Insufficient child care is costing North Carolina about $5.65 billion each year, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation estimates.

The report, released in partnership with the and , looked at the ways a lack of child care access hurts the state’s economy. Employers lose $4.29 billion a year because of job disruptions and turnover related to child care, and the state loses another $1.36 billion in tax revenue, the report found.

“When we couple the immediate needs of employers with the long-term workforce projections in the state, we simply cannot afford to leave people on the sidelines — and that is where access to affordable, quality child care is so critical,” Meredith Archie, president of the NC Chamber Foundation, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Twenty-five percent of parents recently experienced a job disruption due to child care issues, based on a representative survey of 517 parents with children under 6 years old. Thirty-five percent of those parents reported leaving the workforce.

Fifteen percent of surveyed parents said they expected to leave their jobs in the following year, with 37% of those parents citing insufficient child care as the reason.

“It’s a top issue for our workforce,” said Gary Salamido, president and CEO of the NC Chamber, at the event Wednesday. “It’s a top issue for people. At the end of the day, we can get everything else right and be competitive, and we are, and we’re winning. Now it’s about workforce. Now it’s about people.”

North Carolina the top state for business for two years in a row by CNBC. Yet the labor market is “historically tight,” Archie said.

“We have more job openings than people available to take those jobs, and as we look ahead, we know we have an aging population here in the state, and so labor constraints are only going to get tighter,” she said.

Danielle Stilwell, HR development and recruitment manager at Columbia Forest Products, said she did not find the numbers surprising based on her experience with her company’s employees, in terms of both participation and productivity.

“We have found when our employees’ needs are not met, they are not truly engaged in the workforce,” Stilwell said.

The report is part of a series from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation called ” which studies the economic impacts of insufficient child care at the state level.

“The child care challenge that we have right now is akin to quicksand,” said Aaron Merchen, senior director of policy and programs in early childhood education for the U.S. Chamber Foundation. “If you notice you’re in quicksand right away, you can take a low-level intervention and get out of that situation. The longer you wait, the more serious the situation becomes, the harder it gets to get out of that quicksand.”

“So how can we use this report to look at the situation that we’re in, and how can we use this report for employers, policymakers, providers, and working parents to work together to find a solution that works for North Carolina?” Merchen said.

The report’s release comes less than three weeks before the expiration of federal funds propping up the state’s child care industry. Early childhood advocates are pushing for the state to step in to extend that funding during this legislative session.

Without intervention, predicts the state will lose an estimated 20% of its child care programs within a year, and about a third of its programs at some point after the funds end. Most programs have reported expecting to raise prices for parents to sustain their businesses and retain their teachers.

Cost was the top factor parents in the survey considered when choosing child care arrangements, and the report found high-income parents were more likely to be able to choose based on other factors such as quality and reputation.

“For an infant in center-based care in North Carolina, the cost is nearly as high as the average cost of a mortgage, and when you look at families with two or more children, it often far exceeds that cost,” said Erica Palmer Smith, executive director of NC Child. “And so what we see is an incredible need to address this issue as a state so that parents are able to work and provide for their families.”

The report does not include policy recommendations, but Salamido said the state chamber and its foundation have plans to “reimagine child care” in its delivery, in how parents access it, and in how it’s paid for. He brought up both public and private entities playing a role in taking on the cost of child care.

“It’s a long-term priority for us,” Salamido said. “This is not something that’s going to change overnight. This is not a click, and all of a sudden we solve the problem. It’s multidimensional.”

Workforce participation for parents is only one side of the child care coin, Palmer Smith said. It’s also about children’s learning and long-term well-being.

“Children who have access to early learning opportunities in those first five years of life, we know that they are more likely to read at grade level in school,” she said. “We know that they are more likely to develop strong coping skills, to be able to be resilient to all of the things that life is going to grow at them. We know that they’re more likely to graduate from high school, and even as we look into adulthood, we know that they’re more likely to be employed, to earn a higher wage, and even to be healthier.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Quality of schools in the region, which encompasses Boise, could be a factor, according to a from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that identifies the nation’s best and worst metro areas for educational effectiveness. 

“Literally, you see the houses springing up like mushrooms,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, a nonprofit supporting charter and district schools in the area. 

The region is among those where schools made above-average academic progress prior to COVID-19, the report shows. With the pandemic now accelerating toward suburbs and smaller metro areas — and often away from high-priced coastal cities — the authors say families and business leaders looking to relocate should factor in school quality when deciding where to settle down.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Institute, cautioned that there’s no guarantee the pandemic hasn’t stalled progress in areas where student performance once trended upward. Some experts, for example, have called recent “staggering.” But he said the message to districts and charter schools that were effective before the pandemic is to stay the course, and those that are ineffective “cannot just go back to normal.”

“I would assume that school districts and charter schools that were doing well by kids before the pandemic are probably largely the same ones doing well by them during the pandemic,” he said.

Using the — a national database of student performance — and graduation data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fordham-Chamber project focuses on 100 large and mid-sized metro areas. The top locales include Miami, which recently received back-to-back from the state; Memphis, where Black, Hispanic and low-income students have shown above-average academic growth; and the Atlanta region, which ranks fourth in the study.

Atlanta has been ranked among the best places to start a new business, attracting tech leaders like . Collaboration among districts across the metro area is one reason why students were making progress before the pandemic and are “well-positioned to return to growth,” said Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education outcomes across the metro Atlanta area. “Substantial inequities still exist, but the gap in several key indicators has been slowly eroding.”

Smaller metro areas, such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Brownsville, Texas, also emerged as places where schools performed better than expected based on demographics.

Those on the lower end of the spectrum include the Salt Lake City area, Las Vegas and Tulsa. Average achievement in math and English language arts has improved over the past six to 10 years in the Las Vegas metro area — essentially the Clark County School District — but schools still perform below average nationally, according to the report. 

Eighty percent of the population

The researchers focused on the nation’s metro areas because that’s where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives and where economic activity and labor market trends tend to have the most impact. Issues such as school choice and racial segregation also affect multiple districts. 

In addition to identifying areas with above- and below-average academic growth, the researchers factored in progress among Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students, a region’s improvement over the past six to 10 years, and high school graduation rates. They combined these indicators into a measure they call “student learning accelerating metros” — or SLAM. The report includes interactive features so users can isolate results for specific indicators, subject areas or demographic groups.

The authors stressed that while achievement scores might seem to be an obvious indicator of high-quality schools, achievement alone often reflects students’ family backgrounds instead of a school’s effectiveness.

That’s why “Best Places to Live” lists should provide families a more comprehensive view of school quality instead of relying on standardized test scores, the authors wrote.

The SLAM rankings show that a metro area in which students have high achievement scores overall might not perform as well on the other measures. 

In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, in the state’s Research Triangle region, has among the highest ACT scores in the state, but also large in achievement between Black and white students. 

That hasn’t stopped the region from attracting Google, Apple and Nike, which are in the area.

And the Raleigh area ranks fourth in raw achievement scores, but falls to 48th in the report when the other indicators are considered. On the other hand, the McAllen, Texas, area — which includes the Sharyland, Edinburg and Hidalgo school districts — ranks 41st in raw achievement, but third based on the report’s SLAM measure.

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, a nonprofit organization of business leaders in North Carolina, praised the report for providing relevant data for her state, where countywide districts include both urban centers and higher-performing suburbs. 

She said in an email that she’s “most concerned” about Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and is “most eager” to see where the Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg districts go in the years to come.Those two districts, she said “have some really interesting promising practices emerging” around literacy and teacher recruitment in high-needs schools.

The authors note that while charter growth and district reform efforts have often focused on the cities at the heart of a metro area, the “suburbs are where many of the kids — and much of the action — are at, and they often explain a metro’s grade.”

Looking at broad trends across metro areas, however, can hide “meaningful variation” from one district to the next, said Alex Spurrier, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. In October, the think tank released a report showing how a lack of affordable housing in some of the nation’s most sought-after districts limits educational opportunity. 

“Even if families decide to move to a metro area with higher-performing public schools,” Spurrier said, “their access to specific public school systems may be limited based on where they can afford housing,” Spurrier said.