CINCINNATI — The high price of child care isn’t costing only parents. It’s also affecting providers trying to keep day cares going.
At a time when the pandemic shut down day cares for good, Kaneisha Hill decided to open one.
“When I was 13 years old, I was in an unfortunate situation, and I had to leave school, and my sister had just had a baby,” she said. “So that’s where the dream started for me.”
She said she’s part of a team that got a building space and turned it into “Kids Ave Learning Center” in Cincinnati, but it came at a price.
“Financially it was about $20,000 to start up, and we didn’t open as soon as we got the building,” Hill said. “So that’s where a lot of the money went into. It went into the back end of keeping the bills and the rent paid and things like that while we were getting a place together. So, it was a full year that we had the building before we actually opened the building.”
Two years later, they arre just now able to make that money back, she said. But there’s another problem.
“Sometimes we, like, the other day we had three kids,” Hill said. “We have 14 kids in row right now, but we had three kids. So, we had to send people home and that affects their pay.”
She said she’s working on trying to get subsidies to help increase the pay to keep workers without increasing costs to parents.
“Right now, we’re not star-rated, and we just submitted our first star, and the more stars that we get, the more reimbursement we get for the children, and then that will allow us to increase the pay of the employees,” Hill said.
She hopes that will make it so they can expand and add another day care to an area she said desperately needs it.
“I want to open facilities in a less fortunate communities to provide the same learning opportunities that are in place in more fortunate communities,” Hill said. “So that’s that’s the biggest goal.”
