—Help Wanted—
Child Care
Providers By Lisa Meyers McClintick | Photography by John Linn
Area colleges offer low- to no-cost accelerated early childhood certificates
BACK TO SCHOOL: Mande Hatten, owner/operator of Merry Moose Childcare and Preschool in Richmond and Rockville, was excited to have eight staff members complete St. Cloud Technical and Community College’s accelerated early childhood certification program.
Rachel Thompson was pregnant with her second child when the pandemic hit and her child care provider—who suddenly had her school-aged kids at home—decided to close. That left Thompson and her husband, Jesse, on an urgent hunt for two child care openings as her September 2020 due date neared. “It’s very difficult to find the infant spots in particular,” the Sauk Rapids resident said. The couple criss-crossed their close-to-home area, from Foley to St. Augusta, and went through three providers during an 18-month stretch. “It was near impossible, even when looking at child care centers,” which typically have more capacity than home-based providers. If her St. Cloud-based job hadn’t allowed work-from-home flexibility, or if she hadn’t had relatives to help when child care 30 Initiative Foundation ifound.org
operations closed due to COVID exposures, she or her husband would have had to quit work to take care of their daughters. Mande Hatten is the owner of Merry Moose Child Care and Preschool in Richmond and Rockville and a recipient of an Initiative Foundation emergency child care grant in the early days of the pandemic. She said demand is so high that her available child care slots would be booked through 2023 if she weren’t expanding her Richmond location. She and her staff will be able to add 80 more children to their current roster of 129 by the end of the year. Expansions and new providers, though, aren’t keeping pace with an estimated 4,000 Minnesota child care slots that have been lost—mostly in Greater Minnesota—between late 2019 and late 2020, according to The Center for Rural Policy and Development. The pandemic piled on to what was already a steady decline in
