More than a year before 19-year-old Brookelynn Ruckman moved to Dillon to pursue a degree at the University of Montana-Western there was a big obstacle. Amid touring campus and prepping to move, she had to find care for her three-year-old daughter.
“It's so hard to find childcare,” Ruckman said. “I would have struggled finding someone to watch my kid, especially since I'm not totally familiar with the community yet.”
Ruckman eventually got off the waiting list for Odyssey Early Learning Center, located across from campus.
Childcare facilities around the state struggle with staffing and affordability. The challenges of finding and affording childcare seen across the state are exacerbated in rural areas, where providers are scarce and wages tend to be lower. A 2024 Montana Department of Labor report cited nearly 60 percent of counties as childcare deserts.
Ruckman now teaches at Odyssey, too. She’s pursuing a career in education and her work with Odyssey allows her to put what she learns in class into action. She is able to work, attend school and have child care.
But not all families are able to find these solutions. Grace Decker, a representative with Montana Advocates for Children, told state lawmakers in February about the challenges that many families face.
“Childcare today is not a luxury, but low and moderate-income families, often families with two working parents who are trying to do everything as they have been raised to do — right now, they are being left behind.”
Legislators are assessing bills to subsidize childcare access.
One lowers the financial threshold to qualify for Best Beginnings — a sliding-scale scholarship program that helps families afford tuition costs. Another would give childcare workers, like Ruckman, access to that program.
“Had I gotten that right away, that also would have been way more incentive for me to work here, because I kind of took a pay cut for my last job,” Ruckman says.
The bills have backing from rural providers.
Odyssey Director Kelsi McRae testified in support of these bills. She says there are unique challenges for families in her community. Many parents work in agriculture, some are single parents and others work two jobs.
“In Dillon, we have a pretty high population of, like, single-family households,” McRae said. “So those parents are already working multiple jobs to be able to afford the high price of childcare.”
The Montana Department. of Labor says the most significant unmet demand for childcare occurs in the more rural areas of the state. In Beaverhead County, the combined capacities of licensed childcare facilities can accommodate less than half of the county’s children under 5 years old.
McRae says the expansion of the state’s childcare scholarships could help.
“It would help us not only retain staff, but maybe attract people that might be fully qualified to work in a child care facility but don't have the ability to take maybe a pay cut, or have to work at the range in which we can provide them and pay for child care.”
Other communities feel these pressures too. In Big Sky, Executive Director Mariel Butan at Morningstar Learning Center runs the only childcare center in town. She says there’s often a gap between what parents can afford to pay and what the business can afford to charge.
“The people using Morningstar are like the teachers and the firefighters and the plumbers and the carpenters. We're not the wealthy visitors that people may have in mind.”
The people using Morningstar are also its employees. Today Butan offers employees who need childcare a 90 percent discounted tuition. She says it’s made a huge impact in her ability to retain staff. Without them, she faces an uphill battle of recruiting from the already small pool of qualified applicants. But this incentive also costs the non-profit $170,000 a year.
“We already have to fundraise to cover the gap between what our families can afford to pay and what we have to pay our teachers to stay,” Butan says.
Butan says legislation like the Best Beginnings expansion could narrow that gap.
“The biggest piece of leverage, in my opinion, to increasing the availability of childcare for the entire workforce is to make it a better career choice for people to be in the childcare workforce.”
Montana Public Radio is a public service of the University of Montana. State government coverage is funded in part through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
