Like all of Alaska, Juneau has a broken child care system. A state task force is trying to fix it.

The closures of child care centers and a worker shortage have left Juneau parents with few options for affordable and reliable care for their kids. 

But, a new report by a state child care task force proposes dozens of recommendations aimed at expanding child care options statewide. 

City and Borough of Juneau Deputy City Manager Robert Barr is a member of the task force. He sat down with KTOO on Friday to discuss the task force’s findings and what role the city can play in making them a reality. 

Listen:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Clarise Larson: How would you describe the state of child care in Juneau and across Alaska right now?

Robert Barr: I would say that it’s relatively tenuous, to use a word to describe child care.

I think Juneau, we’re in a better place than most of the state because we’ve been subsidizing and participating in the child care sector, using local dollars in a real, meaningful way for a handful of years now.  That same trend hasn’t been happening across the state. 

Clarise Larson: What kind of impact does this have on Juneau’s economy? When people can’t find reliable care for their kids? 

Robert Barr: Yeah, I mean it’s huge, right? There’s a lot of studies out there, there’s a lot of research that shows that when a parent of a child doesn’t have a place — a safe, high quality, good place for their child to be when they’re at work — then they’re not going to work. 

Solving that problem is a priority of many, many political bodies and many, many business interests because it’s really become evident — and there’s a lot of consensus right now across the spectrum, whatever spectrum you care, right, the political spectrum, the business spectrum, — that this is a problem that is really worth solving. For a variety of reasons, economic being primary among them. 

Clarise Larson: What would you say are the biggest barriers for child care providers right now?

Robert Barr: There are many, but the single biggest barrier is money. We as a society, don’t fund in a public way, child care from zero to five, very well at all. When you look at statistics of how much money public dollars in the United States go to child care, and compare that to other developed nations, we’re generally at the bottom of those lists. And, the business model of child care just bluntly, doesn’t work without significant public subsidy. You know, we heavily subsidized K-12 education, but expect parents to bear the burden for all of zero to five care, and that just doesn’t work from a business plan perspective.

Clarise Larson: As part of this task force, you were trying to find solutions. Highlight some of the recommendations that you guys came up with and, from your perspective, which ones really stood out to you.

Robert Barr: There are many — there’s over 50, I think total — recommendations that we made. And all of them matter. All of them can make a difference. But the biggest one that I highlight is the necessity of creating sustainable, publicly funded wage subsidies for licensed child care, both in-home care and center-based care that support a living wage. 

People who work in child care, those are super important jobs, and our our child care workforce really isn’t going to get where it needs to be until our centers and our providers can afford to pay people enough money to live on.

Clarise Larson: What role does the City and Borough of Juneau and the Juneau Assembly play in helping to solve the child care shortage locally?

Robert Barr: We subsidize child care in a couple of different ways. We have a couple of stipend-based programs, and we provide a monthly stipend directly to child care providers to help address that living wage issue and the recruitment and retention issues that child care centers have.

Clarise Larson: All these recommendations have a lot of big ambitions, but walk me through what next steps need to happen to get these recommendations to become a reality. 

Robert Barr: A lot of the recommendations are things that the state can do right now and that the state already has started working on in a lot of instances. Really, the big one is the money piece, right? That’s really the key missing ingredient to really solving this problem, both at a local and statewide and, frankly, a national level. Until we can get enough funding in the system to enable good, decent pay, that’s really the big element that we need.

Clarise Larson: Do these recommendations give you hope for the future of Juneau and solving this problem hopefully in the coming years? 

Robert Barr: They totally do. There really is sort of a bipartisan consensus and a consensus in both the child care sector and the business community that this is a problem worth solving for a wide variety of reasons. And so I think now is a good time to be talking about solving this problem because we’re largely coming from the same perspective.

Clarise Larson: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming in today and chatting with me.

Robert Barr: Thanks for having me.