Mt. Pleasant continues to look at solutions for child care shortage

MT. PLEASANT - Following a meeting on March 3, community members and business leaders in Mt. Pleasant have decided on a three-prong approach to address the lack of accessible child care in the area.

The town and county have been facing a shortage of available child care seats for young children. The Department of Human Services (DHS) has a count of close to 350 fifty seats available in the county for over 1,300 children, ages 0 to 5. The DHS's data does not include in-home providers caring for less than five children who are not required to be registered with the department.

Mt. Pleasant Area Chamber Alliance executive Vice President Kristi Ray said the group hopes to focus on supporting in-home child care providers, starting an awareness campaign and establishing a nonprofit board, who would be responsible for looking into establishing a center.

Ray, alongside Tasha Beghtol from Early Childhood Iowa will be meeting to start the process of establishing a nonprofit, which could take up to six months, Ray explained. Once established, the board will decide whether to move forward with building a center.

'We didn't want to just jump in and build a center,” Ray said.

The executive vice president said the other two focus areas are led by volunteers from the community. The group working on supporting in-home child care providers will focus on helping existing providers grow and become registered centers while the team working on the awareness campaign are tasked with helping people in the community 'understand exactly why [child care] is needed,” and to ask for the community's assistance in addressing that need, Ray explained.

The groups plan to meet again in three months to share on how they've progressed in each of their respective areas.