Colorado child care centers can hardly afford to stay open, and many families can’t afford to enroll without government help

Ten empty cribs fill a canary yellow classroom at Mero Kaya’s Jump Start Early Learning Academy of Englewood. Toys are stowed neatly in brightly colored buckets. A mobile of bees and honeycombs hangs still.

Kaya and his wife, Ranada, have cozied up the space so that infants can be coddled, cradled and comforted while separated from their parents during the workday.

But where they once imagined the sound of cries and lullabies drifting out the door, the room is quiet. The Kayas can’t fill the room with infants, no matter how desperately those babies need a place to go.

Parents simply can’t afford to bring their babies because of the high cost of child care. The Kayas can’t afford to run an infant room with the staff-to-baby ratio that is required. And the government subsidies that were barely holding the child care industry together are now uncertain. 

Colorado’s child care shortage has grown so dire, and the cost of care so steep, that many parents say safe, affordable care is now out of reach. At the same time, many day care owners say they are stuck in survival mode.

Child care providers, long plagued by slim profit margins, were almost at their breaking point before a recent disruption to federal funding. Some families, even those with two working parents, are living paycheck to paycheck just to cover the weekly day care bill — if they manage find a safe, high-quality spot.

In 60 of Colorado’s 64 counties, there aren’t enough licensed slots to accommodate the number of kids younger than 6. That’s according to a report released last year by the free-market think tank Common Sense Institute, which used census data and state data to get a picture of how many licensed child care slots each county would need to serve all kids, although some of them stay home with a parent or family member, or are cared for by a neighbor or friend.

And in both densely populated counties and rural areas of Colorado, child care costs are eating up a huge portion of family income. In San Juan County, for example, people pay close to 40% of their income for child care — more than five times the share of take home pay the federal government recommends families spend on child care, the report notes.

The Colorado Sun talked to parents, child care providers and other experts across the state to learn about the consequences of this shortage and explore proposed solutions, everything from tax credits to state-funded care. Our reporting will appear in a series of stories published in the next few months. 

For the Kayas, who say the empty infant room at their Englewood center costs them $4,000 every month, the plan to keep caring for kids far into the future is punctured by mounting budget stressors and the real possibility of crippling enrollment drops this summer.

“We’re taking a significant responsibility in making sure they’re safe, they’re fed, they’re learning, they’re treated nice, they get the love and the care that they deserve,” Kaya said. “And in return, we get disappointment and lack of support.” 

The couple’s financial woes are a symptom of a chronically strained child care industry that is now creaking under pressure from new funding challenges: The federal government in January paused funding for a subsidized program called the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program that helps low-income families access child care. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut off federal funding, now on hold after a challenge in federal court, came after two dozen counties in Colorado had already stopped letting families enroll in the program because the state could not afford the nearly $70 million per year needed to roll out a flurry of new federal rules.

Among the costly changes handed down by the federal government without any federal funding is a decrease in family copays and a shift from paying providers based on attendance to paying them based on enrollment. Both changes require the state to cough up more money for the assistance program to keep serving families.

The challenges are hitting many of the state’s most vulnerable kids hardest, though finding and securing affordable child care has increasingly become a problem for families regardless of their means. Child care providers and advocates who see child care as a public good, say one way to ease the struggle for everyone is more spending by local, state and federal governments. Colorado is among the states that spend the least on child care per child, according to a report national nonprofit Child Care Aware of America released last year on state contributions to child care and early learning. That leaves few options for affordable care and few spots available at licensed child care centers for Colorado kids from infancy to age 5.

“We’ve been living paycheck to paycheck since our child was born,” said Christina Townsend, a Denver mom of a 4-year-old boy. “It’s never how I imagined parenthood would be and it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Meanwhile, rising costs and stringent state safety regulations leave many child care providers facing one constant, looming question: How long can I keep my doors open?

“I ask the question, do we have a child care system? Yeah, we have one,” said William Browning, president and CEO of Clayton Early Learning in Denver, which has room for 192 children ages 6 weeks old to 5 years old. “But is it a functional, robust system that really supports every child? Absolutely not.”

“The market can’t fix child care”

The state’s flailing child care system hurts far more than the families and providers trying to navigate it, child care advocates say, pointing to impacts that touch nearly every person and every part of a community. Obstacles to reliable and affordable care can hamper parents’ ability to work, sidelining some — often mothers — from the workforce as they opt to stay home with their children. That translates to a real economic loss locally and statewide, experts say.

And missing out on early childhood education can hold a kid back, stunting basic academic and social skills that can leave them trying to catch up to their peers once they’re in school, according to child care providers like state Sen. Scott Bright.

“Brain growth happens predominantly in the 0 to 5 age range,” said Bright, a Platteville Republican who owns six child care centers and 12 after-school programs in Weld County, all of which receive government subsidies. “And so we need to give those kids the best of inputs socially, emotionally, academically, nutritionally and be able to give those things to those kids so that they can have the best platform with which to start school.”

Early childhood education is a priority in Colorado, at least in concept. 

In 2023, the state expanded its free preschool program to offer any kid 10 to 30 hours of preschool per week in the year before kindergarten. Now, 44,387 4-year-olds are enrolled, according to data from Colorado’s early childhood department. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis was a major driver of the “universal preschool program,” fulfilling a promise he made during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign while highlighting the “essential” role early childhood education plays in “helping kids realize their potential.”

But Colorado has not set up a state-funded system of care for kids from birth to age 3 in the same way it has created systems for preschoolers and kids in grades K-12. Instead, parents rely on a variety of settings for child care — school districts, licensed community centers, in-home programs and churches, as well as unlicensed alternatives in the homes of extended family members, friends and neighbors. And Colorado only offers the poorest families help paying for child care, though even families who make a decent living report struggles to afford the surging cost.

Parents with one infant and one toddler would need to earn $549,386 a year to enroll both children in a child care center on their own dime, according to calculations by Mathangi Subramanian, director of early childhood policy for the nonprofit Colorado Children’s Campaign. The federal government recommends spending no more than 7% of pre-tax wages on day care, and in 2024 the unsubsidized annual cost of caring for an infant in a Colorado center was $20,978 and the cost for a toddler reached $17,479, based on data from Child Care Aware of America.

“It shows that we don’t value kids and families because why would we let it get to the point where you literally need to be halfway to being a millionaire before you can afford child care?” Subramanian said. “A (state) budget is a set of priorities and our current budget, which doesn’t invest in child care, shows that we are not prioritizing children and families.” 

Neither parents nor states can fix the escalating price of child care, themselves, said Browning, the Clayton Early Learning CEO.

“The reality is that we’re putting in a few hundred million against a maybe $1 billion or $2 billion problem,” Browning said. “Without large-scale federal subsidy for high quality, you’re not going to solve the problem with the market. The market can’t fix child care. The dynamics aren’t right. You can’t force working families to pay more (than) what they can afford for child care for it to be high quality.”

Across the country, the demand for affordable child care has become so extreme that some places are taking bolder swings toward solutions. New Mexico last year became the first state to fund a universal child care program, though its rollout has come with bumps as the state simply does not have enough child care slots for all families. New York City is at the beginning of a plan to broaden publicly-funded child care for families, focusing first on 2- and 3-year-olds with state leaders hoping to one day expand universal child care to all kids under age 5 in the state.

Polis acknowledged that Colorado needs more affordable child care, but he wouldn’t say whether child care should be free for all families in the way public K-12 education is.

“Colorado needs to do a better job making child care affordable for families and convenient,” Polis said in an interview with The Colorado Sun, “and that includes convenience factors like we’ve established now, tax credits for onsite child care for employers. That’s one popular option. But frankly to support today’s workforce and to prepare kids for success, we want to make sure that Colorado can become one of the stronger states for child care.”

“The less costly, the better,” he added. “Child care costs money, regardless of whether it’s taxes that pay for it or parents that pay for it. It’s not free to provide.”

Polis echoed the need for more federal funding. 

“The key partner that’s missing in all this is the federal government,” he said. “We need the federal government to step up with national solutions, for instance around funding preschool, around early childhood education, around child care. It really takes all the different levels of government working together to be able to provide the affordability and the high quality that parents demand.”

“On the edge constantly”

Bright, the state senator who owns child care facilities in Weld County, usually doesn’t have more than 10 days of cash in the bank to cover payroll and bills, a dangerously thin cushion, but one he says puts him in a more secure spot than most providers.

The bulk of the revenue Bright’s centers bring in — up to 75% — goes right back out in staff compensation. The cost of labor and the laws that govern the child care workforce are the main drivers of child care costs, Bright says, even as early childhood educators rank among the lowest earners in the teaching field. The median hourly pay of an early childhood lead teacher in a child care center that receives subsidies through the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program is $18.50, about half the median pay of a kindergarten teacher, according to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

Colorado has strict state regulations that dictate the maximum number of children allowed in a classroom per teacher, which means child care centers must stretch their budgets to hire more educators. Infant care is the most expensive for families because one caregiver can look after no more than five infants at a time, meaning child care centers must spend much more on staff for infants than for 3- and 4-year-olds, who need one educator for every 10 kids.

Then come a multitude of other costs it takes to keep a child care facility open: rent or a mortgage and property taxes (Bright pays $80,000 in property taxes a year on one of his buildings), utilities, curriculum, classroom supplies, administration, repairs, maintenance, food and new quality and safety regulations established by the state.

“We don’t have a choice but to increase the price of child care to cover those new regulations,” Bright said, adding that community child care providers also pay for liability insurance, family medical leave and income taxes if they manage to eke out a profit.

Across Colorado, the cost of child care ranges from $400 to $650 per week for an infant and from $350 to $550 per week for a toddler, Bright said, depending on a center’s quality and staff wages.

One of his centers ended last year at a loss of more than $50,000, another in the red by more than $150,000. He continues to keep those centers open using profits earned at his other centers.

“Child care is on the edge constantly,” Bright said.

The county-level enrollment freezes in the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program and federal-level funding freeze are only sending providers closer to the brink. In January, the Trump administration notified Colorado and four other states that it would withhold $10 billion in federal dollars for government subsidies, including for the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program, accusing programs that use that money of fraud. A judge has temporarily stopped the Trump administration’s plan to freeze funds after Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and the other states sued the federal government. 

About 70% of the funding for Colorado’s child care payment assistance program for the state’s poorest families comes from federal dollars, the rest from a mix of state and local monies. 

Providers are funded based on factors including the age of the kids they care for, the county they’re in, how they are ranked by the Colorado Shines rating program and the type of provider they are — whether they operate out of a center or a home, for instance. The amount of money providers receive for kids enrolled in the assistance program varies wildly, from $20.80 per child per day to $113.61. Sarah Dawson, program director for the state’s early childhood department, said the approach is intended to “capture really what a provider needs to stay in business and offer that quality care.” 

But sometimes those rates fall short of the true cost of care, which means providers must consider whether they can afford to accept families needing subsidies, Dawson said. 

Bright fills in that gap with the money he receives from families who can pay full tuition.

“It’s an inconvenient truth in the child care business model,” he said, “and I don’t think it’s fair to private-pay families to have to shoulder a responsibility of the government.” 

The funding and enrollment setbacks the program has endured have worn on Bright, who is racing the clock to find a solution this legislative session that will ease the concerns of both families needing care and providers needing to fill vacant slots.

The federal judge’s ruling that paused the Trump administration freeze gives families and providers relying on the program a longer runway to maintain child care. Colorado will continue to receive subsidies while the court case proceeds. 

Should the final ruling side with the Trump administration and pause federal funding once again, it will lead to “a very quick death” for providers, Bright said.

“I will be a small part of a much bigger problem in that most, if not all, (program) families in Colorado won’t have child care the next day,” he said. “We can’t afford to do this for free.”

Kaya, the provider with the empty infant room in Englewood, says a loss of federal funding would trigger staggering enrollment drops: At Jump Start Early Learning Academy, in Thornton, 96 out of his 100 students are enrolled in the government assistance program. If that scenario plays out, Kaya said he is committed to keeping his center open for the four families who pay tuition.

And then, Bright said, there’s the “slow death” awaiting providers if counties continue the enrollment freezes. If that happens, he isn’t sure how to keep some of his centers open come fall.

“We tried to take a big step forward as a child care industry,” Bright said, “but we’re going to have to take that step backwards to be able to just try to get the system back in motion, which is so frustrating.”

Kaya, meanwhile, is scrambling to build an emergency fund that he hopes will keep four child care centers he oversees along the Front Range afloat past summer. Once school resumes in August, at least 14 of the 38 preschoolers at his Englewood facility will move on to kindergarten and, if the enrollment freezes are still in place, he won’t be able to bring in new kids unless their families can pay the $390-per-week tuition out of pocket.

The vacant infant room at his Englewood center is likely to be empty for the foreseeable future unless more families who can afford care show up or the government assistance program starts back up and he secures the subsidies for new babies from low-income families.

Kaya said he can’t recall another time during his seven years in child care that the stress of the unknown took such a heavy, exhausting toll — and that includes the years his businesses survived the pandemic.

“It was nothing compared to this still.”

“We’ve been living paycheck to paycheck since our child was born”

After Darrah and Jacob Thomas had their second child last year, the enormous cost of child care came crashing down on them. They had managed to squirrel away enough money every month to send their daughter to Kaya’s Englewood center, but when their son was born in December, they immediately knew enrolling two kids in child care would break their budget.

Darrah and Jacob, who live in Littleton, are among the growing number of middle-income families who earn too much to qualify for government subsidies and yet not enough to easily afford child care. With a household income of about $125,000 a year, they have been diligent in saving every dollar they can, forgoing dates and vacations, aggressively paying off debt and opening their condo to a roommate. They estimate that putting both their children in child care would eat up about half their take-home pay, begging a hard-to-answer question: Do they go the child care route or should one of them — likely Darrah — stay home?

“The emotional, mental toll of that, it almost makes us feel irresponsible as parents if we don’t know how to financially provide for them,” Jacob said.

The pair, who both work for nonprofits, say they know they’re better off than other families. If one of them stops working, they will likely qualify for financial assistance for child care, Jacob said. But if both their kids attend child care, they’ll both have the time and the drive to work, which will then disqualify them from assistance.

“I want to work,” Darrah said. “So if at all possible I’m going to try to not (leave the workforce), but I might have to if we can’t make the finances work.”

Thousands of Colorado parents, mostly women, find themselves at the same crossroads as Darrah. When they decide to stay home with their children, the cost is high — both for the economy and women who often lose career momentum and the potential to increase their pay.

Colorado’s economy loses out on nearly $3.8 billion a year with 10,200 mothers prioritizing caring for their kids over working, according to a report the Common Sense Institute released in 2024 on the benefits of creating more access to affordable child care.

Townsend, whose family has been living paycheck to paycheck in Denver, wore herself down over nearly two years while trying to look after her young son at home and also hold down a job so that she and her husband, a longtime school counselor, would have enough money to cover all their expenses.

She began handling social media and writing blog posts for the clients of a few communication agencies, squeezing work into every free minute. Townsend said she would jump onto her computer while her son took long afternoon naps and again after she put him to bed for the night.

“To me, it was worth it,” said Townsend, who moved to Denver with her family in June 2022. “It got very hard the longer time went on. You can only sustain that level of energy for so long before it starts to just become exhausting. But I am very grateful that I had the opportunities that I did. I just wish that I had had more help with child care because then I could have focused on my work better when it came time for that.”

It’s an inconvenient truth in the child care business model, and I don’t think it’s fair to private-pay families to have to shoulder a responsibility of the government.

Townsend and her husband, who both have master’s degrees, decided to put their son in full-time child care in August of 2024, when he was 3, paying $1,864 each month while she worked as a nanny to supplement the family income. They had to watch every dollar. By the time they covered all their living expenses, Townsend said she had no money left to save for retirement. While she was working, her son was building his independence for preschool.

Last August, he enrolled in the state’s preschool program at a private school in Denver. The tab is more than $1,200 each month.

Townsend has returned to the classroom as an early childhood educator at a Denver preschool after previously teaching kindergarten in Virginia, where the family last lived. Some of their financial stress has lifted, but she and her husband — who together earn about $120,000 — are still counting down the days until June when they’re finally done paying any kind of tuition. 

As an early childhood educator, Townsend has been weighing the burden of child care costs against her deep understanding of how much infants and toddlers need support, safety and enrichment — which together serve as a springboard for their success later on in school.

A child’s shot at reaching the high school graduation stage begins in their earliest years — something that is backed up by research over decades. Research around Head Start, another federal program that helps kids living in poverty access early childhood education, has shown that high-quality preschool improves kids’ chances of advancing through school into the workforce.

“If kids don’t get services early on, their lifetime outcomes are vastly different,” said Subramanian, of the Colorado Children’s Campaign. “If their parents can’t afford to work, that affects the kids, which then affects these long-term outcomes. So this age is really critical to get right. So not investing in it is costing our country in ways that we probably don’t even know.”

Those are all major reasons why Browning, the head of Clayton Early Learning in Denver, won’t stop demanding that Colorado and the country do more to ensure child care becomes a public good. Browning says a strong child care system is the backbone of national security, which he sums up as the might of the economy and the military.

“Where we are in 50 to 100 years is directly proportionate to how we make investments in early childhood education,” Browning said.

Early childhood education gives kids the foundation they need to find their way through school and avoid the juvenile justice system and also begins preparing children to one day join the military by equipping them with the basics of exercise and nutrition, he said.

“If you don’t have to mitigate and remediate education, if we have a strong birth rate, if women particularly can go and have security to trust that their infant is getting good quality care while they can work,” Browning added, “you’re unlocking billions of dollars in the economy, you’re stabilizing the long-term future and in 50 years you can look back and say that generation of children were strong for us and that does equate to national security and economic growth.”

Still, for parents like Darrah and Jacob Thomas, it feels impossible to balance what’s best for their kids — and the country — in the future with what’s best for their family right now. Any decision they make about child care comes with a major sacrifice.

“We want to be there for our kids,” Jacob said. “We want to be able to spend time with them and, if money and finances becomes the crux of our decision-making, then being a parent becomes secondary. It’s almost like there’s no good option. Everything requires more sacrifice than we want to give to be able to be present with our kids.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.