Thank you for bringing to light the issue of the high cost to families and low wages of child care. I worked for ChildTime Learning Center in Evanston from February 2015 to August 2017. My wage was right on par with what your article states, about $12 per hour (despite having a bachelor’s degree).
What I learned while working there is that the money paid to the center from families goes straight to the top – corporate, that is. ChildTime Learning Center of Evanston is in a building owned by St. Francis (Amita) Hospital but is staffed and run by Learning Care Group, the second-largest in the for-profit child care industry. According to Comparably.com estimates, the average executive at Learning Care Group makes $114 per hour. The estimates say the highest-paid executive makes $700,000 and the lowest-paid executive makes $50,000. Here is the link to that information: https://www.comparably.com/companies/learning-care-group/executive-salaries
I have mixed feelings about the government providing funds that could end up basically in the pockets of these already well-compensated executives. I think that funds should only be allowed to go to nonprofit child care companies. The private companies like Learning Care Group could restructure their own pay grades so that much more of those wages are trickling down to the actual teachers/caregivers taking care of those infants and children. Because let’s face it, without those teachers, they don’t have a business.
Teachers are the ones who are in the classroom changing diapers, feeding, teaching and caring for those infants and young children, yet they are not given a living wage for what they do, which is really a shame considering the income brought in by them.
When parents take a tour of a child care center, they’re looking into the classroom to see what the teachers are like and how they keep their classroom to help decide if that’s where they want to drop their child off everyday. Yet there is a huge imbalance of wages within corporations like Learning Care Group that they should be correcting on their own without a penny of the funds from our government.
Trisha Binkley