During a child’s formative years, high-quality early care does far more than provide a safe place to spend the day – it builds the cognitive, social, and emotional skills that set children up for long-term success. Children who access high-quality early care are statistically more likely to graduate high school, earn higher wages, and build healthier lives.
Yet accessible, quality care remains out of reach for too many families in Story County, standing as a major barrier to working parents and their children’s success. To tackle this challenge head-on, United Way of Story County partnered with Ames Regional Economic Alliance (AREA) and five other local organizations last fall to fund a comprehensive feasibility study for our community. This summer, we released the final report of the Story County Child Care Feasibility Study – a practical, evidence-based roadmap to improve access, affordability, and quality across our county.
Through current-state assessments, stakeholder interviews, and extensive child care provider and family surveys, the study challenges us to reconsider how we approach continuing to build a child care system in our community that meets the needs of all families. Rather than physical space constraints, the study revealed that workforce shortages and affordability pressures are our greatest roadblocks:
- Workforce Shortage: Child care providers face severe recruitment and retention hurdles, with the most critical gaps existing in infant and toddler care, which require higher teacher-to-student ratios.
- Limited Capacity: Some of our local child care centers have the physical space to serve more children, but workforce shortages restrict how many classrooms can actually operate.
- Affordability: Median-income families in Story County spend 15% of their income on infant care – more than double the federal affordability benchmark of 7%.
Our Path Forward
These insights have shaped three key priorities for our community: workforce stabilization, capacity expansion, and targeted funding. Moving forward, we are in the process of establishing a countywide Child Care Leadership Collaborative to align employer, funding, and community partnerships and launch targeted initiatives to stabilize our child care workforce and expand accessible child care slots for local families.
None of this work starts from scratch. Your generous support of United Way of Story County provided over $362,000 in direct investments in child care and out-of-school learning programs across Story County last year – helping hundreds of local families access quality care their children need. That investment sets the stage for the work ahead, but our work is far from done. Building a child care system that truly works for everyone will take continued support from us, our local businesses, public and private partnerships, and community, standing alongside the incredible child care providers who show up for our kids every day.
I encourage you to take a few moments to read the summary report to learn more about these findings and our upcoming steps. Addressing child care creates immediate and lasting ripple effects: when children gain access to quality early learning, parents can maintain stable employment, which means a more stable financial future for families and a stronger economy for all of us.
Thank you, as always, for standing with us as we work together to build a community where every family can thrive.
United is the Way.