It all started nearly 3 years ago with one mother’s frustration. My partner Brian and I have each worked in business for over 30 years with much of that time in the fields of developing insurance, employee benefits, executive compensation and related business and tax strategies. We both have adult or near-adult children, and I have grandchildren, so, needless to say, the topic of child care costs could not have been further from either of our minds when the phone call came in January 2016 from a very frustrated mother of a little girl.
After taking time off work to have a child, the mother, who also happens to be an attorney, prepared to return to work and was shocked by the high cost of child care. In addition, she was faced with waiting lists and found only mediocre quality at those facilities that had space available. Her frustration soon turned to anger when she finally returned to work and realized that many of her co-workers had it even worse because their incomes were lower and many were single parents.
We then set forth on a mission, which evolved into an obsession, to understand why child care was so expensive. Was it only a local issue? A statewide problem, or worse? We understand business economics and we crunched the numbers and still we couldn’t understand it. (We will save the details of the numbers for a future blog post).
We spent months reviewing dozens of state and federal government reports on the issue, NGO reports, interviewing providers and industry experts, crunching numbers, developing spreadsheets. We analyzed costs in about ½ the US states and a dozen foreign countries – for the past 30 years.
Most of all we talked to parents of young children of family members, friends and friends of friends. We approached strangers we saw with young children in supermarkets, airports, and playgrounds in dozens of US cities to hear their stories. The stories we heard were the same regardless of city or state, age or income – Childcare is expensive, scarce and of generally mediocre quality.
I remember the night of January 20, 2015, when I sat and listened to then-President Obama’s State of the Union Address where he stated:
“In today’s economy, when having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, we need affordable, high-quality childcare more than ever. It’s not a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have. So it’s time we stop treating childcare as a side issue, or as a women’s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.”
That was over 18 months earlier (nearly 4 year ago) and it is as if the entire country has forgotten those words were ever spoken – because absolutely nothing has changed – no new laws, no new subsidies, no new tax breaks. In fact there hasn’t been a single new idea in childcare since the invention of Pampers in 1956!
It took about 7 months to come to a startling realization – there is no legitimate economic reason for the high costs and mediocre quality of childcare. More importantly, there is no economic reason for the low wages paid to child care workers. Parents entrust their little darlings to child care centers and early education teachers for the majority of a child’s waking hours. As the recipients of such a tremendous responsibility, why weren’t early childhood working being paid a living wage commensurate with their responsibilities and the expectations of parents and children for high quality care? (you might not like the answer to that question but we will leave it for a future blog).
Then the hard work started. Having identified the problem, now it was time to create a solution. Although Brian and I had extensive business experience none of it was in child care or early education. We had to build a team. We needed a highly experienced team of early childhood educators and business development people from within the corporate Early Childhood Education world. We made them a part of our own corporate team.
But we didn’t stop there. From our business background we knew that we needed a divers multi-disciplinary Founding Team. Reducing parent costs while providing the highest possible quality for children would not be a simple fix – it would require a team of talented and dedicated professionals, and we found them – in the fields of real estate, information technology, human resources, investments, financial management and facilities maintenance.
The story of OVCA is really the story of how the difficulties of one person can ignite the passions of two and evolve into an army of village warriors willing to take on an slay the childcare dragon. Why did we do it?