This Montana school solved its teacher shortage by opening a day care

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This school year, Montana, a state with fewer than 8,000 teachers, had 1,000 unfilled teaching positions. Meanwhile, Dutton-Brady Public Schools, a rural district about an hour from the Canadian border, easily filled its three vacancies. 

Administrators credit a blue-hued room strewn with toys and highchairs: Little Diamondbacks Daycare, which is located inside the district’s K-12 school, steps from the cafeteria and the library. On a chilly Monday morning, children were trying on costumes, riding rocking horses and enjoying a rowdy game of musical chairs. 

Eight-month-old Rowan watched the action from the arms of a staffer. Rowan’s mother, Jessica Toner, is a rookie teacher who heads the third-fourth grade classroom down the hall. Though Toner was offered four higher-paying positions in Great Falls, where she lives, she could neither find nor afford decent child care. “I called probably 15 different day cares,” she said, but they either didn’t have openings or were too expensive. “It was a nightmare.” 

Toner hadn’t considered Dutton-Brady, which is a 32-minute drive from her house. But when she heard it had an opening — one that came with subsidized day care — she applied. “That’s what drew me,” she said. “And then I came to find that I love it out here.”

In-school day care can be found across the U.S., from Maine to Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s one way to tackle two crises: a shortage of qualified teachers and a shortage of quality child care. Recent data suggests that 79% of U.S. schools with teacher vacancies had difficulty filling them, while half of Americans live in “child care deserts” — communities that have at least three times as many children as licensed child-care slots. In many places, including Montana, both issues are more acute in rural areas. And of the 10 states with the highest rates of residents living in child-care deserts, seven are in the West.

Ask anyone involved with school-run day care, whether staff, clients or administrators, and they’ll probably say they’re delighted to have it. Experts, however, warn that it’s not a panacea. “All of this is well-intended,” said Chris Herbst, a professor who studies child care at Arizona State University. “But none of this is a sustainable, broad-based, fully funded solution to a long-standing problem.” 

In the spring of 2022, Dutton-Brady faced several teacher retirements. Superintendent Jeremy Locke knew it would be hard to replace them; it always was. 

The Dutton-Brady School District is deeply rural, serving 131 students in a 625-square-mile region, an area larger than Grand Teton National Park. Its main school is in Dutton, and two others are located on colonies of Hutterites, an isolated Anabaptist religious sect. Dutton, which is the only town for miles, is home to two taverns, a water tower, a bank and a gas station that also sells fertilizer and livestock feed. There’s not a single stoplight.

Recruiting teachers has long been difficult; at times, the district has had to lure teachers from as far away as the Philippines. And veteran teachers rarely apply. Most recruits are like Toner: recent graduates who are just starting out, and perhaps starting families. 

So, at a meeting that spring, Locke and the Board of Trustees seized upon the idea of opening a day care center to boost recruitment and retention. They scrambled to get the paperwork, financing and staffing in order before the 2022-’23 school year began. “We had to make it work,” Locke said. “Or else we knew that we were going to be dead in the water as far as staffing goes.” 

Little Diamondbacks now serves 21 children, ranging from a few months to 5 years old. Dutton-Brady teachers pay up to $270 per child, per month for full-time, year-round care, a rate that is subsidized by state grants and by non-staffers who pay full tuition, up to $540 a month. 

Staffing the facility has been a constant headache — it’s tough to find child-care workers anywhere, let alone in such a rural county — but Locke said it’s been worth it. “If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings,” he said. “We have no teacher shortages right now.”

In-school day cares exist elsewhere in rural Montana, too. Ekalaka, a town of 399 people on the eastern edge of the state, opened its center in August 2022. Browning, located on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, started its facility in 1985; it was initially meant to serve teen mothers but now serves mostly staff members. 

Browning’s superintendent, Corrina L. Guardipee-Hall (Blackfeet-Cree), used the day care when her children were small. “It really helped me be able to be a teacher and eventually administrator and now a superintendent,” she said. “It did help retain not only me as an employee, but also other people around the district.” It’s also a recruitment incentive: Guardipee-Hall noted that two new teacher assistants submitted day care applications for their children immediately after being hired.

Montana’s school-based day care centers would seem an ideal way to attract and keep teachers. But Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, said they don’t address the root causes of shortages: low wages and decreased public perceptions about the profession’s prestige. Plus, day care centers support teachers for only a short time during their career, if at all. 

“There are a lot of initiatives to compensate teachers in ways other than actual wages,” Kraft said, referring to efforts to subsidize student loans, housing or child care. “All of those have potential, although I would argue that it may be more effective to simply take the cost of those programs and fold them into higher teacher pay.” 

In that regard, Montana has a long way to go: Its starting teacher salaries rank 51st in the nation. When the Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit, adjusted for cost-of-living differences, it found that the average starting salary for a Montana teacher was only $36,480 — far behind neighboring Idaho ($44,150) and Wyoming ($51,530).

As for why school districts might provide housing or child care before increasing wages, Kraft explained they might be “hesitant to commit to permanent and substantial pay raises with some uncertainty about the fiscal climate.” Besides, he noted, compensation must be negotiated with teachers’ unions — “often a time-intensive and slow process” — whereas a district can unilaterally decide to open a day care. 

Ultimately, Kraft said, solving the teacher shortage will require major policy changes, as well as “generational shifts in how we perceive the profession.” 

In rural areas, in-school day care centers aren’t merely useful to the school; they also serve the community. About half of Little Diamondbacks’ regular attendees are the children of non-staffers, some of whom drive from nearly 40 miles away. Ekalaka’s facility, which is also open to community members, is the only licensed one in the county.

In rural Colorado, the West Grand School District, between Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, has had an early childhood center since 2018. West Grand opened its facility after several teachers quit because they couldn’t find child care, but administrators soon realized it would address a greater need: The town has just one other licensed day care, and it’s often full. 

The school’s day care center now serves roughly 22 children, only seven of whom are the offspring of teachers. “We knew we needed to (open it),” said Superintendent Elizabeth Bauer. “Not just for our teachers, but for our community.” 

Hannah Wynd, who works for the local health department, said she might have had to move if she hadn’t gotten a spot at West Grand. “I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children,” she said. “It’s super important, what it’s provided for my family.”

Experts don’t dispute the critical role these facilities play in families’ lives. In-school day care centers have been “introduced or enacted by well-meaning people who are probably frustrated that nothing is happening federally and are taking it upon themselves to try to better their community,” said Herbst, the Arizona State University professor. 

Yet ultimately, Herbst believes such changes are “piecemeal,” and that true change must happen on a national scale. He wants Congress to support child-care subsidies, like those that were initially included in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan. 

In the meantime, rural administrators, teachers and parents plan to keep doing what they can to keep their jobs local, their schools open and their kids cared for. (That includes obtaining additional sources of funding for their day cares: Dutton-Brady’s largest grant recently ran out, and West Grand is seeking new community funding partners.)

They don’t have the luxury of waiting for policymakers to decide their fates. 

Because here’s the picture Locke painted: If Dutton-Brady loses a single teacher, it may not be able to replace them. If the school loses a second teacher, and a third, it could end up being assimilated into a bigger district. And then the community hub, the heart of the tiny town of Dutton, would be gone. 

“We don’t have an option to not figure it out, because when we don’t, everything dries up,” Locke said. “It’s really an existential threat.” 

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain