“There Might be a Better Way…”

These communities are turning away from the traditional Child Care Center model and opening multiple Family Child Care Home IIs instead.

Little Eagles Learning Center in Overton consists of 2 separate Family Child Care Home II programs built side-by-side in a duplex.

It’s true that rural Nebraska is in the same child care crisis as the rest of the country, but it hits different: instead of across town, parents are driving 30, 40, 50 miles or more to get their children to a safe, quality environment, or simply going without. To close that gap, many communities have opened up beautiful, well-designed Child Care Centers in town, and while that is working great for some, others have looked at the local and state regulations for what it takes to keep the center model on its feet and, understandably, balked at the cost of it all.

When the C4K team in Overton, Nebraska (population 591) assessed their community in 2021, they found they had a gap number of 35—that is, 35 children with all available parents in the workforce, and no licensed child care or public preschools that could meet their need—they set out trying to make a plan to shrink it. C4K staff member Shonna Werth, who provided technical assistance to the community for 3 years, says the team there worked hard to figure out the right plan for them, going through every possibility with a fine-tooth comb. They knew they needed to open something new, but building commercially was incredibly expensive, and there wasn’t a building in town that was a good fit to purchase and remodel. Werth eventually connected them to the C4K team in Cambridge, another community she was working with, because at the time, they were operating 2 Family Child Care Home IIs in classrooms next to each other, serving 24 children total. “I told them ‘numbers like that would make a big dent in the Overton gap,’” said Werth, “They just needed to learn more about it.”

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, a Family Child Care Home II (FCCHII) can be in a residential home or an approved site somewhere else, and can serve a maximum of 12 children with 2 staff members. Their regulations are more flexible than those of a Child Care Center, and multiple FCCHIIs can be opened in one building, provided they are operated as standalone programs with separate licenses. One reason to go the FCCHII route in particular stood out to Little Eagles Learning Center board president Brooke Puffer: staffing. “Finding enough staff members for a Child Care Center in a town this size, it’s just tough,” she says. And caring for the youngest children can be a particular challenge in terms of provider-to-child ratios—FCCHIIs can have up to 6 infants in their care, provided at least 2 are over 12 months old, as well as 6 toddlers, with only 2 staff required. For the same number of children in a Child Care Center, 3 staff would be needed at all times. Anyway you slice it, the ratios are easier to manage for a FCCHII.

One solution? Growing your own workforce. One of the many benefits of the FCCHII is being able to take advantage of the high school students who need good after-school jobs: these programs can hire them as secondary staff. “If they’re 16 years or older, they can supervise children without another staff present,” said Werth. “They have a little more responsibility than you can do with a Child Care Center license, and you can use them in ratios without another staff present.”

The Overton C4K team was sold, and set about building a duplex by the school instead of a commercial building. It was an easy sell on fundraising, because it was so responsible: their backup plan if one or both of the programs eventually had to close was to simply rent it out as housing, and the need for affordable housing in rural towns is just as big as the lack of child care. It was foolproof for the Overton team, and much more affordable: “When everything was said and done, I think we saved around a million dollars doing it this way,” said Puffer.

The idea is starting to take off in other C4K communities, too. On the western side of the state, the C4K team in Dundy County, Nebraska (population: 1,561) is also trying out multiple Family Child Care Home IIs to meet their needs, constructing a larger building on school property that will close the gap on many of their community’s needs. When it opens in August, it will house 4 FCCHIIs and 2 public preschool classrooms. “They already have 41 kids pre-registered for their FCCHIIs,” said C4K staff member Laura Kemp, who works with the team there. “McCook’s an hour away, Imperial’s 40 minutes away, they’re really on their own island out there. But the gap isn’t that big, and since the ratios are different–I don’t know, it just seems like that FCCHII model works better for some of these more rural areas.”

The cost savings don’t just stop at the building, either. “This team has impressed me so much,” said Kemp. “The conversations they have in the board meetings have been, ‘How do we raise money to offer benefits?’ ‘What are we gonna do to keep people here?’ And I think that’s really important, that they’re thinking in those terms, because a lot of centers can’t afford to even ask that question, but these FCCHIIs? It’s a different story.”

Across the state in Friend, Nebraska (population 927), a crisis was unfolding in 2023. “My husband’s family farm operation lost an employee because there was a lack of child care and a host of other employers were in the same boat,” says Friend Learning Center board president Katie Spohn, “and then we learned that our largest child care provider was closing in November. The same one who had cared for all three of my babies and for a very large contingent of everyone else’s.”

Once they joined C4K and began learning about the prospect of opening multiple FCCHIIs, the idea just took hold. The Friend C4K team decided to renovate a portion of the hospital that wasn’t being used, and will be licensing 4 separate FCCHIIs, all opening in August. They moved practically at the speed of light, reaching out to community members from the beginning to ask for their help in getting the project going. It paid off, and Spohn smiles proudly when reminded of that fact. “I mean, our community just knows–if you want to have a nice town, you have to invest in it. And this was the right way for us. In a small town, the population fluctuates,” she explains, “so you might have a really big class and then a really small class, and the idea of having a Child Care Center and keeping all the classrooms full and playing Tetris was going to be very, very difficult. This way of doing it just made sense.”

C4K communities interested in learning more about how the multiple FCCHII model could work for them can talk to their C4K technical assistance staff.

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