Opinion: Families and Providers Deserve More Notice When Child Care Programs Close

Yahoo

19-03-2025

Imagine getting an email that your favorite restaurant has decided to close at the end of the month. That's sad, but not life-changing news. Now imagine getting an email that your kid's child care center is closing down in a few weeks — or worse, being met with a padlock at drop off. That's a five-alarm fire. One little-noted consequence of America's ongoing decision to treat child care as a market commodity like a restaurant is that customers (in this case, young children and their families) often get little to no notice before their world is turned upside down. That should change.
Abrupt closures are the reality for far too many early care and education programs. In recent months, Guidepost Montessori, a network of more than 130 Montessori-inspired child care programs and schools serving children ages birth to 18, has shuttered more than 16 sites and is on track to closing around one-third due to financial struggles and an inability to pay rent; in each of these cases, parents and educators have gotten at most a month's notice. Some received an email the night before landlords changed the locks.
The short-notice aspect of child care closures is not limited to for-profit chains. Independent, community-based, and nonprofit programs also frequently provide meager notice. In February, Thrive Early Learning Academy, an independent center near San Antonio, Texas closed with zero warning, with the owner writing that due to staffing challenges, 'It is with a heavy heart that we announce the temporary closure of Thrive, effective immediately.' Last year, Rockford Day Nursery, a 100-year-old center in Illinois had a similarly sudden closure, as did the program attached to Salem Baptist Church in the small South Carolina town of Aynor.
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A sudden child care closure can create immense stress for parents and staff. In 2024, Molly Dickens, a stress physiologist, co-authored an op-ed with reproductive psychiatrist Lucy Hutner in which the pair recounted the story of Julia Sachdev, a mother of two young children who got an email that her kids' preschool was closing in a month. They wrote: ''It was so stressful,' reflected Ms. Sachdev. 'There was this suffocating anxiety that ruled my day. I couldn't concentrate on other things. It kept me up at night.'' Dickens and Hutner noted the negative effects of chronic stress on parents and children, and also cited research that child care precarity — a state of insecure and unreliable child care — 'has been linked to negative mental health outcomes for mothers for at least six years afterward.' They underscored that 'Unpredictability itself is a source of stress. Even when parents manage to secure care for their children, it can be unreliable, and they never know when it might go away.'
The reasons for rapid child care closures vary. In some cases, as with Guidepost, it may be financial problems leading to nonpayment of rent or other business failures. In other cases, as with Thrive Learning Academy, a lack of staffing means the program cannot legally operate. And in others, circumstances may be beyond a program's control, as when a landlord decides not to renew a lease.
While it is instructive to compare the closure of child care programs to the closure of public schools, it's important to recognize that this is a case where the lack of a public system really rears its head. A public school closure typically involves a months- to years-long process that is often painful and requires a large amount of meetings and discussion. That's not the case for most child care programs. The government cannot force a private business or even a nonprofit to stay open indefinitely, and the overwhelming majority of child care programs in the U.S. fall into these categories. That doesn't mean, however, that there are no public policy tools.
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First, it's important to note that if a private business that serves a social function is closing, the government often requires reasonable notice. Banks are a good example: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation legally requires banks to give customers 90 days notice prior to closing a branch. Skilled nursing facilities, too, must provide at least 60 days notice and a plan for relocating residents, as mandated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Another challenge is that unlike other industries, there is no rescue mechanism for failing early care and education programs — but there could be. When systemically important companies are risking closure, the government often steps in. For example, when big financial institutions and car companies were flailing during the 2008 fiscal crisis, the federal government provided a bailout. When a public school district's financial situation is dire enough, it typically enters state receivership, meaning the state takes over governing authority in exchange for filling the funding gap, as has happened in districts such as Oakland Unified and Detroit Public Schools. In short, if the social impact of a given service failing is significant enough, the compelling public interest for government intervention is well-established.
While a mom-and-pop child care center or even a medium-sized chain like Guidepost Montessori doesn't rise to the level of systemic importance as a General Motors, they provide critical support to families and children, and when one of them closes, it has rippling impacts on entire communities. Yet there's currently no public recourse whatsoever in child care. There is no established mechanism for Colorado or its cities, for instance, to step in and purchase the shuttering Guidepost facilities at a discount, turning their operations over to a trusted nonprofit or community-based organization. This is an area ripe for policy entrepreneurship — surely some type of mechanism such as a trust fund or loan fund could be established that would keep the centers' doors open, even if the ownership changes hands.
There are other potential policy actions. While the difference between 30, 60 or 90 days isn't massive when you're talking about the supply scarcity that marks child care, states requiring a more robust amount of notice to families and staff would at least offer more breathing room to seek alternative arrangements. And if there were more protections in place to ensure that landlords leasing their spaces to child care programs had to give more notice if they planned not to renew — say 6 months — that could offer program leaders a more reasonable runway to find a solution.
Finally, program failures do not happen out of the blue. There are typically early warning signals along the way. If states established — or improved — the lines of communication with child care programs and offered guidelines or requirements around how to share these warning signals sooner, there would be more time for states to implement supportive strategies to help struggling providers.
For example, regulations could be put in place to require licensed programs to alert the state when a staffing shortage reaches a critical level in which one or two more departures will drop them below the legal minimum, forcing a closure of classrooms or the entire site. For this issue, states might consider having an 'emergency pool' of retired directors and educators who could be called on to maintain operations until the situation is resolved. Similarly, large chain programs could be required to share audited financial statements with the state on an annual basis so that the state has a sense of their general financial health and risk of collapse, given the outsize impact of multisite closures.
There are various levers to pull, but the status quo is untenable and policy change is needed.
Families and child care educators deserve the confidence and peace of mind that the rug is not going to be suddenly pulled out from under them, and young children deserve maximum caregiver stability that promotes their healthy development. We've allowed sudden closures to be a fact of life in the U.S. child care system for far too long. That's a policy choice; it's time to make a different one.