Ramstad: Crystal’s new child care center a direct, and positive, result of ’23 Minnesota Legislature

As someone who complained a few times in this space about the giant jump in state government spending by the 2023 Legislature, today I’d like to point out an outcome of that increase that makes me happy.

The expansion of the state’s child care assistance program is starting pay off.

This is important not just for the families who need help paying for child care, but for growing the state’s economy in general. Minnesota’s workforce remains immensely constrained, with more people retiring from it than entering it.

Every little thing being done to bring people off the sidelines and into work should be celebrated. One important goal is to expand the availability of child care so that more parents can go to work.

There’s a bit of good news. As more employers push workers to return to offices five days a week, child care capacity is growing in the Twin Cities area. However, an acute shortage remains in the rest of Minnesota.

The recent opening of a new site in Crystal by New Horizon Academy highlighted the impact of the 2023 actions the then-DFL-controlled Legislature and Gov. Tim Walz.

They lifted the amount of state assistance that lower-income families receive to access child care centers and they created a compensation-support program for child care providers.

“The combination of solving the staffing crisis, plus having more families be able to afford quality care, gave us confidence to open the school in Crystal again,” Chad Dunkley, chief executive of New Horizon, told me after a ribbon-cutting event Monday.

Plymouth-based New Horizon operates 104 locations in five states, including about two dozen in the Twin Cities. It left Crystal in 2005 after the lease ran out on its space in a former school building, and the school district decided to tear the building down.

That was two years after the Legislature, facing a sizable budget deficit, sharply cut the aid it provided to lower-income families for child care.

“We searched long and hard for an affordable space and we couldn’t do it because of the worry and impact of the cuts to child care assistance,” Dunkley said. “We just couldn’t afford to build a new building because of all those cuts.”

Crystal is a market where about half of the families qualify to have a portion of their fees reimbursed by the state, he said. “In the 2023 Legislature, they increased those reimbursement rates back to where they were at in 2003,” Dunkley said.

Finding a building was much easier today since commercial real estate has been transformed by remote work. Crystal had a 16,000-square-foot vacant office building for sale just a block away from its main commercial and shopping district. New Horizon closed on the property early last year, gutted the interior and re-landscaped the outside with three play areas and an outdoor classroom.

“We’re excited to see a building that was kind of tired and old-looking get the updates that you’ve made,” Crystal’s new mayor, Julie Deshler, said at the ribbon-cutting and open house.

The town of 23,000 northwest of Minneapolis is experiencing a gradual turnover of its housing stock, as baby boomer retirees start to sell to younger couples. When she was door-knocking for votes last fall, Deshler said, “I saw a lot of babies.”

Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie, said she was “thrilled” to see the 2023 reforms begin to produce results with companies like New Horizon. She said she’d like to see the level of state assistance on child care fees raised to families who are higher up the income ladder.

“There’s a large gap of families here in Minnesota who make too much to qualify for assistance but not nearly enough to cover the cost of child care,” Kotyza-Witthuhn said.

While that remains the macro challenge in the economics of child care, within places like New Horizon, new ideas are emerging to help children.

Among the innovations at the New Horizon site in Crystal are doors with protective hinges. They are extended and covered so children can’t catch their fingers between the frame and door.

There are three rooms for infants and one that’s a “transition room” for kids around 8 to 16 months who are learning to walk and move around before going to one of the toddler rooms.

The center is also the first of the 104 New Horizon sites to be equipped with a “small motor” or sensory room, kind of like a small gym for kids to run around in and burn off energy.

“What this new sensory room is about is that some of these children, who maybe didn’t start child care as babies, are not so used to being in a group setting,” Dunkley said. “They started as a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old. They need sometimes to take a break or find ways to self-soothe when they’re still learning how to deal with emotion.”

Since the pandemic, teachers at child care centers and schools have noticed more children exhibit “challenging” behaviors. Numerous studies are being done to determine the effects of isolation and things like interaction with electronic devices have had on young children in recent years.

“Child care definitely looks different than it did five years ago,” Dunkley said.