More than half a century ago, President John F. Kennedy said, "Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future." Anyone who has raised or even just cared for a child can relate to that sentiment. And yet, working parents in rural and urban America struggle daily to ensure they have adequate care for their little ones and certainly safe care at an affordable price.
Here at NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, we have spent countless hours talking with the Administration about workforce issues that impact broadband deployment in rural America. This includes conversations about how to find workers, how to train them and how to keep them in rural markets. It’s what drove us to our collaboration with Northwood Technical College and its digital badging program, among other things.
As a working mother myself, I spent the first six years of my children's early years focused on my own childcare needs, knowing that one disruption in the childcare "house of cards" meant that days of work were cancelled or reshuffled. The stress levels were incredibly high as well, as one spouse was always forced to choose whose day during that time of disruption was more "disposable." We had never really considered access to childcare as something that impacted NTCA members’ ability to recruit and retain the best talent.
During our annual Women in Telecom Fly-In to Washington, D.C., this past summer, we invited Lucy Moore and Barbara Cottam, two leaders from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), to come over and exchange thoughts with our women executives. As soon as the discussion turned to what could be done to encourage more women to enter the rural broadband space as an attractive career path, the Band-Aid came off. I was astounded at the stories NTCA women were sharing about the inability to find care in their communities and the talent they had lost in the workforce, as parents had difficult choices to make or long distances to travel for care.
We heard about everything from challenges with maternity benefits to nursing options to the challenge of pulling together summer programs for school age children. We even heard stories about spending three hours on the road to get back and forth from a lone daycare option and about women dropping out of the workforce mid-career to care for their own grandchildren when their children had no other option. The stories poured in.
There were certainly some bright light stories in there, too. A retired CEO of an Iowa company told us about helping to start a local daycare in a community that had no childcare resources other than a few in-home providers. Families in the town had previously been driving 30 miles away to another town for access to care, which then led to them enrolling their children in those school districts because of the relationships built. We also have CTC (Brainerd, Minn.), who received a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for childcare access and is partnering with their local YMCA. NTCA members are finding creative solutions to help not only their employees, but their communities as a whole.
One of my favorite stores that I have gathered recently came from Dave Wolf, CEO of Gardonville Cooperative Telephone Association (Brandon, Minn.). As Dave noted, "Daycare is a complex problem in our small community. Numerous variables...it's not just solve for X, it's solve for A-Z to figure that one out."
Gardonville’s economic success actually added to the community’s own childcare woes. As the community grew, its workforce needed to grow with it, and the lack of childcare became a bigger issue for the entire company and community. Dave started a staff committee in 2014 to work with the state to get a unique license that allowed a corporation to operate a small, non-center daycare and they hired a teacher to operate it. Pricey? Yes. High quality? Indeed. The need for slots continued to grow and, in 2016, they began working to create a much larger facility with their local township. It took eight years to acquire the land, but I was encouraged by a recent social media post that showed a celebration of the daycare moving forward thanks to Dave's vision and leadership.
After hearing all of these stories, imagine the excitement I felt when NTIA and the U.S. Department of Commerce invited me to a roundtable discussion on the intersection of broadband and daycare. I was likely the first person to RSVP!
There were enough industry players in the room to fill a small conference room table, and it was interesting to exchange ideas. While I was the only one in the room with a rural focus, I was proud of what I was able to share, thanks to the stories from the field shared by NTCA members. It was great to talk about rural Americans helping their own communities and coming together to ensure that parents can work, that talent is consistently brought into the broadband space and that children in rural communities can thrive. We just have more work to do.
Childcare is not a women's issue, it's an economic issue, and it impacts all of us. If we make access to affordable care a priority, we can continue to thrive as a country and certainly ensure that rural America is not left behind.