(5/17/99)

A national study one year ago portrayed a crisis in child care. While Utah ranked well among other states, too many families still cannot come up with quality child care. News Specialist Jed Boal has the story.

Child Care is a persistent concern for most Utah parents. Many families rely on grandparents or other relatives. Other parents stay at home. But, most families must find child care outside the home.

Here's the problem:

160,000 Utah kids have both, or their only parent working.

But, there are only 35,000 licensed child care places.

The constant complaint among parents? Affordable, quality child care is not available.

Jennifer Christiansen, Utah Children's Development Coordinator says, "We just need to find some kind of system that will raise the quality of child care, will raise the income of child care workers, and that will help to meet the needs of families."

In order to answer that critical need, many Head Starts now have all day classrooms, and some of them are also forming a partnership with child care.

Heidi Rojas, of Head Start, says, "We're able to serve more children, because we're not having to pay for the services. We're sharing them with other agencies. And then we help those agencies expand into doing child care and taking care of their clients' kids."

The partnership enables Head Start and the Child Care Agency to share costs and lower costs for parents.

It helps, but it doesn't solve the problem, which will likely get worse.

Under welfare reform, more parents will head to jobs that will not cover child care.

Despite government initiatives and innovative programs, day care providers still say it just isn't working for many parents.