When Dianna Wells found out she was pregnant in 2018, she did what most parents do: She started searching for reliable child care.
And then she heard horror stories about potential providers in the Madison area being understaffed or unexpectedly shutting down.
"And the cost!" Wells said. "The cost was incredible."
Wells’ journey to find safe, accessible and affordable child care wasn’t easy. She even had to cut back her hours as a teacher in the Verona Area School District to make it work.
Her experience is far from unique as Wisconsin, like the rest of the nation, faces a shortage of child care workers.
Angela Major/WPR
Over half of Wisconsin is in a child care desert, meaning for every open child care slot available in a community, there are three or more children who need it, according to a report by the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association.
In Wisconsin, 288,430 children have a potential need for child care. There are 171,040 slots, according to the same report.
At the same time, child care isn’t affordable. The average two-income household is spending 17 percent of their income on child care for one child. That’s more than what most people are paying for their children to go to college, according to a recent report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
For the last three years, Wisconsin child care providers have been buoyed by a federal pandemic relief program that helped them improve pay for their employees while keeping tuition costs for families down.
In June, funding...
Hyderabad: BRS leader Aedla Sudhakar Reddy strongly criticised the statements of HYDRAA commissioner A.V. Ranganath regarding the status of Bathukammakunta. The official had claimed that the place...