With the Permian Basin’s infant population expected to grow 12 percent in five years, organizations and agencies joined forces to hold a Cross-Sector Convening to Find Childcare Solutions for the Permian Basin Wednesday at the Bush Convention Center in Midland.
The event was aimed at fostering collaboration and innovation among school and civic leaders and community members within the 17 counties of the Permian Basin Workforce Development Board’s service area and Eastern New Mexico.
Permian Strategic Partnership President and CEO Tracee Bentley and Executive Director of the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin Adrian Vega spoke to the media.
“We are currently in a childcare crisis. Many of our counties in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico are designated as childcare deserts,” Bentley said.
This is having a huge impact on the economy because when parents cannot contribute to the workforce that hurts the economy and families.
Generally speaking, childcare costs about $14,000 to $15,000 a year, but the average childcare worker makes about $22,000 a year mostly without benefits, she said.
Bentley said they know that if parents could find affordable childcare they would be filling some of the critical jobs available today such as teachers, first responders and the energy industry.
She added that the region is experiencing growth like it has never seen before.
“Currently we have more 2, 3 and 1 year olds than any other population in our area,” Bentley said.
She added that everything is on the table as a solution.
“We think the business community is going to be essential to solving some of these problems and presenting solutions. We want to see all options. We’re interested in knowing maybe there’s a regional pre K lab like we did in Midland” that could be started in New Mexico or West Texas.
“Also, we’ve got to start building our pipeline of childcare workers because as we heard today, they don’t make enough money to survive and oftentimes they don’t even have benefits so we’ve got to start working on that immediately,” Bentley said.
She added that PSP is hearing from school districts around the region that there are mothers that may have a teaching degree or certification, but because they cannot find childcare, they are unable to go back into the teaching profession.
“The other part of this that we know that is absolutely critical is many of our kiddos are not entering kindergarten, kindergarten ready. But if they have access to high quality childcare, I think we’re going to start to see improvement in that area as well,” Bentley said.
She added that she thinks they have known this was an issue for a long time, but hoped the market would fill the gap, but it hasn’t.
“It’s time for the business community, local leaders, city and county government, as well as other professionals to come in and figure out what are we going to do,” Bentley said.
She said one idea is to create pipelines from high school with students interested in going into the childcare field so they can easily get certified.
“They can have a dual credit program and also (start) attracting them to the industry … much earlier than we currently are,” Bentley said.
Vega said the backstory behind Wednesday’s conference is about a year and a half ago the Texas Workforce Commission put out a request for proposals across the state to learn more about industry partners and each community is trying to solve the childcare challenges faced not only as a state, but regionally.
“With support from the Permian Strategic Partnership, Workforce Commission, and the Permian Basin Workforce Development Board, they co-funded a study. … The Education Partnership of the Permian Basin (was) able to do a landscape analysis, which focused on the 17 counties that fall under the Permian Basin Workforce Board region,” Vega said.
The focus of that study was to look at childcare capacity. This includes not only infants and young children but kids in elementary school. Vega said it’s not only a school readiness issue, but a workforce issue.
“If we don’t have enough seats that impacts whether parents are able to go to work or not. That obviously impacts the economy as a whole, so really, the focus of today’s convening is really to dig deeper into the landscape analysis, but then to try to come up with some solutions — workable, viable solutions,” Vega said.
There are many factors that create challenges such as not having enough seats, staff retention, and/or licensing issues.
Like most complex issues in this community, there isn’t one answer but everyone has to work together to come up with solutions.
“Funding is obviously the biggest challenge to this and whether that’s going to come through, taking advantage of some programs at the state or federal level,” Vega said.
“It’s also going to require an investment. … We have a number of people who are invested in these big challenges to help industry,” he added.
He said there are some industry members who have banded together to bring in a third party childcare provider. “That might not impact the broader whole, but that impacts their workforce, because now they at least have childcare for their kids,” Vega said. “The way they saw that is they came together, and then put their funding together to bring that model.”
Another potential avenue is community partnerships that were allowed through legislation in 2019.
“Basically it opens the door for school districts and community partnerships. So for example, ECISD, has partnered … with the local YMCA,” Vega said.
That has enabled the Y to provide pre K 3 education for ECISD and childcare.
Midland College did something very similar, but in a different vein.
“They were able to create an early childhood center that also serves as a learning lab that they just opened this fall on the campus of Midland College, but because it’s in partnership with MISD (it) will also then provide additional seats for 3 year olds for MISD,” Vega said.
