A typical workday for Whitney Aschenwald begins with a drive north from Bigfork to Kalispell, where she drops off each of her two young children in separate child care centers.
After spending the day working as a writer, Aschenwald returns to both establishments to pick up each child – one nearly 3 years old, the other nearly 5 months old.
It’s a lot of shuffling, but Aschenwald is grateful that she got the two childcare spots. She feels lucky with the many local families struggling to find adequate child care.
“Now I have two dumps and two pickups from each daycare, each morning and evening,” Aschenwald said. “But I think our family is really lucky compared to a lot.”
Renee Harkins, another working mom of two, shares Aschenwald’s gratitude.
“We were very lucky at the end of the day,” Harkins said. She spent eight months on numerous waiting lists before finding places for her daughters in two different daycare centers.
He came over in the case of his youngest daughter, now 3 months old. Harkins said she finally heard about an infant care opening just a week before the birth of her second child.
“Right now there isn’t a lot available,” said Collette Box, owner and operator of the Discovery Developmental Center on Glenwood Drive in Kalispell. She has worked as an early childhood advocate for 30 years.
Box said the valley’s child care system was inadequate due to a lack of public investment in resources. Facilities are understaffed and underfunded, caregivers are underpaid, and families cannot afford to do much, but wait and hope that their child will find a place in a good facility.
Discovery charges $ 950 per month for one child to attend daycare. Box said it would be impossible to raise the rate higher because most families simply couldn’t afford it.
But that, she says, also means she can’t pay her entry-level employees more than $ 10 an hour, even if their position requires them to have a bachelor’s degree.
This makes childcare an unappealing area for new workers, creating staff shortages and ultimately “damaging the children,” Box said.
COVID-19 the pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. At a time when disrupted workplaces forced many more parents to seek child care, centers have been forced to limit capacity or shut down entirely due to concerns about the virus.
Among the local facilities that recently closed was the early childhood center at Flathead Valley Community College, where Bigfork resident Aschenwald used to take her toddler.
For four months, Aschenwald searched for a replacement while his extended family helped watch his son. Without their help, Aschenwald said she would have had to take time off work to care for him.
“Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to [keep working]”she said of her family’s contributions.” I know a lot of people in the area don’t have that luxury. “
His experience shows the greater effects of the shortage of child care services.
Box noted that the problem often goes unnoticed by people without small children, but its ramifications are felt throughout the community.
AS MUCH Businesses in Montana and across the country say they are struggling to hire workers, Governor Greg Gianforte recently ended federal pandemic unemployment benefits and began offering bonuses of $ 1,200 to unemployed Montanans who are returning to the labor market.
But there haven’t been any major new investments in Montana’s child care system, although there is plenty of research indicating the impact this can have on the state’s economy.
“About 40% of companies said the shortage was having an impact on their ability to recruit or retain skilled workers,” said an investigation report from November 2020 from the Montana Department of Labor and Industry.
“Inadequate child care costs Montana businesses nearly $ 55 million a year,” it says. a September 2020 investigation report from the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana.
With better access to child care services statewide, Montana’s economy would save about $ 232 million per year, according to the UM report.
UM researchers surveyed more than 400 Montana households with children under the age of 6. They found that 12% of respondents quit their jobs the previous year because they could not meet their child care needs. Another 15% had to switch from full-time to part-time work for the same reason.
The UM report noted that inadequate childcare disproportionately affects women and female-dominated career fields, contributing to labor shortages in the childcare sector. .
PARENTS LOVE Aschenwald and Harkins are still waiting for solutions.
Earlier this month, Gianforte vetoed bill 624, who is said to have created a task force to analyze the shortcomings of child care services in Montana.
“Montana has never had more resources available to increase access and invest in child care, ultimately reducing a major barrier to re-entry into the workforce,” Gianforte wrote in its veto note.
He cited federal pandemic relief funding and his recent decision on unemployment benefits as proof of the abundant resources available to stimulate the state’s economy. A stronger global economy, argued Gianforte, would spill over into the child care sector.
The scrapped task force joins many other official efforts to improve childcare services that have been slaughtered at local and state levels.
The Republican-controlled legislature this year nixed bills proposing the creation of a subsidy program for childcare providers and the expansion of eligibility for the childcare scholarship program. of State. He also cut funding for the state health department’s Stars to Quality program. In an email, Box said the old program, which offered incentives to providers, “has improved the quality of programs over the past 10 years.”
Box tries to keep her hopes up for the future of child care in Flathead Valley, but she’s not optimistic about the Gianforte administration’s approach. She said child care deserved to be a funding priority.
“It will take a huge, huge, billion dollar investment in child care to make the system work for families,” she said.
At a recent economic conference in Kalispell, she warned that a continued lack of investment could result in “very sad children and families.”
Journalist Bret Anne Serbin can be reached at 406-758-4459 or [email protected]
Three states make it easier for home cooks to be entrepreneurs – Reason.com
June 4, 2021
Montana Economy
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Roberta T. Mainor
With a flurry of new food freedom laws, more and more states are allowing home food producers to do what they’ve been doing since the dawn of commerce: sell their produce directly to customers without the heavy burdens. a commercial food license. This wave of legislation comes at a time when the pandemic has shaken the food industry and locked the nation into their homes, leading many astute individuals to turn to home food production as a means of making money. and serve their communities.
Oklahoma, Alabama and Montana are the latest states to deregulate domestic food production.
oklahoma Homemade Food Freedom Act, enacted on May 10, is one of the most permissive food freedom laws to date. It allows people to sell any homemade food products that are free from meat or seafood without a license, permit or government inspection. Shelf-life and perishable products can be sold direct to consumers, in person or online, and non-perishable items can also be sold in farmers’ markets and even in retail stores.
Oklahoma law also lifts the $ 20,000 sales cap that previously weighed on domestic producers. Companies can now be considered “Home feeding establishments” as long as they have gross annual sales less than $75, 000.
For many farmers, bakers and other small food business owners, the new law removes barriers to competing with large companies and will allow small local businesses to thrive. This is “a critical step in getting hardworking Oklahoma residents to embark on their home catering business,” Thanh Tran, a leader of the Oklahoma Young Farmers Coalition, tell the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian legal organization that helped develop the Oklahoma bill, “They can start directly with their own resources and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars “each year to operate a commercial kitchen.
A similar invoice was adopted in Alabama on May 6. Like the Oklahoma bill, it expands the foods home chefs – also known as country food producers – can sell, removes regulatory barriers, and lifts the sales cap that keeps small producers small.
Melissa Humble testified in favor of the bill before the Alabama Senate health care committee. Humble was a teacher and photographer, but quit working those jobs when the pandemic started because her husband was immunocompromised and it would have put his health at risk. To support his family and pay off debt incurred during the pandemic, Humble started his own home bakery business, HumbleBee Bakes, specializing in French macaroons. “Being able to start a business under the Cottage Act has helped me pay my bills and feel like an active member of society,” she wrote in her testimony.
But Humble ran into Alabama’s $ 20,000 cap on home-cooked food sales. Last December alone, she had to turn down 20 orders, or $ 400 in sales, forcing her to take another job for a living. “If I could earn more income,” she said, “I would have the opportunity to grow my business and hire employees, thus providing jobs for more people.
A 2017 IJ Study of 775 home food producers in 22 states found that a majority of them were, like humble, married women living in rural areas with household incomes below the national average. Selling homemade food gives these women the opportunity to use their skills to participate in the economy on their own terms. Now that the $ 20,000 barrier has been lifted, home bakers in Oklahoma and Alabama are not prevented by regulation from turning their home projects into small businesses.
Meanwhile, Montana Choice of Local Foods Act allows certain categories of home-made food producers, including those who operate small dairies, to sell products to individuals or to “traditional community social events” without “”permit, permit, certification, packaging, labeling, test, sampling, or inspection. “(Cottage food producers will still be required to pay $ 40 for a cottage food license and meet certain labeling requirements.) It also includes a provision extend the legal sale of raw milk by small producers.
Small local farmer Sara Richardson of JLbar farm supported the bill. “For the little ones, they usually can’t cope with the regulatory system put in place to control the big ones,” she says. Reason. “There’s absolutely no way for the little guys to compete with the big guys in the system.”
the National Association for Environmental Health possesses identified 41 invoices linked to the artisanal food industry proposed in 24 states to date during the 2021-2022 legislative session. These include new Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations Laws in California and Utah and Colorado meat deregulation law. Food freedom laws were also recently passed in Arkansas and Minnesota, and bills are under consideration in Illinois, Florida and Washington.
This barrage of bills reducing food regulations appears to be one of the benefits of the devastation the pandemic has wrought on the traditional food and restaurant industry.
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