PROVINCETOWN — Outer Cape towns’ efforts to help families afford child care are being stymied by a lack of space and staffing. Some families with young children are unable to take advantage of town funds appropriated specifically to help them, while child-care providers struggle to retain staff and break even financially.

“All of the Outer Cape towns have done a lot to offset the costs of child care,” said Tessa Bry Taylor, the manager of the Provincetown Early Learning Center, which is housed in the Provincetown IB Schools. “But offsetting the costs isn’t really helpful if there isn’t space for the children.”

Though the towns’ child-care voucher programs are popular, securing a voucher does not guarantee a spot. In January, the Provincetown Schools opened a long-needed third classroom for its infant-toddler program. All the spots filled immediately.

Taylor said that the infant-toddler program currently has a waitlist of 22 children. She estimated that it takes a year for a spot to open up. There have been cases, she said, in which a child registers for the infant-toddler waitlist but ages out of the group before a spot becomes available.

“The most difficult part of my job is telling families that I don’t have child care for them,” said Taylor.

For families living in Provincetown year-round, employees of the Provincetown Schools, and other town employees, child care and early education from eight weeks through preschool is free. The Provincetown Early Learning Center also accepts vouchers from the other Outer Cape towns, which provide direct-to-provider payments to cover a substantial portion of the cost.

In Wellfleet, families can get up to $7,000 per year per child from two funds in the town budget — one for children up to 36 months and a separate one for children ages three, four, and five. Director of Community Services Suzanne Grout Thomas said that 35 children from 32 families are currently using the vouchers and that “almost every family that is eligible signs up.”

Last year, Truro residents voted to make the town’s child-care voucher program, which covers children from birth to age four, a permanent part of the town budget. Each child can receive up to $7,500 per year.

In January, Eastham’s select board unanimously voted to increase its subsidy from $2,500 to $5,000 per child starting in fiscal 2025, as reported by the Independent. But Eastham’s program covers only three- and four-year-olds.

Not Enough Spots

Provincetown’s Early Learning Center is one of the larger providers on the Outer Cape and offers infant-toddler, preschool, and prekindergarten programs. According to Taylor, of the 32 families that send children there, only one pays out of pocket.

At the Earthstar Play School in downtown Truro, director Nola Glatzel runs a smaller child-care center on the first floor of her home but faces the same problems.

Glatzel can take care of eight kids per day and does not take children younger than two. Her school is currently at capacity, is fully enrolled for the next year, and has five children on a waitlist.

Glatzel said that seven of the families at Earthstar are signed up for the Truro early education voucher, but “there’s just not enough spots.”

The solution to high demand and low supply may seem obvious: expand the child-care centers. But staffing shortages plague providers.

Glatzel said that she would like to have two classrooms, which would increase Earthstar’s enrollment capacity, but she can’t find another qualified teacher. Glatzel’s assistants make $22 per hour. Keeping qualified staff when child-care workers are historically underpaid is a constant challenge.

In the five years Earthstar Play School has been open, Glatzel says, she’s had three assistant teachers leave for medical or family reasons and has struggled to find replacements with the right state certifications.

The Cape Cod Children’s Place in Eastham, which has programs for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and prekindergartners, is also fully enrolled with 28 children and has a waitlist of approximately 40 families.

Cathy Horgan, the director of family support services at the Children’s Place, estimated that over 90 percent of child-care centers on the Cape are in a “staffing crisis.”

“We’ve always been an institution that’s been barely hanging on,” said Horgan.

Horgan said the Children’s Place pays $21 per hour for assistant teachers. Many of her employees make less money than they could serving in restaurants, she noted.

Due to a lack of staff, the Cape Cod Children’s Place provides care only from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., leaving parents working full-time jobs scrambling to find extra coverage. Before June 3, the Children’s Place infant program ran just three days per week because there weren’t enough staff members with the necessary certifications to take care of infants.

Fractured Funding

In the absence of action at the federal or state level to provide funding for universal child care, parents and providers are using a piecemeal approach to early education.

The town voucher programs have geographic requirements: one must live or work in the town to qualify. The state voucher program, which is run by the Dept. of Early Education and Care, determines eligibility by family size and income. Additionally, many families take advantage of what’s called the “Bailey Boyd fund.”

Bailey Boyd Associates, a consulting firm in Scituate, has helped many towns on the Outer and Lower Cape receive additional funding through community development block grants, which are distributed by the Mass. Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC). The EOHLC receives funds from the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development.

According to Cassie Boyd Marsh, president of Bailey Boyd, families can apply for up to $7,000 per child to help offset child-care costs from birth to age 13. A family’s gross income and size determine whether they are eligible, and towns apply for the funding collectively in groups of three or four.

The federal grants are intended to support families on a tight budget in which one parent seeks to go back to work instead of staying home to care for a child.

Many of the providers interviewed for this story admitted that separate funding from town, state, and federal programs adds to their workload and complicates their balance sheets.

“It’s definitely more challenging to invoice all these different towns and the state and Bailey Boyd, but I’m willing to do that because it’s really important to me that people can have affordable and accessible child care,” said Glatzel.

Horgan said that when parents use town vouchers, the Children’s Place receives the same amount of money as when parents pay fully out of pocket. But the state voucher program reimburses the provider at a lower rate than what it costs to run the program — and as part of the agreement to accept state vouchers, providers are not allowed to charge a family more to make up the difference.

Horgan says that it costs $56.40 per child per day to operate the preschool program at the Cape Cod Children’s Place, but the state reimbursement rate is only $39.00 per day.

“By accepting the state vouchers, you’re automatically losing money,” said Horgan. Still, the Children’s Place continues to accept them because Horgan says there’s a “moral responsibility” to help these families.

According to a 2022 study for the National Database of Childcare Prices conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the Dept. of Labor, the annual median cost of infant center-based child care in Barnstable County was $17,644 per child.

“We can’t charge families what it would actually cost to run programs,” said Horgan. The child-care programs at the Children’s Place typically run a $120,000 deficit per year, she said. Fundraising allows the organization to make up the difference.

Eyes on the Statehouse

As towns on the Outer Cape have taken action to subsidize child care, town officials and child-care providers are looking to the state to do more.

Wellfleet’s Suzanne Grout Thomas said that though the $375,000 that Wellfleet budgets for families with young children is important, it does nothing to put more money in the pockets of underpaid child-care workers.

“Each town was doing it because it did not exist on the state level,” said Thomas. “But I think at some point, the state needs to step up.”

In 2021, with money from the federal pandemic-relief CARES Act, the Mass. Dept. of Early Education and Care distributed “Commonwealth Cares for Children” (C3) grants to help early care centers stay afloat.

Glatzel and Horgan said those grants were crucial for their bottom lines, allowing them to pay rent and give staff members much-needed bonuses.

In March, the Dept. of Early Education and Care, citing “greater than expected growth” of the C3 program, notified providers across the state that their C3 payments would be dramatically reduced in May so as not to exceed the $475 million appropriated in the state budget.

Glatzel said that starting in May her C3 payments, which allowed her to accept students using state vouchers for the first time, decreased from $1,500 to $950 per month. Even so, she said, she feels fortunate. Some providers had their funding slashed by as much as 75 percent.

The Children’s Place C3 grants decreased from a high of $8,000 to $4,400 last month.

In March, the Mass. Senate unanimously passed the EARLY Ed Act, which would make the C3 program permanent in addition to expanding eligibility parameters for the state voucher program and providing a career ladder for the early education professionals.

In July 2022, the Senate unanimously passed a similar bill that would have expanded funding for early education. That bill languished in the House Ways and Means committee before eventually dying at the end of the session.

The 2024 EARLY Ed Act now sits once more in the House Ways and Means Committee, where it has not been taken up in over two months.

“Reform of early education has been a top priority for me and so many lawmakers,” said state Sen. Julian Cyr, who was an original petitioner of both the 2022 bill and this year’s bill.

“The Senate took up and unanimously passed an early ed bill much earlier in the session than last time,” said Cyr. “The hope is that it gives early ed champions in the House enough lead time to pass their own bill and reconcile the differences before the end of the session on July 31.”