Montana child care professionals say changes the state Health Department made will have a major effect on child care. (Photo by Rebecca Rivas | Missouri Independent)
A child care organization in Butte that supports families and providers will lose roughly half of its staff after the Department of Public Health and Human Services upended the way Montana helps children and families — and decreased funding for it.
“I see our providers in panic mode,” said Butte 4 C’s executive director Terri Amberg, who said she will lose 8 to 10 of 18 workers as a result.
The change outlined in requests for proposals earlier this year means Montana will go from having six regional organizations helping both families and providers to one out-of-state entity helping providers.
Based in New York, Shine Early Learning, part of Acelero, Inc., will be awarded a contract for assistance to child care providers, according to a DPHHS notice late last month.
The change also means possibly just two state organizations will support families — and with a lot less money.
The state decreased the budget by roughly $900,000, or 27%, for family support, from $3.4 million to $2.5 million, according to data from one of those organizations, Child Care Resources of Missoula.
The fallout in Montana means Child Care Resources and Family Connections in Great Falls will likely vastly increase the number of cases they manage as a result, but another nonprofit in Bozeman turned down a major state contract due to inadequate funding and is in limbo.
For decades in some cases, the regional organizations have helped families find the right child care facility and apply for the Best Beginnings scholarship, and they provided technical support to caregivers, such as advice about behavioral issues.
(The Best Beginnings scholarships are still available; child care professionals stressed the scholarships are not going away.)
Tori Sproles, executive director of Child Care Connections in Bozeman, said she hopes a future exists for her organization, which has been around since 1978 and counts 16 staff. But she said the decreased budget the state offered was not adequate for the work.
“What we were awarded would be a request of 173% increase in our caseload and workforce but only approximately 58% increase in funding,” Sproles said of the contract offered to support families.
Grace Decker, coordinator of Montana Advocates for Children, said the changes represent a massive shift in how Montana provides support for children, families and childcare providers.
For one thing, it’s the first time an out-of-state contractor was allowed to bid, Decker said.
Across the state, workers at supporting organizations have had longstanding relationships with childcare providers, she said, and now there’s a question: “Who do I call if I have a kid with challenging behavior?”
“It’s a real earthquake,” Decker said. “It is a seismic shift in how our system is going to be structured and how it’s going to feel.”
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For 50 years, the state supported the child care system through a network of independent agencies around the state, Decker said. They were geographically based, and each one looked a little different.
The DPHHS website lists the different agencies including the District No. 7 Human Resources and Development Center in Billings as offering the services. The others are based in Kalispell, Missoula, Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls and Havre.
Essentially, they did work that fell into three different categories, Decker said: They supported families, steering them to appropriate child care facilities, and figured out whether they qualified for the Best Beginnings scholarship; they coached and trained child care providers; and they helped child care businesses get off the ground.
Best Beginnings scholarships are available to parents generally earning at or below 185% of the federal poverty guideline and have a child in a child care center, group home, or other qualified center.
“The state for the first time this year changed the way that it offered contracts around that work,” Decker said.
The state offered three separate contracts. Decker said all of the business support will go to one Montana organization, Zero to Five, which was generally not a surprise because the organization had been doing just that with funds from ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act.
However, the state also awarded all of the provider support to Shine Early Learning of Acelero, which has not done this work in Montana. Acelero did not return a call from the Daily Montanan or message sent on its web portal about how it plans to provide services here.
The Shine website lists an address in New York and describes its work. In 2022, Acelero announced it was growing through an investment from a new $800 million fund, according to Reuters, of global hedge fund manager BlackRock.
“Shine Early Learning partners with community-based programs and public systems, providing data-driven services and solutions and an equity-centered approach to accelerate child and family outcomes,” said the Shine Early Learning website.
Decker said the regional organizations in Montana had to decide whether to bid on the contract for provider support, the one for families support and scholarship administration, or both. In the past, she said, the organizations could make their budgets pencil out because they provided all of the services as one package.
But the state awarded the families support contract to manage Best Beginnings to three organizations, and the Bozeman one backed out based on inadequate funding.
“In the name of efficiency, the state is spending less expecting the same work to happen while cutting these same agencies in half,” Decker said.
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Based in Missoula, Child Care Resources will take on more cases as a result of the change. It will go from 500 family scholarship cases to 1,800, but executive director Kelly Rosenleaf said it’s a major shift and more than they bargained for.
“That’s an enormous growth that is likely to be painful and bumpy in the short term,” Rosenleaf said. “But if a family does want to have more hands-on help, there will be fewer entities to do it. And the budget is not there (for offices).”
Rosenleaf said the state currently has six separate contracts to administer the Best Beginnings scholarship and support families. She said reducing the number of contracts will cut some overhead costs.
“But not that much. Not $900,000 plus dollars. It’s not going to do that,” Rosenleaf said.
The Department of Public Health and Human Services did not address the reason it cut that amount of money. DPHHS spokesperson Jon Ebelt said splitting the contract was “part of our continued commitment to increasing access to high-quality, affordable childcare for hardworking Montana families.”
He did not explain how it would do so or why it would be better for families.
Additionally, sending all of the provider services to Shine or Acelero makes it all the more expensive to cover overhead costs, Rosenleaf said. It means just one contract is paying for things like accounting, a server and phone services.
It also appears that just two organizations, Child Care Resources in Missoula and Family Connections in Great Falls, will help families all across the state with things like finding quality child care options and scholarship eligibility.
Rosenleaf said when the state issued its request for proposals, Montana counted 3,750 active scholarship cases, and Child Care Resources managed roughly 500 of those families. She said Child Care Resources bid on 1,315, or roughly one-third, in conversations with the other organizations that bid.
Now, though, Bozeman is out of the mix, Great Falls’ budget is “way too tight” for the number it was awarded, and Rosenleaf said she and Great Falls are talking with DPHHS about how to share the remaining scholarships roughly equally. Each child gets a separate invoice, she said, and the state has roughly 6,000 children in the program in all.
“For families to get the services they need and deserve, it’s better if the organization is not completely stressed financially, barely able to breathe,” Rosenleaf said. “Which is what happened when they took that over $900,000 out of the operating budget.”
Bruce Tribbensee, on the board of Child Care Resources, said some of the work can and is being done remotely, but some people are less literate or speak less English or aren’t as accustomed to bureaucracy.
He said not having offices all over Montana is probably not an issue because people can meet at a library, for instance.
“But having people all over the state is kind of important,” Tribbensee said. “The group on the eastern side of the state is going to be in Great Falls, and they’re going to have to go to Miles City if they want to meet with someone. There’s no money in the budget for that.”
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Now, Rosenleaf said, they’ll have to figure out how to deliver equitable services when they’ll be supporting families across Montana versus just in their region.
She said they meet in person with families that face challenges to help them complete the “very long government application.”
Those include families that have a low literacy level, refugee families, those with children who have special needs, and families who don’t have homes.
“Those are the families we’re more likely to see in person,” Rosenleaf said. “So the families that need the most support will have a harder time accessing local services.”
In the past, Rosenleaf said the organizations have provided training and coaching to childcare facilities in person as well, and staff have deep relationships with caregivers. Providers may call about a behavioral issue and need help with an intervention, or have a licensing violation they need help correcting.
She said Child Care Resources provides online training, so it’s familiar with distance work, such as educational videos, but they aren’t always a substitute for being present in person.
“It’s not the same as going there and sitting there and watching what goes down,” Rosenleaf said. “Sometimes, you’ve got to be there for a while. It’s just the nature of effective consulting.”
She said she wonders if Shine has a concept of some of the challenges Montanans face related to being a rural state. Those include trying to support a child with special needs with services 250 miles away or living in parts of the state without good cell service or internet access, such as some tribal communities.
“I just have to hope that Shine is going to hire some of these folks from around the state,” Rosenleaf said. “It would be good if they did because they do have relationships. They know what Montana’s licensing rules are.”
Rosenleaf also takes a step back from the split contracts and bogged-down process to the values behind the child care. She said you can train providers in human resources and accounting, and you can reduce the ratio of workers to infants (with bad outcomes for children), but even so, child care is not profitable.
“Other industrialized countries have decided it was a public good, and they would put money into it,” Rosenleaf said. “ … Much like the sewer and the sidewalk, this is a public good. We need to have it, much like we need the internet to have business, (we need) phone, water. We’ve got to have child care to have business.”
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As a result of these changes, the Havre office will close, although it didn’t have many people who visited either, said director Kim Stull. She said three of the six employees will lose their jobs, and the other three will work remotely for the Great Falls office.
In Bozeman, Sproles said Child Care Connections is willing to help the state transition through the end of this calendar year, and she doesn’t have a plan for the future, although the organization has opted not to dissolve its 501(c)3 designation at this point.
“I am hoping to find some opportunities for us to continue to help advocate,” Sproles said.
Child Care Connections serves six counties, oversees 500 Best Beginnings scholarships, serves 190 child care providers, each with multiple caregivers, she said. Sproles said she’s hoping some of her staff and others in the state can work for Shine, especially given the existing relationships they have.
One of her biggest concerns is ensuring her staff find good placements, she said.
“They’re all fabulous and great professionals, and I think that they’ll find something that makes sense,” Sproles said. “But it’s just unfortunate.”