I’m in the middle of yet another college course that I needed to take hoping that one of the three different channels for education will be approved by state licensing. Another story for another post, but what I am doing is embracing the time of opportunity to learn. You might see it as a rant, but I hope you might learn a thing or two as well as I share below my assignment (read… this is probably going to be longer than a normal post) for a Quality Improvement Plan for my Administrator Credential class.
Today’s Lesson about the Childcare Trilemma
I didn’t know the term trilemma was used to describe the early childhood education challenges, but it makes sense. There are three solid components and each with potentially unfavorable consequences to the others. Of course, I knew the different areas as it is one of the big reasons Matt and I decided to venture into the industry. We want to make a difference in each of the equally important facets that are all very much connected and rely upon one another.
Quality
Having a clean and safe environment was one of the highest rated items that families answered in our survey. This isn’t just the building or rooms, it encompasses the toys, the playground equipment, the art supplies, the materials to explore and learn, everything!
Top-Notch quality can’t be forgotten with the food that is served, pest prevention, curriculum/learning materials, books, safe disinfectants, the continuing education of the team, the list goes on. There is not one area here that can be cut back on. We aren’t talking about 24 lb. bright white paper or ignoring sale items, just keeping quality with what is needed is an investment.
Affordability
I don’t think it is a surprise to anyone that some people are expected to pay more than their mortgage payment for their child to be in care while the parent(s) are working! Go back and read that again. Come on! Even if families are able to, and I would imagine most would say they will do whatever they have to in order to provide the best for their child(ren) but should it be this way? No. If you shop around at the various early childhood learning centers, you will find that the prices don’t vary a lot in tuition pricing and it’s important to look at what is included with the costs (learning environment, food, vacation days, multi child discount, etc).
Compensation
Qualified and experienced teachers and team members should be recognized with a fair pay. In Waukesha County, the average hourly wage is $16.50, which is 5% above the national average, according to Indeed.
Kindergarten teachers average pay in the area is about $30/hour.
I thought it would be informative to see what types of jobs you can have to make around $17/hour. Here is what Google result I got:
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Crew member at Wendy’s or McDonald’s
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Delivery driver for Domino’s or Topper’s Pizza
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Oil change team member or car wash crew member at Take 5
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Sales associate at Pet Supplies Plus
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Hotel laundry attendant at Hilton Garden Inn
These are all important jobs and I am grateful for all of them, but the people that lead the care for children from 6 weeks old until the time they enter public school Kindergarten are paid less than $20/hour on average! A child’s most crucial time for brain development occurs before five years old, just let all of that sink in. It’s ridiculous, we need to make this better.
Here is the Trick
The challenge here is to figure out how to improve these three different areas with the least amount of impact to the others. There isn’t one area here that is more important – they are all dependent upon one another. You can’t just throw more money at one without taking from another. We will not bend on quality at Just Like GRAMMY & POPPOP’s, it’s just not what we are willing to do. We want our program to be the one mom groups are talking about because of our excellence in all aspects.
What we are doing
First, we are helping by opening our early learning center, Just Like GRAMMY & POPPOP’s, in Pewaukee. When we were forming our business plan, we kept asking each other why there is such a difficulty in finding care. Why aren’t more people opening centers to help? Once we continued down our path, the question to each other became a statement, “this is why more people don’t this!” It’s been nothing less than a grueling process and full of challenges, but we have kept in mind when we see the smiling faces around us as our reward. The smiles on the children, families, and our team is the reason we have continued to overcome the roadblocks and tread on.
Continually, Matt and I have a lot of foundational beliefs that we share and we both believe in data driven decisions that are in partnership with qualitative feedback. It comes very natural to us both and we believe this is imperative to put within our business. We have already seen a very valuable lesson in how important this is and we haven’t even opened yet! We both felt that one of the items we needed to offer to give great quality was live-camera feeds to parents where they can ‘drop in’ at any time and watch what their child (and the class) was doing. Matt spent time researching and had a few demonstrations just about ready to make a decision when we got the results of a quality survey we did ranking different features of a childcare with our sphere of influence. We had no plans of this informing the decision about the live-view, but it did. The results were that live-views were ranked at the bottom of quality! There were different reasons why this was not something families wanted, but we were shocked and pivoted immediately. We will have cameras for security monitoring, but not live-views. We almost spent money where we thought was what families wanted and we would have gotten it wrong had we not listened.
Gaining the perspectives to help inform decisions of all of the customers (children, families, and team members) is vital. They should be the ones to help define what quality, affordability, and fair compensation means for Just Like GRAMMY & POPPOP’s. Then we continually iterate based on what we hear… it’s just like software development. We hope you will join us as we help to make a difference in the early childhood education trilemma with what ideas you have.
