infant-toddler teachers even before the ARPA grant came in. They posted the two openings in May, internally and on SchoolSpring, the school jobs board website, according to Provincetown IB Schools Administrative Assistant Darlene Van Alstyne. The salary range for the jobs, which include benefits, is $40,000 to $45,000.
The school has received zero applications for the two positions, Van Alstyne said.
There are currently 28 families on the waiting list for infant-toddler spots. That number has jumped from five this past winter, according to Bry Taylor.
Despite the reality of an aging population, “it continues to be extremely evident to me that there needs to be more child care on the Outer Cape,” she said.
“It’s just getting worse by the day,” she told the Independent last week. “In the last 72 hours, I’ve received four additional inquiries,” she said, from parents looking to enroll their children.
The infant-toddler program is one of a handful of early childhood caregiving options on the Outer Cape. But the others — including Earthstar Play School in Truro, the preschool at Truro Central School, the Wellfleet Montessori Preschool, and My Little Island Preschool in Wellfleet — also have waiting lists, Bry Taylor said.
Provincetown’s program is free for children of residents and town employees. And with child-care voucher programs up and running in Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham, very few families pay the full per-diem price.
The program’s two existing rooms, which are staffed by four teachers, are sufficient for the 21 children already enrolled. A third room would allow the program to accept at least nine more kids.
The Outer Cape is not alone in coming up short on child-care hiring. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2022 indicate that roughly 100,000 child-care workers nationwide had left for other jobs since the pandemic began.
In the recent round of Barnstable County-distributed ARPA grants, child-care organizations received $1.1 million of the $5 million available, the largest share of any sector.
It’s a draining but rewarding profession, Provincetown Schools Supt. Gerry Goyette said. “If I retired, I would totally work up there, because they are so adorable,” he said. “I mean, you go home dead tired, but they are a lot of fun.”
