Early Childhood Alliance Coordinator Kristen Schulz approached the Park City Council earlier this year with a proposal to help stabilize the local child care market. For around $2 million, she said the city could fund care for more than 200 children.
The council agreed to $1 million, and now Schulz said there will have to be hard trade-offs.
A city work group will determine how to spend the money, which Schulz said could include tuition stipends for parents.
“I think there is general support for some kind of stipend,” Schulz said. “But questions remain. Do you have to live here? Do you also have to work here? If we say you work here, what does that mean?”
The money from the city could also be used for incentives to push informal child care providers to become licensed.
“There are a lot of home-based providers that don’t have their certification that other centers have,” Park City Community Foundation Executive Director Joel Zarrow, who has lobbied city hall along with Schulz, said. “Part of the proposal was to provide those family providers with the professional development assistance they need to get the certification that would bring them up to the same level of standard as the other centers. Now these are fantastic providers, they’re doing great work, we just want us to help standardize some of the care that is in the more informal part of the sector.”
By becoming licensed, home-based providers would be able to accept subsidies, some of which are available through Utah’s Department of Workforce Services.
Schulz said the group is working diligently to reach answers as the next school year approaches. Additionally, pandemic-era funding from the federal government for local child care providers is set to dry up this fall.
Options for how to spend the $1 million could be presented to the city council as early as July.
Schulz said they plan to start discussions about child care assistance with the Summit County Council on June 28.
