Putnam proposes free early childhood educator program, business assistance

ST. CLOUD — Each day comes with twists and turns for Love and Learn Childcare Academy business partners Charla Attarsaheli and Becky Waytashek. The two child care professionals juggle providing an individualized experience for their students while also managing the logistics of running a small business.

After a day’s work at the academy, the two small business owners take their work home with them, making it difficult at times to establish a healthy work-life balance.

Child care facilities across central Minnesota are experiencing these struggles, and Senator Aric Putnam (DFL-St. Cloud) has been exploring ways to address it. Now, he might have found a solution.

Putnam introduced two bills this April looking to provide relief. One bill would provide business management solutions to child care business owners while the other bill looks to create an online early childhood development professional educator program.

“Child care is a huge issue in greater Minnesota, especially in our region,” Putnam said. “My district is weird because it’s urban, suburban and rural simultaneously with a regional center. Child care is one of those things to see some of the different challenges in rural and urban areas and we can combat some of those challenges at the same time here.”

Minnesota’s child care crisis

Putnam’s bills come as roughly 81% of child care providers believe Minnesota’s child care industry is in crisis, according to a March 2024 survey by the Minneapolis Fed and First Children's Finance.

This comes as payroll and food expenses increased for many providers this year. Despite payroll expenses increasing, the survey shows a shortage in child care educators with centers being unable to fill roughly 700 jobs statewide.

Business management solutions

Putnam would like to allocate $6 million from the 2025 Workforce Development Fund to create a program connecting child care businesses with business management vendors. These vendors would provide the businesses services, such as marketing, enrollment support, finances, attendance tracking, taxes, daily activity and family communication, according to the bill.

“Shared services are kind of like taking all the tedious stuff off the plate of the people who do daycare, and making it cheaper for them to do what they do because it's brutal,” Putnam said. “For example, there’s one person in St. Cloud who is good at doing taxes for child care centers. We would hire them to work with all of the child care centers so business owners don't have to mess with that.”

This could help business owners like Attarsaheli and Waytashek who spend hours going over licensing and other business functions. Love and Learn Childcare Academy currently spends $850 a month on marketing, including advertising for prospective students and recruiting staff members, so this bill could provide the educators a fiscal relief, Attarsaheli told the St. Cloud Times.

Professional educator program

One way Putnam hopes to address the child care educator shortage is by creating an online early childhood professional educator program. Putnam wants the program to be free for those interested and would like to allocate $1.5 million from the 2025 Workforce Development Fund toward the project.

Putnam said the shortage is in part due to the cost of taking child care courses to become an educator. He said the industry’s low wages make going into the trade a difficult investment to make.

“Who is going to go into debt for a job that pays roughly $14 an hour?” Putnam said.

The average wage in Minnesota for a preschool teacher is $17.46 an hour and $12.06 for a child care worker, according to a 2020 report by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

Putnam’s proposed program would cover a child’s development from birth to age three, the bill states. It would provide instruction via synchronous and asynchronous tools, such as videos, interactive games, knowledge checks and writing components. Coursework would be available in both English and Spanish.

The program’s entirely online component has received some backlash from the child care community, however, professionals are happy to take what they can get. Those skeptical of the strictly online element wish there was an in-person component to prepare participants for the classroom.

“It's really hard to just take over a classroom and think that all the kids are gonna listen, you do have this picture in your mind that you have the education,” Waytashek said. “When you walk into a classroom, it's completely different.”

Attarsaheli said the program should consider adding a volunteer or internship component to allow program participants to get into the classroom, even if it’s as simple as reading a book to students.

“​​Volunteers could come in and read stories, help at lunchtime, go out on the playground and play with kids out there,” Attarsaheli said.

Staffing can be difficult for the two St. Cloud business partners. They said if a teacher calls in sick, and they can’t find a sub, they have to jump into the classroom themselves and take more work home with them at the end of the day.

Despite the challenges facing Minnesota’s child care industry, Attarsaheli and Waytashek said they love their line of work and seeing families work together in fostering youth. However, the two couldn’t do it alone.

“At the end of the day, we are very fortunate because we have each other,” Waytashek said. “Even though there's two of us, there's a lot of times when we take administrative work home and do it when we are not technically working.”

Putnam’s professional development program is currently being considered by the Health and Human Services Committee while the business management solution bill is being considered by the Jobs and Economic Development Committee.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: St. Cloud's Putnam proposes free early childhood educator program