The child care crisis in our region hit close to home recently.

My daughter and son-in-law have three boys ages 8, 6 and 4 and they are fortunate to have have access to great child care. It’s also been a major financial burden, but those are the difficult choices parents have to make when balancing career and children.

But getting summer child care required my son-in-law to camp out overnight just to be close to the front of the line in hopes of landing three of the limited slots at a local facility. They were lucky by getting the slots -- many other parents are not. They will be scrambling and juggling work schedules over the summer months.

The state of child care in the 7 Rivers Region and possible solutions were presented April 23 the 7 Rivers Alliance hosted a child care summit in La Crosse. I’d like to thank all of the panelists who participated in our roundtable discussions and for those who took time out of their busy schedules to attend.

A copy of the presentations from the panelists and the information shared at the summit is available here.

The challenges with child care are many, from the providers to the regulators to access and affordability. The summit was intended to present the facts, layout the challenges and present different solutions. What makes this complex is that no two communities are the same.

A striking challenge is the shrinking child care centers -- there has been a 75 percent decline in the number of regulated facilities in Wisconsin since 1998. That has led to having more than 7,400 more children in our local region than existing child care slots available.

Clearly not all businesses have the scale of Gundersen Health System or the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, which have created their own child care centers and are able to help with subsidies that allow them to operate. But even those centers are at full capacity.

But smaller and large businesses could forge partnerships with child care centers to discuss how they can help. A huge challenge for child care providers is finding and keeping staff. Some have the ability to add capacity if they could find the staff. Businesses could assist in that endeavor with some financial support that would allow the centers to increase staff pay -- one of the biggest barriers to finding workers. With average child care center pay in Wisconsin hovering around $10 an hour with few benefits, we need to start somewhere.

I’d also like to thank the attendees who provided feedback about the summit. Some of you said that you wanted to see more solutions. Rest assured -- so do we. The summit is not the end of the child care discussion -- it is part of our ongoing process. The 7 Rivers Alliance is committed to following on some of the ideas and taking the next steps toward solutions, which we will continue to share with everyone who is interested.

If you have any questions or concerns about this or any other topic, I am always eager to hear. 

Chris Hardie, CEO
chris@7riversalliance.org

Thank you again to everyone who helped bring our Childcare Summit to life yesterday! We had many industry professionals speak about the current childcare crisis with different insights and perspectives on how to solve this issue moving forward.

Specifically, we want to thank all of our sponsors: LADCO, The Parenting Place, and La Crosse Society for Human Resource Management.

Here are several pictures from our event which was held at the AmericInn on Tuesday, April 23rd.

We are currently trying to update our website to better fit our needs and our community's needs. A Childcare, Transportation, and Housing tab will be added soon as those continue to be a big focus for our organization. 

If you have any relevant resources in which you would like to add to any of our pages, please email us wih that information at info@7riversalliance.org. 

The Inspire 7 Rivers team has taken initiative to grow its network of employers and students. Inspire is a way to link together education and industry to help students and job seekers achieve their goals and address communities’ workforce development needs. Inspire 7 Rivers is launched in school districts within Black River Falls, Holmen, Tomah, Hillsboro and Blair-Taylor, and over the next three years, the program will expand to include school districts throughout the entire 7 Rivers Region.