Leanna Lorden is Chief Operating Officer at White Birch Center.

At the White Birch Center, we experience the child care crisis every day. The bright red banner on top of our website reads: “No open enrollment opportunities until Fall 2025 for infant, toddler and preschool-age children.”

Families on our waiting list call in monthly to hold their spots, with some families remaining on our waitlist for close to two years. We are the only child care center in Henniker and one of just a handful in our region west of Concord.

The childcare availability and affordability crisis continues, affecting families with young children in New Hampshire.

For many young, working families in the Granite State, accessing child care is a real burden. Some families struggle to find child care, battling long waitlists at multiple facilities. For others, affording child care is a barrier. In New Hampshire, the average cost of quality child care for a family with a toddler and an infant is $28,000.

One factor contributing to long waitlists is the lack of early childhood educators in the field. An early childhood professional in New Hampshire earns, on average, $27,000 per year. The field is largely dominated by women, many of whom leave when they start families of their own due to the cost of accessing care for their own children. If a child care worker in a two-parent household herself has a toddler and an infant, she is likely paying all or most of her income towards child care.

It’s easy to see why leaving the field for a higher-paying job is a smart financial decision for parents working in child care. And yet, they are being forced out of a career path for which they are passionate and highly trained because the economics of running a child care center does not allow their employers to pay more without raising the tuition prices for the families who attend their centers.

At White Birch Center, we are able to offer our teachers a discount on child care for their own children who attend our center. Thanks to the investments and updated guidelines included in the state budget that passed last summer, two of our teachers now qualify and have applied for the New Hampshire Child Care Scholarship to help further offset the cost of child care for their children. While our center discount and the state scholarship program offer some relief, it does not apply to everyone.

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In January, the National Association for the Education of Young Children polled childcare owners and directors on the state of the industry over the last six months. One-third of directors or owners said they paid more in rent, nearly half said they paid more for liability insurance, and more than half were paying more for property insurance. 53 percent of centers polled had a staffing shortage, and 48 percent had raised tuition in the last month.

These expenses prevent White Birch Center from raising wages for our employees. Plus, if we raised the wages of our two staff members receiving the NH Child Care Scholarship, they risk earning too much to qualify and in turn, losing access to the scholarship program.

But what if there was a way all child care workers could qualify for the New Hampshire Child Care Scholarship, regardless of household income?

The House Finance Committee is currently considering a bill, SB 404, that would provide all child care workers access to the state scholarship program, regardless of household income. For the small percentage of centers in the state that are already providing free child care to their employees, this would help them stabilize the bottom line and increase wages for employees.

The estimated cost per year for the state is $2 million. When considering what the state of New Hampshire spends in a year, this investment into stabilizing the child care workforce would equate to just .02% of the total state budget.

SB 404 is a statewide investment in early care, staff retention, and program growth.

White Birch Center is also trying to increase our capacity to include more infant care. Currently, we only provide care for children older than nine months old. With this expansion comes the necessity for more childcare staff. SB 404 will allow us to hire more teachers for these spots, retain them, and fully staff our program.

As a center experiencing this child care staffing crisis, we urge lawmakers to support SB 404.