When daycares close in rural areas, sometimes an entire town is left without options

On a recent work day, Casey Sedlack was keeping her three kids busy with chores. Seven-year-old Levi watered the flowers, 5-year-old Charlie collected eggs from the chicken coop, and three-year-old Tilly was in charge of scooping up pet waste.

“I was supposed to do dog poop, but I hate dog poop!” Tilly said.

Sedlak would rather have them all in daycare. She’s self-employed as a life coach and as a consultant to small businesses, plus she helps run the family cattle ranch. But instead, she’s here at home trying to juggle work and kids. 

“Hey, hey, that’s not okay,” she told the kids, with a note of exhaustion in her voice. “There’s no hitting.”

Sedlak said it’s stressful and almost impossible. “Figuring it out when you have kids and how you’re going to make money when your kids are not in school, and there’s not an option for them to be cared for, it’s tricky.”

Even trickier now that there is no daycare option in town. Her kids were on the waitlist for Tiny Tots, the town’s sole childcare center that closed last spring.

The former daycare owner, Jess Unger, said she could care for a maximum of 21 kids. But even at that number, she couldn’t make a living.

“There’s just no feasible way that in Wyoming, at least in these smaller areas, that you’ll ever have enough enrollment to make it work,” Unger said.

Not to mention how exhausting caring for so many children can be.

“You’re sick a lot because kids are just germs, germs, germs,” she said.

Caregiver burnout and staff turnover is a major reason so many rural daycares are shutting down nationwide. In Wyoming alone, 285 daycares have shuttered in the past 15 years, and there were only about 850 to begin with. 

And those closures can hit local economies hard. Across the U.S., “the long-term impact of that is between $142 billion to $217 billion in economic loss,” said Brittany Walsh an early childhood researcher with the Bipartisan Policy Center who has studied Wyoming’s childcare needs. She found that about 10,000 Wyomingites are out of work due to a lack of childcare. That’s a lot in a state with only about 580,000 people.

“There’s a direct correlation between folks’ ability to enter and remain in the workforce and the economic impact that it has on your local community,” she said.

But now, some Dubois parents are trying something new. They plan to open their own daycare center called Little Lambs. Sara Domek is one of the parents figuring out the logistics. On a tour of the place, she opened doors and pointed out stacks of infant beds and tiny tables and chairs.

“We’ve got the bathrooms, and then two rooms that can be used for nap times,” she said.

Domek said Little Lambs will be a nonprofit so they can get grants to help them ride the constant highs and lows of enrollment that often come with doing business in a rural area.

“It seemed to be the most sustainable model because you could tap into other granting sources and that’s what we want. We want sustainability,” Domek said.

Domek said the town recently gave Little Lambs a couple grants worth $20,000 dollars, and a local fundraiser brought in $12,000 more.

For Domek, it’s urgent this new daycare gets up and running. Her five-year-old is in pre-K, but she recently gave birth to a baby boy and will need to go back to working full time for a conservation group in a few months. If they can’t figure out childcare, they might move to the other side of the mountains three hours away.

“We’ve even looked, like, well, do we move to Pinedale for a few years and closer to my folks and they could help?” Domek said.

And with fewer than 1,000 residents here, losing even one family leaves behind a hole in this small mountain town.