Christina Bohannan Tours Richland Daycare

RICHLAND – Congressional candidate Christina Bohannan toured the Jerry B. Robinson Child Care Center in Richland, as part of a five-county Rural Restoration Project listening tour focussed on childcare. Richland Area Childcare Organization Chair Kerry Hadley explained that there are currently no registered daycares in Keokuk County. Tammy Wetjen-Kesterson of Early Childhood Iowa, who is the project manager for the daycare, added that Keokuk County is a childcare desert, with absolutely no registered childcare aside from 16 Head Start spots at Sigourney, which only last through the school year and only part of the day. She stated that there is a child care deficit of 755 spots. Ground was broken for the new daycare, built in the lot where the old school once stood, in Jan. of 2023. The daycare is tentatively expected to open before Thanksgiving. Currently, the RACCO board is working to hire a director.

Hadley explained that RACCO raised $1,500,000 in donations from local businesses, nonprofits like the Washington County Riverboat Foundation, and former Richland resident Jerry Robinson to build the daycare. She stated that they still need to raise $300,000 to cover the daycare’s initial operational costs and are open for donations. She stated that they were very blessed by the amount of community support, but noted that they had not received financial support from the government to build the daycare.

“We reached out to all of your congressional offices and received no help,” said Hadley. “I’m just going to say that up front, we had nobody to help us, so we did this on our own...Nothing from the state, nothing from federal. Nobody wanted to help us and there are no grants available now. We got in after Kim Reynolds said ‘We need daycare, we’re going to give you grants,’ but we got in after they shut all that down and have not gotten anything. Not a penny.”

Bohannan said she was not surprised. “When I was in the legislature, everybody talked about needing more childcare,” she said. “Everybody! But, when it came to actually funding it, it’s not there. People will talk about this, but they won’t put their money where their mouth is.”

Wetjen-Kesterson gave Bohannan a tour of the daycare and showed her a list of other childcare projects Early Childhood Iowa had worked on in Keokuk, Jefferson and Iowa Counties through private/public partnerships. She stated that some of the earlier projects, like the Cambridge Little Achievers daycare in Fairfield, had received heavy public funding, but that public grants were no longer being offered.

“They’re gone! What do we do now? Because we still have work to do!” said Wetjen-Kesterson. “My board has work to do. My board doesn’t have the kind of budget to support this...And then we get to the secondary problem of how do we have staff? How do we retain staff? It’s a two-prong problem. One, most of the staff are women in childcare centers, and we undervalue women’s work and have always in this country, and this is also considered to be a women’s problem. You have the child, you find the child care. So we have these two big philosophies running against us to be able to hire high quality staff, retain them, and do the work that we need to do, and we need money. The money has to come from somewhere to help us supplement staff and ECI does not have it.”

“Everywhere I go, you hear that childcare is a big problem,” said Bohannan. “I hear that from legislatures, but I hear that from business owners. I hear that from chambers of commerce, who say that our workforce shortage, which we’ve been hearing a lot about in the state, is largely around things like childcare, because if people don’t have affordable childcare, they can’t be in the workforce. It’s a very clear straight line to the childcare issue to our workforce shortage, but people like Mariannette Miller-Meeks are doing nothing about it. In fact, she voted to cut over 170,000 kids from Head Start and eliminate over 100,000 from affordable childcare. We’re not going to make any progress in this state.”

Bohannan discussed the difficulty of finding childcare when her daughter was young. She stated that her mother had worked part time at a daycare and said that daycare workers are underpaid. Wetjen-Kesterson stated that a lot of Iowa’s child care is provided by aging home provider women who will retire in ten years, which will cause a new childcare crisis. She stated that childcare, like mental healthcare and AEAs, were on the list of things the state of Iowa was coming for.

“This facility is stunning. I think it’s going to be great for families in this community, but I also think it’s critical for economic development...I heard today that there was a deficit of 755 slots for daycare kids who need daycare and didn’t have it here in this community. And so this is going to serve that need,” Bohannan said after the tour was done.

She reiterated that child care was essential for economic development and that parents are forced to stay out of the workforce to take care of kids if there is a lack of childcare. She stated that businesses would not move to Iowa unless there is adequate childcare. She also stated that early childhood development is critical for lifelong learning. She stated, if she was elected, she would continue and expand the Head Start program, which gives support to facilities like the Richland daycare, provides support for low-income families, and helps people become better parents. She also advocated expanding the Child Tax Credit, saying that it has reduced child poverty by half.

“It’s so rare to find a single program that can reduce child poverty by half, but the Child Tax Credit did that, and so we need to continue that and expand that,” said Bohannan.

She was asked about childcare regulations, which some locals have asserted make it difficult to open childcare facilities. Bohannan stated that there had already been loosening of safety regulations in Iowa, with the legislature allowing 16-year-olds to look after very young children and increasing the ratio of children allowed per teacher. She claimed that child care experts and teachers did not support this, because children need good, mature teachers who are trained to handle dangerous situations. “If someone came in who was a threat to the children, you can’t have children here who are going to keep our kids safe in the case of an emergency like that,” said Bohannan. “They just don’t have the maturity and experience to deal with those kinds of things. So I think that what we really need to do is stop making excuses, like regulations, and really look for ways to support childcare in the ways that people who do this for work tell us that they need.”