HAYS, Kansas — It started with a phone call late last month.
The child care that Zach and Aubrey Woolf had lined up for their 10-month-old daughter was closing, just a couple of weeks before Aubrey started back at her job with the local school district.
The news sent them scrambling.
They called over a dozen other child care providers in town and sent messages to 20 more. The Woolfs scoured a statewide database for options in their county. But there were exactly zero openings.
“There just seems to be a swarm of people all trying to find open spots for infants, and they’re few and far between,” Zach Woolf said. “There’s no hope.”
How dire is the situation in Hays? The Woolfs also posted their pleas to an active Facebook group dedicated to local parents searching for child care options. In this northwest Kansas town of about 21,000 people, that Facebook group has 1,400 members.
After several frantic days, the Woolfs found an opening for their daughter in a neighboring town 20 minutes away. It wasn’t ideal, but at least it was something.
Then, they got another phone call. That provider was injured in an accident and could no longer care for their daughter.
So, they crunched the numbers to see how it would affect their finances for Aubrey to quit her job.
“We were probably a week away from her talking to her advisor at the school and being like, ‘I can’t come because I have nowhere to send my child.’” Woolf said. “What are you supposed to do in that situation?”
It’s a dilemma families face across rural Kansas, where child care options are scarce and solutions to the chronic problem seem ever more elusive. For small towns desperate to attract new families and stop an exodus of young residents, solving the child care conundrum poses a matter of civic survival.
Child care scarcity squeezes communities statewide. In four-fifths of Kansas counties, more than 10 children compete for each open spot that can take a kid younger than three years old.
If finding child care is a stressful, competitive prospect in Kansas City and Wichita, that pales in comparison to family life in a county where you can count the number of day care options on one hand.
The Child Care Aware organization’s data shows 18 rural counties in Kansas have five or fewer child care providers. Wichita County in western Kansas has only one.
And that’s before any of those precious few providers close down.
