Why Michigan families are struggling to find summer child care for their 4-year-olds

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Finding summer child care for kids is never an easy task, but for one age, it's getting even tougher.
The state's 4-year-olds often fall into a summer care limbo and a recent policy change in Michigan is adding to the challenge, experts say.
While the state recently expanded its free pre-K program, known as the Great Start for Readiness Program (GSRP), to all families in Michigan regardless of income, the funding limits programs to the traditional school year.
As more public schools are opening GSRP classrooms, parents of these 4-year-olds are left looking for summer care once their district's programming ends around early June.
It's a hiccup that Jessi Jones faced when her 4-year-old son Oliver was enrolled in GSRP at his elementary school in Elk Rapids last year, but was too young for his school's Kids Club summer camp.
Jones and her husband, both working parents, were left scrambling without a summer option. There were only a couple day care options around her which were all already full. There was a summer program at a local YMCA but the drive was nearly an hour away. She also checked options in Traverse City and surrounding areas: all full.
Luckily, Jones was able to cobble together summer care with family members, but the experience wasn't ideal for her son.
'I felt like we lost the consistency and the routine, that's really important, especially for younger kids,' Jones said.
Some parents, especially new ones, don't know there may not be an abundance of summer options for their kids, said Norika Kida Betti, early childhood system coordinator at the United Way of Northwest Michigan.
'Sometimes parents assume 'if this is what everyone is doing, there must be a solution developed for the summer, right?' ' Kida Betti said. But come the end of their child's GSRP program, they find there isn't, she says.
As the state expanded GSRP to be universal, both day cares and school districts have been opening more GSRP classrooms and the program is limited to a maximum of 36 weeks in both.
But in day care, there isn't a drop-off in summer care. Day cares typically run year-round, so once GSRP programming ends, they offer tuition-based summer care.
Most school districts don't, and come summer, there are limited available options for 4-year-olds. Public schools typically only offer summer programs for school-age kids 5 and older, day cares are already filled up with kids who've been there all year, and summer camps for young kids are few and far between.
Last year, there were about 40,000 kids in GSRP with 71% of them enrolled in school-based programs, according to Michigan State University's annual GSRP evaluation report.
Advocates say school districts need to get better at addressing the needs of the families with young kids they're now serving. They say the state should also consider funding GSRP for the entire year, so that parents aren't left searching for just three months of care before their child enters kindergarten.
MiLEAP said the Legislature funded GSRP as a school-year program but did not comment on the rationale behind doing so.
The child care ecosystem varies by county so the summer care crunch for 4-year-olds is worse in some areas. In some communities, GSRP classrooms are primarily in school districts. Other areas have more day care-based classrooms for 4-year-olds.
The state wants to create more slots in both, so that there's a diversity of options, including year-round care. For this reason, the state requires that Intermediate School Districts, who receive GSRP funding, allocate at least 30% of the funding to existing day cares.
But partnering success differs by county, according to Kelly Sheppard, the early childhood consultant for Jackson ISD.
In Jackson County, 84% of the available GSRP slots are offered through day cares and other community early childhood sites, according to Sheppard. This means that, come summer, when school-based GSRP programs end, these day cares have available slots. Sheppard said she hasn't heard from parents complaining of lacking summer care for their 4-year-olds.
But in Lenawee County, currently, only 34% of GSRP slots are delivered through day cares, according to Christie Cadmus, early childhood consultant for Lenawee ISD. Cadmus says the county continues partnering with more day cares each year to get more classrooms open.
Often, parents struggle in the area to find 4-year-old summer care because there just aren't enough day care-based spots, said Brigid Wilson, who manages four different day cares in the area.
When parents who take their kids out of her day care setting to place them in a school-based program come back seeking summer care, she has to tell them that their spot was filled.
'Parents are giving up year-round child care by participating in school-based universal pre-K,' Wilson said. 'They're losing summer care.'
Another issue is the expansion of GSRP in school districts has caused day cares to take a financial hit. Families opt to put their 4-year-olds in school districts where they will eventually attend kindergarten, pulling this age group out of day cares.
It is not sustainable for a day care to run without 4-year-olds. The age group has higher ratios of kids to staff, meaning they're less labor intensive and help offset the higher costs of infant and toddler care. Because programs can't operate without the income the 4-year-olds bring in, they close, Wilson said.
These are the kinds of problems Kida Betti said the increased availability of free pre-K can bring about.
'There are always unintended consequences that we as a system haven't had time to respond to yet or there isn't a solution developed alongside the change that would make it easy for families to find that summer care,' Kida Betti said.
She said the ultimate result is a tighter market 'with less wiggle room' for families to find summer specific care available for their 4-year-olds.
While some schools with GSRP classrooms do run summer programming, those who do are rare.
Dawn Koger, early childhood consultant for Oakland Schools, said typically, 'school districts think of GSRP as preschool and look to Community Based Organizations to provide child care.' Community Based Organization is the official term for day cares.
Wilson said she thinks it's also a staffing issue, because teachers working in a school-based GSRP classroom want their summers off like the rest of the teachers often get in a public K-12 school system. Koger said early education teachers in GSRP classrooms are also often part of school unions whose contracts typically dictate either 185 or 95 working days a year.
Still, Wilson said she doesn't understand it.
'I don't know why they close,' she said. 'It's desperately needed and it's financially responsible to keep them open.'
Many districts, however, do lose money running summer care for kids under 5, according to Kristin Witt, co-director of Great Start to Quality at the United Way of Northwest Michigan. Depending on variables including parents' ability to pay and the cost of teacher wages and benefits, summer programming is in many cases, 'an expense that a school knows they will have to absorb,' Witt said.
Whitmore Lake Public School District, for example, ran a summer camp that accepted kids starting at 3 years old for around six years, but eventually stopped because it was too expensive, according to district early childhood program director Sue Wanamaker.
Wanamaker, who has worked in the Whitmore Lake Public School District for 20 years, said her district has long understood that having year-round programming for 4-year-olds beyond GSRP would be ideal, so that there's no gap in kids' education or routine. But, "it just wasn't cost effective to keep running it," she said.
"Parents have expectations for the summer, they expect fun things like field trips," Wanamaker said. "All those big things cost money."
Whitmore Lake wouldn't have the funding to run free summer programming for 4-year-olds, but even if the district charged parents, the question remains "is it really worth it?" when you'll likely lose money, Wanamaker said.
Though they stopped running their summer camp, Whitmore Lake continues to have a summer option for 4-year-olds through a Montessori school in the district. But Wanamaker said the majority of her school's GSRP kids don't go there in the summer because it's expensive, with monthly rates starting at $900. Instead, Wanamaker says she sees many of her school's GSRP kids stay home for the summer with relatives.
Kida Betti said another part of the reason more school districts don't offer year-round care is because doing so would require them to expand their child care license. Child care licensing can be a time-consuming and expensive process — more onerous than getting licensed for a 5-year-old and up summer camp, Witt said.
Though it can be difficult to expand a license, the bigger issue, Witt said, is desire to do so. She said school districts across Michigan need to take responsibility for all children in their communities, not just school-age kids.
'Kids don't just show up on Earth at age 5,' she said. 'My feeling is, it's the school district's responsibility to really think about supporting their families.'
Witt believes this starts top down with Michigan's Board of Education setting the tone by adopting a philosophy that considers kids under 5. County ISDs could then work with districts to bring them into the fold so they can expand services like summer care for this age group.
Her advice for districts is to think ahead and preemptively expand their licenses so, come summer, they have summer care for their kids.
'Any place a child might want to be, get that space licensed,' Witt said.
In an ideal world, Koger said, GSRP could be funded year-round. While MiLEAP did not comment on future GSRP funding changes, agency spokesperson Aundreana Jones-Poole said in an email that school-based GSRP programs looking to provide summer care could offer families 'private pay options' or use existing funding sources including the state's Tri-Share program — which splits child care costs among families, their employers, and the state — and the state's child care subsidy program to do so.
As a parent who went through it, Jones said year-round GSRP programming or even the option to add days in the summer would have supported her family's needs.
'To know there was an accredited place, that you're comfortable with your kid going, that's offered in the summer would be incredibly helpful,' Jones said.
Beki San Martin is a fellow at the Detroit Free Press who covers child care, early childhood education and other issues that affect the lives of children ages 5 and under and their families in metro Detroit and across Michigan. Contact her at [e-mail].
This fellowship is supported by the Bainum Family Foundation. The Free Press retains editorial control of this work.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan's free GSRP leaves summer child care gap for 4-year-olds