One Montana woman’s childcare travails

Montana Free Press recently investigated the challenges facing working families and childcare providers in Montana, in collaboration with the national news nonprofit Open Campus. The following portrait provides a deeper view into the experience of one of the sources crucial to that reporting, offering readers another lens through which to understand how childcare issues are impacting everyday Montanans.

Ever since her earliest days in early childhood education, Amanda Wiseman has felt that her chosen field is “underappreciated.” Her first job as a teacher, at a private preschool program in Missoula, paid about $14 an hour, and while she has heard elected officials pay lip service to the profession’s importance, she continues to labor under the impression that many people “don’t take early-ed teachers seriously.”

Wiseman has dreamed of working with kids since high school, when she spent several days a week mentoring students with special needs through Helena’s Head Start program. She subsequently spent three years studying elementary education at the University of Montana before learning that UM-Western in Dillon offered a degree in early childhood. She transferred, earned her bachelor’s degree in 2015, and two years into her first job was promoted to program director — an advancement that came with a $2 hourly pay bump, bringing her wage up to about $16.

It wasn’t enough. As Wiseman told MTFP this spring, her young family faced a hard reality following the birth of her firstborn. The preschool she worked at didn’t enroll infants, and the money she made running the program went straight to covering the cost of childcare elsewhere. With her husband making enough to support them, Wiseman withdrew from the workforce, staying home to care for their son and, a few years later, their new daughter.

Wiseman’s story reflects a broader trend at play in Montana and across the country. MTFP recently reported on the low wages paid to childcare workers in the state — an hourly median of $12.84 in 2022 — and the effects those wages have on campus leaders looking to recruit the next wave of childcare professionals. Allison Wilson, director of UM’s Institute for Early Childhood Education, said the low wage endemic to the profession are particularly difficult for educators with young families — especially if they’re unable to leverage their jobs in childcare to secure more affordable services for their own children.

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Barriers to childcare kept an estimated 66,000 Montanans from fully engaging in the workforce in 2023, training a local lens on a national crisis that families, providers, and higher education programs are struggling to navigate. Over the past three months, MTFP collaborated with Open Campus, a higher education news outlet that works in partnership with local newsrooms, to explore those challenges through the lives of everyday Montanans trying to make it work.

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“The pay for that position within a childcare program doesn’t offset the cost of what they would be paying to have someone else watch their child,” Wilson said, speaking to the experience Wiseman has lived firsthand. “So that takes them away from their career and their profession that they’ve invested time and energy into.”

Wiseman is now preparing to re-enter the academic track this fall as a master’s degree student in early childhood education at UM. She said she wouldn’t mind returning to teaching, but her real long-term career aspiration is to focus on the development of early childhood curricula. And while she initially had concerns about the four-and-a-half-year resume gap when she was raising her children, Wiseman believes employers in the childcare space will be “pretty understanding” about employment histories like hers. As for recruiting more workers to meet Montana’s childcare demands, Wiseman suspects that the solution lies not solely in better pay, but in wider promotion of childcare as a career path.

“I think that there just needs to be more of an awareness around it, because I think a lot of people have a heart for it,” Wiseman said. “They just don’t know that they can get a degree in it.”