Childcare Expensive for Parents and Centers Alike

East Atlanta’s Highlander School houses 0-5-year-olds. The center just opened this year, but filled up quickly. It was converted from a house and still feels like one. In the infant room, children play in big rolls of paper for a sensory experience.

Back out in the hallway, the smell of curry chicken wafts in from the kitchen. Out back, older kids play outside. Soon, they’ll come in for a story.

Rukia Rogers is the school’s owner and director. She walks and talks as she juggles her multiple roles.

“I’m also the teacher here and I cook and stuff like that because we can’t afford a lot of things,” she explains.

Tuition here runs around $1000 a month. That may seem pricey, but Rogers says the center doesn’t make a huge profit.

“We often buy things from our own expenses, we’re shopping on the weekends,” she says.

To ensure high quality, Rogers likes to hire teachers with bachelors’ degrees. But she can’t afford to pay them what a public elementary school teacher earns.

Pam Tatum is the CEO of Quality Care for Children. The nonprofit provides support and services for teachers, centers, and parents.

“A lot of the staff who work in small child care centers, like this, are committed to them because they like the philosophy, they like the quality of care that’s being provided here,” Tatum says. “But it’s very difficult to keep highly trained teachers and we know that’s one of the hallmarks of quality.”

The Cost for Parents

The dilemma for parents is how to find a high-quality center without breaking the bank. Sabrina Grossman’s nine-month-old son goes to a different center.

At a bookstore in Midtown, she explains that she and her husband spent months researching childcare centers.

“We were really looking at proximity to our house and hours that matched our work schedule in addition to good recommendations and also a strong facility that had good activities for the kids,” she says. 

Grossman’s search involved hours of Internet research, tours, and cost comparisons. She said centers could vary in cost between $400 and $500 a month.

“Sometimes it was hard to tell exactly why they varied in that cost,” Grossman said. “Sometimes it would be that they opened a half an hour earlier and closed a half an hour later. So, things like that was then easy to identify why the cost was different.”  

  A Balancing Act

Data from Quality Care for Children show the average cost of childcare in Fulton County is more than $9000 a year (see accompanying chart). CEO Pam Tatum says most parents are paying out of pocket.

“It is a market-based system,” she says. “It’s not public school yet. So the reason what we would advocate for more financial assistance to parents to pay for child care is because those years, 0-5, is when 85% of the brain develops.”

Families can receive tax credits and other subsidies. But most don’t come close to covering the full cost of care.  

Centers also have financial concerns. Rukia Rogers says she’s an educator who’s learning how to run a small business.

“I’ve got a scholarship to go to a collaborative meeting about shared services and different ways that we can bring early childhood educators together and kind of share some of the costs and some of the services with other local programs,” Rogers says.

Pam Tatum says many centers face the same challenge: how to develop a business model where they can offer quality care and still make a small profit.