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I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It's basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.
If you're paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that's $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.
But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there's a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.
And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.
And then there's the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.
So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I'm thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)
Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there's basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.
MBA consultant:
Increase the ratio to 35 kids per teacher, add in a minimum wage helper to assist, and have an intern work reception while building the website. Extra services are subscription add ons.
Boom
You would need to change federal law to do that. In other words: that would literally take an act of congress.
Or, hear me out here, fix the economy so that people don't need between 2 and 3 incomes per household to survive.
How could we possibly subsidize child care? We've got genocides to fund, and that's WAYYYY more important /s
Childcare should be subsidized by the government
It is. Ever heard of TANF and other CCW programs?
You mean the programs that Republicans defund every chance they get, and are constantly trying to eliminate? Those programs?
If only ~30% of the population was able to learn something (or oftentimes simply admit they're wrong) and stop voting against their interests, we wouldn't have to be constantly worrying that these programs are going to go away and/or get starved.
People literally voting in the people who will (and have in the past) taken food directly from their own childrens' mouths. It's infuriating to see. Then when it happens, they'll find a way to blame "liberals."
Yet they remain...
Those programs are income limited and don't really provide much support compared to the cost of child care.
Cost of child care
I my state, child care runs between $1,500 and $2,200 per month ($18,000 to $26,400 per year) per child (I pay about $1,800 per month).
TANF benefits
TANF benefits are income based. They decrease as income increases and end at $75,000 household income.
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The maximum possible benefit of $592 per month ($7,104 per year) is provided for a family with one parent and two children with zero income.
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If that single parent earns $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year) their benefit drops to $330 per month ($3,960 per year).
Availability of care
To top that off, child care facilities are not required to accept TANF because it places limits on how much they can charge. Most place limits on the number of TANF recipients they will enroll and some simply don't accept TANF.
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