Skagway’s for-profit daycare providers get another year of municipal support—but this time it’s coming from stimulus funds.
Skagway’s city hall and museum. (Greta Mart)
Skagway will put nearly $20,000 of municipal stimulus money towards year-round daycares. Finance chair Steve Burnham proposed the idea at Wednesday’s Finance Committee meeting. He told KHNS it’s stop-gap solution in response to parent outcry after a 2019 assembly resolution left the town’s two year-round, for-profit care centers ineligible for borough funding.
“Let’s just solve it and then talk about it when we’re or right before we get into the budget situation,” he said.
“And this will also provide us more time to work with the daycares to try to come to actual resolution while they’re not stressed out.”
Burnham says most other municipalities don’t help support for-profit daycares—usually. And he says Skagway is moving in that direction. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, some municipalities have put CARES Act money towards childcare.
So this one-time allocation will be part of the Skagway Deal, since there’s still some discretionary funds leftover and Skagway’s CARES Act money is already spoken for. The goal is to support local childcare while enrollment is down due to COVID-19.
“Effectively, it’s kind of a bridge to fund the daycares that might otherwise have to not be in the daycare business again,” Burnham told the Finance Committee on Wednesday evening.
He explained that the for-profit daycares are impacted by COVID-19 because many people are out of work and do not need day care. The amount of money each care center gets will be based on the maximum number of children they can accommodate.
“Some of them are open, but they’re not making enough to provide the service they typically used to. I’m not anticipating that the economy comes back up right away, but we would like the community to try to stay whole while we’re waiting for that.”
The support will be in place for 11 months. Daycares will be required to show in their billing to clients how much of the cost is subsidized by the borough. Burnham says that’s because Skagway has been underwriting child care for so long that people may not have a sense of its real cost. After this year, he’s not sure if the borough will choose to continue supporting for-profit daycare as it has in the past.
Money going to the daycares is from a discretionary fund, so no vote was needed. Burnham will work with Borough Manager Brad Ryan to finalize the details.
