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Murphy – Families and social service professionals are scrambling for solutions with the impending closure of a significant day-care service in Cherokee County.
Southwestern Child Care Centers announced its closure of the Murphy facility effective Oct. 31, along with several other centers around western North Carolina.
Letters were sent to parents on Oct. 16. Southwestern Child Development Commission Executive Director Sheila Hoyle sent out a release Friday.
“Our centers serve high numbers of children who are eligible for N.C.’s Subsidized Child Care Program,” she said. “Reimbursement policies from the N.C. Division of Child Development & Early Education have required that our agency supplement the state rate in order to keep these child care centers open. We no longer have adequate agency resources to supplement the state rate.
“New county market rates were implemented on Oct. 1, 2023, and these rates offered only small support or improvement to the rural counties of Region A. Again, this is a sad decision for our agency, as providing direct child-care services to the young children in Region A is at the ‘heart and soul’ of our work.”
Other services offered by the agency are not impacted by the closures, Hoyle said.
“We will continue to deliver child-care subsidy administration, child-care resource and referral services, nurse family partnership services and other services, both regionally and statewide,” she said.
Their goal is to work with community resources in early childhood education to locate placements for all children they serve.
“Recognizing that early childhood is currently experiencing a severe staffing crisis, we will develop Job Placement Services with a goal of linking area child-care providers who are searching for child-care workers with our child-care center staff,” she said.
Hoyle said child care is extremely important in today’s economy. Funding levels do not adequately support community providers for the service they deliver daily to young families.
“The cost of child care is high, very high and parents can’t pay higher child-care fees,” she said. “Staff wages are inadequate for the work that our child-care teachers provide. Wages for child-care staff must be stabilized and increased. Child care is the workforce behind the workforce, and stable funding policies must be developed.”
During the past 50-plus years, Southwestern has served thousands of young children in western North Carolina. However, a funding shortage is forcing the entire organization to seek ways to reduce expenses.
“The perfect storm hit us, like many businesses during and following COVID,” Hoyle said. “Our day-care centers were some of the first businesses to reopen during the pandemic as we knew parents had to have day care in order to work. But when we reopened, we found that to attract employees back into our centers we had to increase our wages significantly. The cost of food and other necessities also increased dramatically.
“At the same time, it took months for our centers to fill up, as parents remained reluctant to bring their children back due to the pandemic. So our cost to provide services increased dramatically, and our revenues were lower. The stabilization grant kept us afloat. As these funds ran out, and no new funds were allocated, the current crisis ensued.”
Early childhood education has historically been underfunded. The state has a funding formula that penalizes small rural counties in the amount of reimbursement that comes from the state, according to information from the Southwestern Child Development Commission. For instance, Wake County gets $1,417 per child per month, while Clay County only receives $897 per month per child.
The state argues that it costs more to provide day care in large, populous counties. The Southwestern Child Development Commission has been arguing this for years until a couple of years ago, when the General Assembly funded a study to prove this funding formula was correct. The study found that, in fact, it cost more to provide day care in small rural counties than in large counties.
“We felt that with this new information the funding formula would be made more equitable this legislative session. In fact, Sen. (Kevin) Corbin introduced a bill, correcting this funding problem, that would have prevented our current crisis, but it did not pass,” according to the Southwestern Child Development Commission.
The roots of Southwestern Child Development are to provide child care in seven western North Carolina counties. In many counties, it was the only day-care provider for many years.
“We are devastated at having to close our day-care operation,” Hoyle said. “We are deeply sorry for that and apologize for the abruptness of this. On the positive side, we are beginning to see our communities step up and fill in this gap in day-care services.
“We are prepared to lend our expertise to help theses community resources take over day-care services in all counties. We are hopeful that eventually families will have more choices for day care than before.”
Dr. Sue Lynn Ledford is executive director at Four Square Community Action, which oversees programs for low-income families in Cherokee, Clay, Graham and Swain counties.
She has been working with other local agencies to plug the gap left by Southwestern Child Development’s closures, like in Murphy. While the closures are unfortunate, they may have positive results as local experts in the field seek alternatives.
The deadline is Nov. 1 – the day after the Murphy facility closes.