Grace Decker, Lee Enterprises - Mar. 1 2025
Like most Montanans, you’ve probably heard that our state is experiencing a child care crisis. Elected officials and political candidates list “child care” right alongside “housing” and “property taxes” as problems that need solving for Montana’s working families.
The Montana Advocates for Children, a coalition of statewide organizations advocating for a robust and coordinated system of early care and education, agree: we DO have a child care crisis.
We have a pay crisis: With a statewide median wage of only $13.99 per hour, child care workers are paid some of the lowest wages of any industry, unsurprisingly leading to shortages of child care workers across Montana.
We have an availability crisis: Montana has only half the child care slots we need for children 0-5, and only one-third of the slots needed for infants and toddlers.
We have an affordability crisis: Child care costs a family between $9,100 and $11,700 per child, per year, on average, putting the average cost for a family with two children well over $20,000 per year.
The net impact? We have a workforce crisis: At least 66,000 Montanans are not as fully employed as they would like to be because of challenges with child care.
But, among all the interrelated crises of the child care system that need fixes, there’s one that ISN’T at the top of the to-do list: rewriting our state’s child care regulations in ways that make them more confusing for providers and potentially less effective at ensuring safe and consistent care.
Senate Bills 269 and 285 would significantly weaken our state’s child care licensing and regulatory infrastructure. These bills would do away with the rules and regulations developed and revised over decades of experience, and informed by input and feedback from parents, child care experts and practitioners. Instead, providers would be expected to comply with vague standards without any objective measures for compliance. SB 269 and SB 285 seem to have been developed with little or no input from child care providers, parents, or licensing experts.
What parents, providers, and experts HAVE said loud and clear is that they want action that makes safe, reliable, quality child care more affordable for families, and more widely available because the people who work in the field can make a living doing it. The Legislature will also consider two bills that would address the REAL child care crisis.
House Bill 457 would expand eligibility for the Best Beginnings Scholarship program to make care affordable for more families.
House Bill 456 would provide eligibility for Best Beginnings to child care workers — a smart and targeted strategy to improve recruitment and retention to the “workforce behind the workforce.”
Child care DOES need attention and problem-solving at the state level, in the form of policies that make safe and reliable child care affordable for more families; policies that ensure enough child care exists for families who need it; and policies that help child care programs recruit and retain quality staff. As experts working directly with child care small businesses, families, and workers, we urge the legislature to move forward with HB 457 and HB 456 which provide concrete and meaningful solutions to our state’s very real child care crisis.
Montana Advocates for Children; Butte 4Cs; Catalyst Montana; Central Montana Child Care Alliance; Child Care Resources; Family Connections; Greater Gallatin United Way; Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies - the Montana Coalition; Montana Afterschool Alliance; Montana Association for the Education of Young Children, Montana Budget and Policy Center; Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; Montana Family Childcare Network; Montana Head Start Association; Raise Montana
MBPC is a nonprofit organization focused on providing credible and timely research and analysis on budget, tax, and economic issues that impact low- and moderate-income Montana families.