Finding high-quality, affordable child care can be a daunting task for parents in Greenville County.
Each family faces its owns obstacles when looking for a provider. Often, parents find limited options that meet their specific needs for budget, location, hours and quality of care.
If they find suitable options, parents might spend months on waiting lists only to be rejected or pay a good chunk of their income for child care service. The median annual price of child care is $9,049 per child in the Greenville area, according to the nonprofit Children’s Trust of South Carolina.
For local parent Sandy Lesley, the most affordable option to care for her daughter was to quit her job and start a business at home.
“The one day care near me wanted $235 a week for day care, and with me working even just my 2½ days, I was barely making $200 a week part time,” Lesley said. “I would pretty much be working just to pay for day care.”
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2023 Kids Count Book, 15% of young children in South Carolina were in families in which a parent quit, changed or reduced a job because child care was difficult to find or afford.
Connelly-Anne Ragley, the South Carolina Department of Social Services director of communications, said the affordability and accessibility of child care is an ongoing issue at both a local and national level.
“The (COVID-19) pandemic has really exacerbated the discussion … and shined a different light on the needs of child care,” Ragley said.
Shortage of providers
During the pandemic, around 75% of the child care providers in Greenville County closed, said Derek Lewis, executive director of Greenville First Steps, a local nonprofit that supports children and families.
“As workers started to return to the workforce, there wasn’t a place for them to put their kids because most of the child care providers had to either close or still have severely scaled back what they did,” Lewis said.
Child care deserts have been identified across the county — especially in rural areas — where the population of children is higher than the child care spots available. Families living in these areas often must find a child care service farther away from where they work or live.
In Greenville County, there is also a need for more services for infants up to 24 months old.
Many expecting parents, such as local resident Emily Pettigrew, apply to multiple centers before their children are born, hoping that one will have an opening once they return to their full-time jobs.
“There are a lot of day cares, preschools — especially through churches and stuff — that are half-day,” Pettigrew said. “As two full-time working parents, that just doesn’t really work for us.”
Elusive affordability
Pettigrew said many of the centers she has looked at cost between $600 and $1,000 a month.
“It just all feels really expensive,” Pettigrew said. “I know that there are more expensive ones in Greenville from my research that I just didn’t even bother getting on the waitlist because it was out of our price range.”
The average cost of more than $9,000 for a year of care for each child puts the service out of reach for some.
“There is a compounding problem for low-income families,” Lewis said.
“It’s getting to the point now where it’s almost cheaper for families to stay home than it is to pay for two children to be in child care.”
Why is child care so expensive?
Palmetto Shared Service Alliance is a local organization focused on improving early childhood care and education. Operations Director Shelley Summer said the price of care depends on the program.
The operating costs of child care providers include:
- Employee salaries
- Learning materials, such as toys and books
- Cleaning supplies
- Rent and utilities
- Insurance
- Food
“If you want to be a quality program you have to have manipulatives and toys and resources and books — and all of those things add up,” Summer said. “Especially when they’re the younger ones, they destroy that stuff, and you are constantly having to replace it.”
Assistance available
Government agencies and other organizations provide assistance for families in need to help make child care more accessible in both Greenville County and across the state.
As the regulatory entity of South Carolina’s child care providers, DSS operates the ABC Quality program. The voluntary rating system encourages and supports services to provide high-quality, accessible child care.
DSS also offers financial assistance to parents struggling to afford child care.
Ragley said two scholarship programs are available:
- The Child Care Scholarship Program is for families that qualify for federal assistance such as SNAP or Medicaid
- The COVID-300 Scholarship Program is for working parents who have a gross income below 300% of the federal poverty level
“As of June 20, 2023, we’ve had 66,460 children in South Carolina that have been approved for the COVID-300 scholarship program since it launched back in October of 2020,” Ragley said.
Both scholarships can be used only at the child care providers that have participated in the ABC Quality program.
South Carolina First Steps, a statewide early-childhood initiative, also provides a scholarship program called First Steps 4K in partnership with DSS. This program allows a child to attend a free, full-day, pre-kindergarten program for 4-year-olds at more than 250 locations in the state.
To qualify for the program, a child must be:
- Eligible for Medicaid, free/reduced-price lunch or a SNAP/TANF recipient
- Experiencing homelessness, transiency or in foster care
Two other options for low-income families are Head Start and Early Head Start, federally funded programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers that are offered locally through the nonprofit Sunbelt Human Advancement Resources agency. There are 11 facilities offering these programs in Greenville County.
“It’s very comprehensive so we not (only) focus on the child as far as education, but also the family and their needs and helping them set goals toward self-sufficiency,” said Shannon Vaughn, SHARE’s director of children and family development.
Finding solutions
While there are options available to assist low-income families, the crisis will continue if there aren’t enough available child care providers.
“It’s a big problem and it’s going to be worse,” Lewis said. “We’re expecting Greenville’s population would grow by 30% in the next 15 years. People are going to be moving here with young children or they’re going to be moving here to have families. We’ve got to address this problem proactively.”
Lewis said Greenville First Steps has been working to improve access to quality child care in the county by supporting and increasing the number of available services.
In December 2019, the organization partnered with the Greenville Chamber of Commerce and the Palmetto Shared Service Alliance to launch a program that supports and recruits licensed in-home child care providers. Lewis said DSS will allow a licensed person to care for up to six children in their home.
“What we realized was that we have a large number of people who are taking care of children in their homes,” Lewis said. “So how do we help these people who are already kind of providing that service to maybe create a small business where they can generate income for their family while staying home to take care of their children?”
Greenville First Steps is also working on a new project with a group of volunteers from Furman University to find empty classrooms or space at local churches that can be converted into child care sites.
While those two efforts help, more work needs to be done to address the current child care situation.
“There’s not a magic bullet,” Lewis said. “It’s going to take a whole lot of solutions.”
The median household income in Greenville is around $65,500 and the median annual income price of child care is $9,049 per child.
According to Children’s Trust of South Carolina, single parents spend more than a quarter of their income (29.9%) on child care. In Greenville County, 30% of children live in single parent households, and 14% of children in the county live in households below the poverty line.
For families wanting to find free preschool programs in South Carolina, visit Palmettoprek.org.
Source: Greenville Journal
