How do you pay child care workers what they are worth?

With its stated mission to “maximize the status of the health, safety, education and care of children (prenatal through 5 years) and their families,” the DHLW Early Childhood Area board has a lot of ground to cover.

The 15-member board assists with funding and facilitating a number of early childhood initiatives in Des Moines, Henry, Louisa and Washington counties.

“The board is charged with maintaining a community plan, always assessing what’s going on in the community and what are the needs of children and families,” Early Childhood Area Director Tasha Beghtol said. “How can we provide services or fund services that are meeting those needs?”

Beghtol said that the board operates on an annual budget of approximately $1 million, which funnels to the organization from the Iowa Department of Management, the Department of Human Services and the Department of Education.

Supporting child care is a large part of the board’s work.

“We have supported the Mt. Pleasant Community Childcare Center and the Burlington Early Childhood Center as they worked to open up this year,” Beghtol said.

For the current fiscal year, which began July 1, the fledgling Mt. Pleasant Community Childcare Center received $72,000 from the board.

Beghtol explained that the money helps subsidize salaries at child care centers while they get off the ground.

“Right now is that there’s a lot of energy and effort going into creating new child care centers like the one in Mt. Pleasant,” she said. “The challenge is finding the workforce to come and be child care providers.

“There’s a lot of demand on making sure that there’s high quality child care and that means high quality staff. It’s no secret that child care is insanely expensive for families, yet we don’t pay our child care staff nearly what they’re worth.”

She said that overcoming that issue is a challenge.

“How do you pay those staff what they’re worth as professionals, as early childhood educators, not babysitters?” she said. “At the same time, there’s that cost to provide a quality service. You can’t push that cost 100 percent onto the families, because then it’s just going to become completely unaffordable.”

The board used to fund the WAGES program, which offers six-month stipends to child care workers depending on their level of education.

“At the state level, they picked up the funding with some of the CARES money,” Beghtol said. “Our board can find other programs and other gaps to fill in.

“By not funding WAGES, that’s really helped us to continue to support the Burlington Early Childhood Center and the Mt. Pleasant center.”

She said that the board is able to provide funds to the centers to help cover salaries while the centers get up and running.

“We’re able to support the staff salaries so payroll is not going to bring them down right away,” she said. “Slowly as they build their business and become more self-sustaining, we hope to be able to back out of that.

“Our goal is to help child care providers get started, find that quality, establish that program and do all those good things without having the full weight of payroll on their backs as they learn the business.”

The board also funds the Family Connection program, which operates out of the Henry County Extension Office.

“That program does parenting education, classes, group events, one-on-one home visitation with parents,” Beghtol said. “It is absolutely free of charge to those parents. We’re really able to serve a lot of folks.”

While originally just a Henry County program, it recently expanded to cover Washington County as well.

This year, the board provided just over $230,000 for the now two-county program.

The board also funds two child care nurse consultant positions.

“That role is very detailed and oriented to working with child care specifically on health and safety improvements and making changes to their environment,” Beghtol said. “That nurse is available to them to provide intensive consultation and maybe do some assessments of their environment and connect them with resources to help them improve that environment.”

In addition, the board works with county health departments to offer dental screenings in preschools and child care settings.

Beghtol praised the board for its dedication and diligence taking on so many complicated issues.

“This local board is an amazing group of volunteers getting together and diving into some tough topics,” she said. “They tackle the issues, learn about all these things and really make the tough decisions about where to put the money.”