There is a crisis in childcare.
It’s not just Mount Vernon and Lisbon, though.
Closures in Cedar Rapids, Tipton and even Lisbon’s day care are having ripple effects in the daycares in other communities. As Bre Ties outlined last week, the calls and emails started the day after the Turtle Club announced its closure, and the Lisbon Early Childcare Center has a waitlist near 100 kids at the moment. It’s hardest for the daycare to find seats for families with kids in multiple age ranges, as they may have a seat open for the older students, but can’t find for younger kids.
Tonight (Thursday, July 14) the League of Women Voters will present the findings of their survey on childcare in the Mount Vernon and Lisbon communities, as well as a discussion with childcare providers about the situation at the Lisbon Heritage Hall.
Mount Vernon Schools, the City of Mount Vernon and Cornell College are applying for a grant with the Iowa Childcare Business Incentive, up to a $3 million opportunity, to build a new daycare center. Mount Vernon Schools would build the center and operate the facility, with the city offering tax incremental financing for construction and operation. That’s a step to increase offerings of daycare in the community, but it addresses one portion of the solution – having a dedicated center with it’s own space.
As Ties and Teresa Hines noted in interviews last week with the Sun, the other significant issue for these daycares is having employees working in them. It’s one of the reasons the Turtle Club faced when closing doors was struggling to find employees, and both Mount Vernon and Lisbon’s centers are already looking ahead to the possible staffing shortages at the end of summer.
It’s not a guarantee the community of Mount Vernon will even receive the grant, but Mount Vernon and Lisbon being denoted as a daycare desert points to an issue these communities need to work to address, and members of Mount Vernon’s city council in their discussions noted these concerns.
Part of addressing the childcare issue is getting perspective on the problem we’re all facing, and that comes with reviewing data collected from those childcare surveys collected this spring and starting the discussion on the next steps we as a community can work to fix this issue in our communities.