Closing of Duluth daycare centers exacerbates growing hardship for families

Mikayla Kruschke gave birth to her first child, a girl, in July. And so far, says Kruschke, her daughter is a great baby and a wonderful addition to the family. She smiles a lot, is not very whiny and goes to bed quite easily.

But a few weeks ago, the young mother's blissful mood was shattered when Kruschke learned that the daycare center where she and her husband had reserved a place for their daughter was to be unexpectedly closed on September 20.

“I immediately panicked,” Kruschke recalls, describing a “heartbreaking feeling.”

She called every childcare provider in the area she could find, but the answer was always the same: no one had a spot available for months.

“I thought that while I was on maternity leave, I would just focus on figuring out what my life was like now. How could I take care of her? And then this added stress was just awful,” she said.

Kruschke is a clinical social worker and her husband is a nurse. They have no family in the area who could help them. Now they are considering hiring a nanny. She has also considered quitting work.

They are one of more than 100 families in the Duluth area who have been desperately searching for alternative childcare in recent weeks after two major daycare centers announced their imminent closure.

The Building Blocks Learning Center will close on September 20; the Observation Hill Children's Center will close on November 1. Together, the two centers are licensed to serve 141 children.

Meanwhile, a third facility, Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center, licensed for 54 children and operated by the YWCA Duluth, is looking for a new group to lead the center.

This cumulative loss is exacerbating Duluth's child care shortage. Even before these closures, the Duluth region was short more than 1,000 child care spaces, according to data from the Northland Foundation and economic development group Northspan.

And while the number of places in daycare centers has remained stable up to this point, the region has lost over half of its home-based child care workers in the past five years alone, resulting in a decrease of over 700 places.

“We said this was going to happen,” said Courtney Greiner, an organizer with the child care campaign Kids Count On Us, who also runs her own daycare center in nearby Esko.

“This draws even more attention to a crisis we have been talking about for years.”

A broken model

The situation in Duluth is not an isolated case. The YMCA of Rochester closed its daycare center last month, leaving 160 children without space.

A report by the Center for Rural Policy and Development estimates that there is a shortage of more than 40,000 child care places outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

The owners of the soon-to-close Duluth daycare centers declined requests for interviews. Greiner, who spoke to both, said the child care workers view their work as a passion as much as a livelihood.

“You feel like you're a failure, when in reality it's a system failure, a state failure and a community failure. It's not their fault. Our business model doesn't work.”

Last week, toddlers at the YWCA Duluth's Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center built wobbly blocks in a classroom filled with light from giant windows while teachers led them in a rousing, quacking chorus of “Five Little Ducks.”

The YWCA Duluth has operated child care programs since the 1980s, but the organization says it can no longer sustain them.

“We see that the rising costs are making this simply impossible,” said Beth Burt, strategic adviser to the YWCA. “In the past, child care centers often operated on the backs of the women who worked there, and they earned nothing.”

Burt said they have increased wages but still can't recruit and retain enough staff. They also had to invest $650,000 in their aging building in recent years. Those costs are impossible to recoup in a business with such thin margins, she said. Now they hope to make the space and equipment available to another nonprofit to run the center.

“Our families and our staff have been crying,” said Loni Stallsmith, director of the daycare, in announcing their plans. “So we really want to find someone to take it over and keep it running and keep our staff and families.”

Years-long waiting lists

Over the past two weeks, parents who just learned of the centers' closure have been desperately calling other childcare facilities in the city, asking for help on social media, but the response is almost always the same.

“Our response is that we are at capacity, but the waiting list is pretty long and we don't expect to have any spots available any time soon,” said Nate Byrne, co-director of the Summit School, which provides early childhood care for 115 children. The school is being inundated with calls from concerned parents.

“And then the places we would normally send them to are all full. It's heartbreaking.”

The earliest opening of the Summit School and many other centers in Duluth is not until 2026.

“One description people often give me is that the first person they tell about their pregnancy is a family member and the second person they tell is their daycare provider or their future caregiver just to get on the waiting list,” said Duluth City Council member Arik Forsman.

In fact, many parents say you have to start even earlier. They say you have to tell a potential daycare center before you even start, attempt have a baby.

Forsman has been concerned about the lack of childcare for several years, ever since he first-hand experienced how difficult it is to find childcare for his young children. He agreed that the childcare model needed to be fundamentally changed.

“There are these contradictory truths: It is very expensive for families to be able to afford child care. At the same time, these providers hardly make any money,” he said.

In recent years, the city has invested money in creating new daycare spaces. Now, Forsman said, authorities want to switch to providing repayable loans and grants to help existing daycare centers stay afloat.

Jade Goran, a Duluth mother of two young children, said her 3-year-old is already at his fifth daycare. The previous four have all been closed.

“Every time we get one of these notifications, it's incredibly stressful for us,” Goran said. “It's all exhausting. I'm making phone call after phone call to find a place to view and secure a spot.”

Meanwhile, parents in west Duluth are fighting to keep the Spirit Valley Early Childhood Education Center open.

Kaitlin Reinl, who has two children at the center, said there would be no other places for her children if the center were to close.

“I really feel like my only option is to fight this, both for myself and for others,” Reinl said. “We're just trying to go to work and we really feel abandoned in this situation.”