By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
Child care is becoming harder and harder to find following the coronavirus pandemic.
And that might be keeping some people from reentering the workforce.
St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce President Natalie Redmond says the pandemic put northwest Missouri in a "child care desert."
"As well as issues with folks being able to get to daycare, so not only do we have the desert but obviously that's impacting small businesses," Redmond tells KFEQ Hotline host Barry Birr. "So, there was some money released last week from the state for childcare reimbursement."
Redmond says the chamber will be getting information out to small business owners that have applied for that money. She says though that still doesn't fully help with the desert.
Natalie Redmond says during the pandemic, while everyone was stuck at home, childcare became unnecessary.
"So, a lot of your in home or smaller daycare closed during COVID because the parents were shut down, they weren't needing daycare, maybe they didn't need daycare for a year, so that business just never reopened, so we're seeing a lot of the smaller in-home daycares never reopened," Redmond explains.
But Redmond says other government changes during the pandemic added some extra hoops in the form of regulations making things more difficult.
"So, you had a lot of these, maybe a grandma who was doing childcare out of her home, it just wasn't worth it to her because of the hoops she had to jump through for regulations to open a childcare," Redmond says. "So, it's one of those things, we want children to be safe but it's also one of those government overreaches on a small business so there kind of has to be some middle ground."
Redmond says the state is currently working to find that middle ground to get more child care centers open.