SEELEY LAKE - This year, Sparrow’s Vine Parenting and Pregnancy Resource Center and the Seeley Lake Community Foundation (SLCF) received a $6,000 grant from Zero to Five Montana and the Montana Cooperative Development Center (MCDC) to help assess child-care needs and provide opportunities for people to apply for child-care licensure in the Seeley Lake community.
Zero to Five is a statewide organization that helps coordinate local collaboratives to improve child care for children and families across Montana. Seeley Lake is one of 10 communities participating in the Montana Child Care Innovations Pilot. Other communities and counties include Bozeman, Kalispell, Billings, Baker, Lewistown, Beaverhead County, Mineral County and Park County.
“A number of communities around the state have been working on thinking about new ways to help small towns overcome this hurdle of child care,” said Grace Decker, Missoula County’s Zero to Five collaboration coordinator. “We think about engaging local businesses or school districts or any local government agencies that might exist and bringing those folks together to talk about what makes sense for each of those small communities.”
Across Montana, communities suffer from a lack of access to child care. According to the Montana Department of Labor, approximately 60% of the counties in Montana are considered “child-care deserts,” meaning the supply of child care meets less than one third the estimated demand.
Seeley Lake falls under this category. Currently there is only one licensed facility in Seeley Lake which can care for up to eight children at a time.
According to Decker, many factors influence this disparity, including location, housing and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER), 32,000 parents were absent from work or were working part-time instead of full-time due to a lack of child care or the need to monitor remote learning in 2021.
While parents are rejoining the full-time workforce and their kids have returned to school, Decker said COVID-19 amplified the long-time issues of child care in rural communities. For Seeley Lake, she said some of these challenges arise from temporary housing.
“Finding a location to rent is challenging,” Decker said. “And doing it in your home is also challenging because many of the locations in the Seeley Lake area have [Homeowner Association] agreements that don’t allow a child-care business to operate.”
A homeowners association (HOA) is a self-governing organization in “common-interest” communities where homeowners collectively pay fees to maintain the units or neighborhood. According to Decker, many of the houses in Seeley Lake have HOA’s.
Decker said using a licensed facility is important because they meet basic health and safety standards for the state, establishing a baseline standard for care. It’s also important to have licensed facilities for low-income families, who are on the state child-care subsidy. If a facility is not licensed, a family cannot use that scholarship.
For rural communities like Seeley Lake, Decker said a potential way to offset the costs of the facility is to use spaces in schools and churches for child care. In Darby, for example, there’s a modular building next to the elementary school used for child care.
“It’s really important that folks who have resources of any kind are part of the conversation,” Decker said.
Sparrow’s Vine and the SLCF are currently collaborating to help bring those child-care resources to Seeley Lake. While Sparrow’s Vine handles the bulk of assessing the community needs, Claire Muller, the Executive Director of SLCF, said they provide the “back-end support.” For the last few years, Muller has been attending Zero to Five round tables to keep tabs on what’s happening in the realm of child care.
“Going to these collaborative meetings and hearing about what other people are doing around Montana I think is interesting because most places don’t have enough child care to meet the demand,” Muller said. “In some places, there are no facilities available and in other communities, there’s nobody who wants to run a child-care center. I think it’s interesting to remember that the challenges look different in different communities. I think one of the biggest challenges for Seeley Lake is finding facilities to host child care.”
According to Jama Mauldin, the executive director of Sparrow’s Vine, they are currently in the process of finding child-care providers. They are also drafting a community survey on child-care needs. The survey includes questions about parents’ work hours and commutes, annual income and what attributes they’re looking for in child-care professionals.
Mauldin said since it can be difficult to get people to fill out surveys, she scheduled a tentative public meeting at the Community Foundation building on Aug. 16 at 6 p.m.
Depending on the community’s feedback, Mauldin said they have plans to apply for more grants to allocate for child-care needs. This may include allocating money towards building a new facility, bringing a pre-existing building up to code and allowing child-care providers to have access to funds to maintain their facility.
“I think child care has been a problem for a long time here,” Mauldin said. “We want to see families stay in the area and be able to survive and grow here.”
You can find the child-care assessment survey at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckXYC3eSwjf3ViCFjrr4L3qbS29qslxwo7xjERSrKqmo7NEA/viewform
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