To supplement low wages in the child care workforce, some employees at Little Clippers Child Development Center in Tiffin, Iowa, work second jobs to make a livable wage.

Stagnating wages, a stressful work environment, and high employee turnover rates have long plagued Iowa’s child care workforce. Johnson County initiatives have alleviated some of the strain, Little Clippers Director Amanda Rairden said, and state legislation signals a larger-scale solution.

A countywide $2 an hour wage enhancement for child care workers allowed Little Clippers to be more selective in its hiring process and dramatically increased employee retention, Rairden said.

Rairden was able to hire five new workers when Little Clippers received the wage boost in 2023 and has retained four since then.

“We had one staff [member] practically cry because $2 an hour during the week is huge,” Rairden said. “$12.50 an hour isn’t livable. Some of them were able to give up a weekend job, which meant a lot.”

Iowa’s hourly average pay for child care workers is $12.62, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics. The annual average pay is $26,250.

Child care workers in Johnson County earn an average hourly wage of $12.56, according to Laurie Nash, the county’s youth and family service manager.

Despite the wage improvement, Rairden said there are still changes needed to make the profession more attractive for potential employees.

Iowa Child Care Connect, a website providing real-time information about availability and demand of child care in the state, reports there are 47,858 Iowa children and their families in need of child care as of Feb. 13.

The data shows there are 5,980 child care slots available in Johnson County, yet the demand is 7,884 slots — a deficit of nearly 2,000 children and their families who are not receiving the care they need.

An estimated 23 percent of people in Iowa live in a child care desert, according to the Center for American Progress.

Aiming to address low wages and removing barriers to access child care, local and state initiatives seek to improve Iowa’s ailing child care workforce.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds listed improving the state’s child care industry and voluntary preschool programs as a priority during her Condition of the State Address on Jan. 14.

Reynolds announced a plan to launch a statewide program to boost child care worker wages, supplementing an existing network of regional funds which raised over $2.3 million in private investment for 2025. The network, beginning in October 2023, has created nearly 11,000 new child care slots in Iowa, according to a study by the Common Sense Institute of Iowa, a nonpartisan think tank.

Through the governor’s proposed program, businesses and private donors can contribute to a fund that raises wages for child care workers without raising fees for families.

The proposal would allow for direct donations to a specific regional fund through a statewide portal or general donations used to match regional fund dollars.

The governor also introduced a bill to launch a $16 million “continuum of care” grant program for preschool providers and child care centers to partner to provide all-day care for children, using funds to transport children from preschool to daycare and vice versa. Introduced on Feb. 7, the bill would also offer child care assistance to child care workers and improve preschool quality standards.

“Parents need a solution that meets the demands of their busy lives — one that allows their children to benefit from our successful preschool program and have access to childcare,” Reynolds said in a Feb. 7 news release.

Iowa Senate Democrats have long prioritized improving child care in the state and introduced a legislative package addressing the issue on Feb. 6. The package includes legislation to expand eligibility for state assistance for child care, automatic qualification for child care assistance for parents under the age of 18, and automatic qualification for siblings of children who receive assistance.

The package also includes an initiative to raise child care workers’ wages. However, unlike Reynolds’ proposal, which aims to use donations from public and private organizations, the Iowa Senate Democrats’ proposal plans to double the state’s investment in the Child Care Solutions Fund pilot program. Reynolds seeks to codify the pilot program.

The governor’s proposal will be sent to state lawmakers to review, while the Iowa Senate Democrats’ proposal is likely to be dead on arrival since they are the minority party.

Iowa Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner, D-Iowa City, said the pilot program injected $3 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds into the state’s child care workforce, and it resulted in the creation of 275 new child care slots in seven communities.

This is similar to Johnson County’s wage enhancement, although research on the program is not finalized, and numbers are not yet known.

“One of the arguments that we’ve made for a long time is that we need to professionalize child care,” Weiner said. “We need to respect those who work in the area because they’re really in the business of helping form young minds in their most formative years, and the wages have been way too low, objectively too low.”

While these state and local programs target the issue, Johnson County child care advocates and experts worry the governor’s legislation may not be enough.

Iowa City experts worry about “one-size-fits-all”

Nash, who has been involved with Johnson County’s child care worker wage enhancement program since it was enacted in 2023, said nine other wage enhancement programs have been launched across the state and all look different.

A statewide wage enhancement program would be beneficial for the industry, Nash said, but she doubts one particular program will be successful throughout the state in both rural and urban counties.

“I think that’s really important to note, as usual, in the state of Iowa, a one-size-fits-all does not work for us,” Nash said.

Nash pointed to Hamilton County — north of Ames in the middle of the state — which enacted a wage enhancement program that was very different from Johnson County’s. She said there are four licensed child care centers in Hamilton County, and the wage enhancement was able to benefit them all. However, in Johnson County with 85 centers, the program had to have criteria to stipulate which centers qualified.

Nash said there is a misunderstanding of how the governor’s initiatives will be funded, as the plan does not allocate any new money to improve child care but rather moves funds from existing sources.

In an email to The Daily Iowan, the governor’s office confirmed the continuum of care grant pilot program will be funded by existing state Early Childhood Iowa funds as well as funds from the federal Child Care and Development Fund.

Nash said the movement of funds will have local fallout, and it means the county will likely no longer be able to fund Home Ties, a child care center for families experiencing or at risk of housing insecurity. She said the move would also endanger the child care center at the Arc, which serves a number of kids with disabilities.

“I’m hoping that that is not going to be an unintended consequence of this,” Nash said. “I hope we’re not weakening the whole system.”

Liz Ernst, Johnson County’s early childhood coordinator and board member of Early Childhood Iowa, said while the continuum of care program will help alleviate transportation worries for parents, it would take away from the organization’s funding.

Ernst said the shift in funds would take away programs Early Childhood Iowa offers, such as scholarships for child care costs.

Initiatives to expand child care assistance could have adverse effects on Iowa’s child care centers.

Sheila Hansen, senior policy advisor at Common Good Iowa, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to create people-centered policy solutions, said child care providers often lose money when they take on children who are on child care assistance because their reimbursement rates are lower than what a private person might pay the center.

Hansen said a solution to this would be to increase the reimbursement rate centers receive from the Iowa Department of Human Services, which reimburses providers to take children on child care assistance.

There are more issues to address than those outlined in the governor’s proposals, Hansen said, and increasing reimbursement rates would be a good place to start, as well as building up the child care workforce in Iowa.

“There have been lots of funding, lots of money that has gone out for building buildings or increasing capacity, and you can build all the buildings you want and increase the capacity, but if you don’t have the staff to fill those buildings, then it really does no good to spend all that money on increasing the capacity,” Hansen said. “So, we really do need to make sure that the workforce is there.”

Extending local initiatives aimed to alleviate child care worker issues

Johnson County’s child care wage enhancement program will inject $1.5 million into the workforce by the time it ends in 2026.

Michael Chen, Greater Iowa City’s community development program manager, is leading the effort  to extend ways to support the local child care workforce. Part of Chen’s work is speaking with child care providers participating in the wage enhancement and assessing how the program is working for them.

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Chen said he’s made his way to at least half of the participating providers, and the general consensus is child care centers recognizing improvement in the ability to retain quality staff and boost morale among child care workers.

Chen and Greater Iowa City are reaching out to local businesses to instill more investment in the child care workforce through business and private donations, similar to how Reynolds proposed to increase child care wages.

“It should be treated as a shared responsibility, in my opinion,” Chen said. “Investing in child care means investing in workforce stability.”

Chen said the governor’s plan to raise wages is sustainable, and not having access to child care prevents Iowans from being in the workforce, which has a negative impact on the economy.

Data obtained by the Iowa Women’s Foundation, a statewide organization that utilizes targeted research to reveal barriers to women’s success, reported that child care issues result in an estimated $935 million loss annually for Iowa’s economy.

“There’s no silver bullet to this, but if we can contribute in a way that helps a greater community and opens up slots, helps employees get to work without having to worry about child care, we’ll be in a better spot,” Chen said.

Megan Ronnenberg, a graduate fellow at the University of Iowa School of Social Work, is leading an evaluation of the county’s wage enhancement program. Ronnenberg surveys participating child care centers at six-month intervals, assessing the impact of the program on a personal and professional level.

She said she is in the middle of her second round of data collection and not yet finished with her research, but her first round of data collection revealed positive results and uncovered struggles for the participating centers.

Ronnenberg said child care workers who received enhanced wages reported being more financially stable as a result, however, they are still facing struggles. In her first survey, Ronnenberg said 80 percent of the workers who responded said they had experienced at least one hardship in the past six months, such as housing insecurity, transportation insecurity, or difficulty affording health care.

“There is some evidence, yes, that the wage enhancement program is helping and working, but it can’t fix everything,” she said. “There still is a lot of support that the child care workforce needs in order to really be well and provide the best quality of care that they can,” she said.

She said Reynolds’ proposals are evidence of a commitment to improve child care and child care outcomes for families in Iowa.

Little Clippers Director Rairden said the “million dollar question” is if these initiatives and programs are enough to address Iowa’s child care workforce’s struggles.

Rairden said more can be done to aid the ailing profession, but the state has to start somewhere, and the governor recognizing the problem is a huge step forward.

“I have to believe that it will start taking us in the right direction so that we can offer more centers and slots and fill the gaps for all of these families,” she said.