As more discussions about supplying adequate, affordable childcare are had across the state, childcare centers continue to struggle with staff retention.
Beth Ann Lang, deputy chief executive officer of Child Care Aware of Missouri, has been working to address Missouri’s childcare crisis for more than 20 years.
Lang said there are many deep-rooted issues within the early childcare industry, but she feels that low wages and a lack of education requirements for workers in the field heavily impact turnover.
A January 2025 report from Child Care Aware found a 26% to 40% staff turnover rate due to stagnant wages between 2020 and 2024. Lang said salaries vary by area, but she said many workers barely receive compensation higher than minimum wage and rarely receive benefits.
“If you're not being paid and you don't have an education base to be able to do your very best, then people don't want to stay in our field,” Lang said.
She said another aspect of the problem is that the education field is undervalued in the United States, which in turn has led to major systemic issues.
“If you've ever looked at some other countries and how they approach education and early childhood education, it's much more part of the larger system,” Lang said. “It's viewed as a very important job and one that actually makes money.”
Amber Hansen, executive director of Seeds of Faith Preschool in Clinton, said she has been advocating for early childhood education to be more valued as a career in recent years.
“Childcare is not easy. There's lots of factors that happen in these early years of brain development,” Hansen said. “We're dealing with kids with trauma, foster kids. There's lots of things that go into our job; it's not just having them sit at a desk and complete a worksheet.”
Hansen said specific issues with staff retention vary from year to year, but it remains a consistent problem.
“Retention is a challenge for any childcare provider because of the pay factor,” Hansen said.
Hansen’s teachers are contracted to remain on staff until the end of a nine-month school year, so her day-to-day operations are mostly unaffected by staffing changes. However, she said problems could easily arise for centers under different circumstances.
“I could see that being a problem for 12-month programs because if you have a two-week notice of somebody's quitting, that doesn't leave you very long to find somebody, and then you've got to run a background screening on them,” Hansen said.
Lang said that for the state to begin to chip away at the problems within childcare, it must stop treating only the symptoms of the problem without also addressing the main issue at hand.
“If somebody's bleeding, you put a Bandaid on them,” Lang said. “But then you're going to ask, ‘Why are you bleeding? What caused that?’”
She said she wishes legislators would try to look at the issue through the eyes of someone who works in childcare.
“I wish that every legislator would spend one day in a childcare program, whether it's family-based or center-based to be just there seeing what it's like, what the issues are, what the challenges are,” Lang said. “Sitting in a room of 1-year-olds or in a family childcare program where you have two babies, a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old all running around at the same time needing you.”
Lang said even though things seem hard now, she still holds out hope for conditions to change in the future.
“Over the next five years, if we are actually as communities and as legislators and as education entities sitting together and discussing what needs to change, and making plans then enacting them, we'll be in a good place,” Lang said.