Day-care affordability is paramount in retaining high-quality teachers

I’ll be leaving the School District of Philadelphia as soon as baby two arrives (no, Dad, I am not pregnant).

For years, I have written about how district maternity policies financially cripple female teachers. With a heavy sigh and a healthy toddler, I can finally push some line items to the side: Target store-brand diapers compensated for lost earnings; thrift store outfits offset unpaid leave.

What I can’t ignore is the pending economic disaster of having two children in a quality day care while teaching.

In order to retain high-quality teachers, the School District of Philadelphia must consider viable options to support teacher childcare. It is one of the reasons so many teachers are leaving.

Day-care affordability is paramount in retaining high-quality teachers. An overwhelming population of the teaching profession is female and on the receiving end of failed and biased policymaking at the federal level. To complicate matters, the United States is one of the few westernized countries to not have widespread, subsidized childcare.

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While U.S. Department of Labor data show that childcare is out of financial reach for many families, the numbers are grimmer for teachers, whose wages have been low and slow to keep up with inflation and the cost of living. For example, my monthly day-care bill is $2,100. After childcare, union dues, and taxes, I’m only bringing home $1,000 per paycheck. That’s not enough for a family to live on.

Following this trend, when I have another child, my day-care expenses will be equivalent to my wages.

I am not alone.

To be sure, we don’t have any hard quantitative data on the matter — unfortunately, no formal study has been done (University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, consider this is my doctoral pre-application!). But a 2017 study from the Learning Policy Institute found that 52% of teachers leave the profession for family and personal reasons.

We do know from research from Ready Nation that there is a low supply of high-quality early childhood education in Philadelphia. When caretakers live in childcare deserts, they are motivated to stay at home.

I would like to posit that the School District of Philadelphia is not suffering from attracting teachers, it is suffering from the “brain drain” of highly qualified, seasoned professionals like me — whose professional level of expertise in the field overlaps with childbearing age.

My colleague, Alicia Conquest, is another example. She is an administrator’s dream hire: a Spanish teacher and track coach who is a favorite of students and teachers alike, and deeply connected to the neighborhood and school communities. Conquest left the district classroom upon the birth of her children because of the cost of childcare. While she has since returned to the field, she is one of the few.

Philadelphia students deserve the best of the best.

The district could stop the drain of highly experienced teachers by investing in teacher day care. Options exist in the form of expanding financial subsidies, providing direct childcare reimbursement, and by partnering with successful programs to create district-run centers. The late University City High School had such a facility on its first floor before it closed in 2013, while Thomas Alva Edison High School continues to have a center in collaboration with its career and technical education program. Both of these are district schools.

I am not suggesting that every district school in Philadelphia needs to have a facility for staff children, nor am I advocating for a childcare program run by the district. Instead, the district and research partners should conduct research on providing district-subsidized day care that can provide relevant, actionable steps for district policymakers to retain experienced teachers.

I am advocating for identifying day-care deserts in the Philadelphia area and triaging resources in places where there is strong teacher demand.

States such as Idaho and Texas have experimented with providing quality, affordable childcare for teachers as a teacher retention tool. Tabitha Branum, superintendent of Richardson Independent School District, north of Dallas, has noted that creating centers to care for staff children “is one of the strategies that we have in place to attract and retain the very best of the best.”

Some may say that it is not in the interest of Philly school students to divert funds from classrooms. Look, I get it. District classrooms aren’t overflowing with tangible resources. I’ve been in the classroom for close to a decade, and for many years, I have had to purchase my own copy paper. But if the district is able to procure $145,037,021 for Apple technology in 2023, investing in teachers — which is undeniably also an investment in students — is also possible.

Not only do programs like the ones I’ve mentioned support the long-term retention of teachers, they also support experienced educators — which is requisite for student academic success and an indicator of school quality. It is possible that a successful program would also attract other experienced educators from nearby districts.

Philadelphia students deserve the best of the best. And the best of the best need better childcare options.

Lydia Kulina-Washburn is a high school English language arts teacher in the School District of Philadelphia. @LydiaKulina