MANSFIELD — Jeanetta Elia wove through the maze of hallways at M1 Kids Academy, past a row of rainbow-colored coat hooks hung at waist level and doors decorated with children’s artwork.
In one classroom, a group of preschoolers sat in a semicircle, coloring worksheets designed to teach them how to recognize patterns. Down the hall, a gaggle of toddlers fidgeted as their teacher cued up a song for music and movement time.
A rosy-cheeked toddler wandered toward the entrance to the classroom as Elia stopped to talk with a teacher. She leaned over the half door and lifted the little girl in her arms.
“I’ll give you a hug, but I can’t take you with me right now, OK?” Elia said as the child nestled into her shoulder.
Elia is the director of M1 Kids, a child care center housed inside M1 Church in Mansfield.
“For me, this is a ministry. It’s not just a job,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like something that I get to do. I have fun.”
Before she entered the world of child care, Elia worked at Richland County Children Services for 15 years.
Then, she and her husband found themselves in need of child care. Even with two incomes, it was hard to find an affordable option.
“Either we had to work different or split shifts, or we had to have one of us stay home,” she recalled.
“I took a $12,000 a year pay cut in order to work as a center director so that my child could come with me.”
Elia’s story isn’t unique. Cost is one of the most common barriers for families seeking high quality child care, locally and nationwide.
Meanwhile, licensed child care providers are operating on a shoestring budget and early childhood educators barely make enough to get by.
Why is child care so expensive?
Child care prices are high — but so is the cost to provide care.
Child care centers have many of the typical costs of other brick-and-mortar businesses: payroll, utilities, rent or a mortgage, liability insurance, property insurance, data management systems and supplies.
There are curriculum costs. Depending on the provider, there may be other costs — snacks, meals, transportation, field trips.
Most businesses needing to increase revenue have options — they can cut costs, raise prices or scale up production.
But those often aren’t feasible options for child care providers, according to Susan Martin, data manager for the YWCA of Northwest Ohio.
Ohio law sets required staff-to-child ratios for child care centers and in-home providers, as well as maximum group sizes per classroom.
Thus, staffing and space limit how many children a provider can legally (and safely) serve.
Raising prices is rarely a feasible option.
Martin said many providers are hesitant to hike prices for fear of pricing themselves out of the market — even if that means what they are charging barely covers the cost of care.
“We have to look at what the populations in the communities can afford to pay,” she said.
Elia said M1 Kids receives both financial and volunteer support from its affiliated church.
“If it wasn’t for the church, it would be difficult for us,” she said. “There are times where we might not make ends meet.”
Child care workers are often just scraping by
In a field that’s marginally profitable at best, child care workers typically earn low wages with minimal benefits.
“Most child care centers in this community don’t offer benefits to their employees,” said Peg Tazewell, a 26-year veteran of the child care industry and executive director of Knox County Head Start.
“They provide the mandated benefits — Social Security and Workers Comp and things like that.
“But as far as health insurance, life, short term disability, long term disability, any significant vacation, sick leave and holiday pay — I would say that in the United States, the majority of child care providers are not able to support those kind of benefits.”
Ohio’s hourly median wage across all industries is $23.11, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That adds up to $47,140 annually for a full-time worker.
The median wage for a full-time child care worker is just $28,230 a year — about $13.57 an hour.
Ohio’s minimum wage is $10.70 an hour.
Ohio’s early childhood educators have a poverty rate of 12.9 percent, while the poverty rate for elementary and middle school teachers is just 1.3 percent, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California Berkeley.
The same report found that 15 percent of Ohio’s early childhood educators are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and 27 percent are on Medicaid, at an annual cost to taxpayers of $101 million.
Child care providers we spoke to said they’d like to pay their staff more, but it’s difficult to do so without passing on the cost to families.
“In Ohio, we often find ourselves stuck choosing between paying staff fairly or keeping care affordable,” Elia said.
“As a child care center director, I see the tension every day. I want to pay my staff what they truly deserve — wages that reflect their critical role in child development — but I can’t raise tuition without pushing care out of reach for the very families who need it most.”
Many child care centers offer staff discounts for their own children. Some have tried to get creative by adding whatever benefits they can, like paid time off, holidays and free professional development.
But retention is still a challenge.
“We’re really working hard to pay more, but you can go to the Amazon warehouse and make more than a bachelor’s degreed teacher in our classroom, and that just sucks,” Tazewell said.
Providers said higher worker pay wouldn’t just benefit individual workers. It would help stabilize the industry.
Martin said she thinks public investment in child care is lagging behind because child care is often considered low-skill work.
“Child care providers are probably the most dedicated group of people you’ll find,” Martin said. “They’re looked at a lot of times as babysitters.
“They’re not looked at as the professionals that they are, which can limit that conversation in some other realms.”
“If we restructured the system to invest in both the educators and the families — ensuring livable wages for providers and expanding access to assistance up to a more reasonable threshold — it would drastically change my life as a director,” Elia said.
“I could focus on building a high-quality, stable program rather than juggling staffing shortages and tuition struggles.
“Most importantly, we’d be honoring children by giving them consistent, nurturing care and giving families the dignity of choice and opportunity.”
Ohio’s reimbursement rates are low for providers who serve poor children
Even after taking affordability into account, child care providers face another limitation on how much they can charge for their services: public reimbursement rates.
Child care costs for families who receive public assistance are reimbursed using a mix of federal and state funds. Ohio sets a maximum reimbursement rate for these children based on what it calls a market-rate survey, which is conducted every two years.
Providers are asked to fill out a survey where they input what they currently charge private pay families — which can be more, but not less, than families receiving public assistance.
Rates vary based on the child’s age, the center’s Step Up to Quality rating and the region of Ohio where the center is located.
Ohio currently reimburses providers up to the 50th percentile of the market rate — the midway point between the lowest rate charged by providers and the highest, according to Policy Matters Ohio.
That’s the lowest allowable percentile permitted by the federal government, which recommends rates states reimburse providers up to at least the 75th percentile.
Income from publicly funded child care reimbursements can be volatile because providers are reimbursed based on attendance, not enrollment.
In other words, if a child doesn’t show up due to illness or other circumstances, providers don’t get paid.
“I track weekly our expenses and our revenue, and I’m always kind of balancing,” Tazewell said. “It is a costly, costly business to operate, especially when you can’t solidly predict income.”
Tazewell said the state became more lenient after the pandemic and now offers 20 absence days every six months.
“But if there’s a crisis in the family, if someone is very sick, they’re going to use their absence days up pretty quickly,” she said.
That will be changing next year thanks to a provision in Ohio’s biennial budget, which was passed by lawmakers last week and signed by Gov. Mike DeWine.
Starting July 1, 2026, the state will reimburse providers based on enrollment.
What if child care were treated like a public good?
A report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2021 found that about ninety percent of child care workers are women and a disproportionate share of workers are women of color.
An average nationwide salary of $27,000 a year puts child care workers in the bottom 2 percent of occupations based on income.
“The free market works well in many different sectors, but child care is not one of them. It does not work for the caregivers,” then-treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote. “It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids.”
Yellen went on to call child care a “textbook example of a broken market” because its cost doesn’t account for its societal benefits.
“It’s past time that we treat child care as what it is – an element whose contribution to economic growth is as essential as infrastructure or energy,” she added.
Several child care providers in north central Ohio agreed.
“The system is held together by underfunded programs and exhausted professionals. It’s not sustainable,” Elia said. “If more people truly understood the depth and importance of early care and education, they’d see it not as a personal expense — but as a public investment with long-term return.
“High-quality child care isn’t just about keeping children safe while parents work; it’s about laying the groundwork for school readiness, resilience, and lifelong success.”
