By Jennifer Fernandez
Key Takeaways:
- Low wages continue to drive workforce shortages in child care.
- To address staffing issues, the General Assembly is spending money to expand free child care worker training academies statewide.
- Part of that funding will pay retention stipends for academy graduates who stay employed for at least one year.
About a week after finishing the Early Childhood Workforce Ready Academy in Wayne County, Dominque McBride walked into Little Bulldogs Academy in Goldsboro.
She carried a packet filled with certifications — such as CPR, first aid, playground safety — that she earned while undergoing intensive training during the two-week academy in February 2024.
At the end of the interview, McBride walked out with a job.
Typically, that type of training can take months to a year to complete, said Shelly Willis, director of program coordination and evaluation with Partnership for Children of Wayne County, which offers the academy.
On top of that, students would have had to pay for the various certifications and classes and squeeze them in between jobs and their lives at home.
But McBride and more than 100 other people got the training for free over the past two years, thanks to grants from the Camber Foundation, according to Valerie Wallace, executive director of the Partnership for Children of Wayne County. She said the organization, which supports community projects in 41 eastern North Carolina counties, has pumped $145,000 into the child care academies in Wayne and Johnston counties.
McBride said the academy prepared her for her first job in child care, and made it easy to get all the required certifications and training in one place, in a short time.
“If I had to do it on my own, I think I would have been overwhelmed,” McBride told NC Health News.
Now, state legislators want to take that model and expand it across the state. They included $1.5 million in one-time funding in the state budget passed in July. The training support is part of a slate of efforts added to this year’s budget to tackle staffing shortages and long waitlists for child care in North Carolina.
From March 2018 to June 2026, North Carolina has lost a net 1,072 child care sites, according to the NC Early Care and Learning dashboard. Enrollment dropped by 28,183 children — or 11.5 percent — during that same time.
The NC Chamber touted such academies as a way to address chronic staffing shortages driving those closures in a February 2025 report.
“If North Carolina is going to produce the qualified workforce necessary to meet the demand for high-quality child care services in a timely manner, the state must lean less heavily on higher education to train and prepare early childhood professionals and more heavily on strategies that are more accessible, affordable, flexible, and expeditious,” the report’s authors wrote.
‘At a crossroads’
The National Conference of State Legislatures also recently highlighted such academies for quick training to alleviate workforce shortages.
The recommendation is included in the report “Childcare at a Crossroads: A State Legislative Framework for Strengthening Childcare Systems,” released on July 27. The report was developed by a bipartisan work group of 13 state legislators from across the country that included North Carolina state Sen. Jim Burgin (R-Angier).
The legislators wrote that child care has become “one of the most urgent and complex challenges facing states.”
“It affects children’s development and well-being, parents’ ability to work, employers’ access to a stable workforce and the economic vitality of communities large and small,” they said in the report. “Rural and urban. Red and blue. No state is unaffected, and no ideology holds all the answers.
“As costs rise, workforce shortages persist and demand remains strong, state policymakers face important decisions,” the report’s authors continued. “The childcare system is at a crossroads, and decisions made now will shape how well systems meet the needs of families and economies in the years ahead.”
North Carolina has struggled to meet the need. Lack of child care costs the state $5.65 billion every year in economic activity, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the NC Chamber Foundation and advocacy organization NC Child.
Since 2018, child care employment in the state rose by just 1 percent, or 419 people, even as the state’s population grew by around a million people.
Where that growth has occurred has been uneven.
Small centers and family child care homes make up most of the closures, according to research shared July 9 by Afton Partners, an Illinois-based consultant firm that specializes in several areas, including early education. The group presented the findings earlier in the year to members of the North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education.
Meanwhile, more large centers have opened, mainly in urban areas, according to the Afton research.
Many counties, including Wayne, have lost workers and child care slots from 2018 to 2026.
In Wayne County, state data shows there are nine fewer child care facilities than in 2018. Average monthly enrollment dropped by more than 1,000 kids during that same time. And average monthly employment is down by 420 workers.
The state faces a double whammy: demand for more child care slots and a lack of workers.
The biggest problem in child care is having qualified teachers, Burgin said as part of a panel discussion on the “Childcare at a Crossroads” report at the National Conference of State Legislatures conference in Chicago last month.
“We’ve made the restrictions so high that by the time that they get enough qualified people on board, those people will go find other jobs, usually in the school system,” he said.
He told the audience that North Carolina directed millions of dollars to tackling the child care workforce issue in the state’s latest budget.
The bipartisan work group’s report highlighted North Carolina’s child care academies, like the program in Wayne County.
Other efforts in the report included a high school student training program in South Dakota, scholarships and stipends for people pursuing child care degrees in Delaware, and a pilot program in New Mexico that gives stipends to people in workforce training for child care.
In West Virginia and Rhode Island, there are also apprenticeships that target the child care work force.
Like some other states, North Carolina included in its recent budget stipends for graduates who stay with an employer for at least a year.
‘A huge step forward’
The N.C. Child Fatality Task Force has been recommending since 2024 that North Carolina support efforts to improve the child care system, including increasing subsidies to child care centers, especially in the wake of additional federal child care stabilization grants that sunsetted as the COVID pandemic wound down.
Child care funding was one of the four task force recommendations for this year.
In July, the General Assembly passed a budget with $97 million in federal funding to increase reimbursement rates to providers of subsidized child care and to create a much-welcomed floor rate. The budget also transfers $16.8 million from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant to the state’s child care subsidy program.
Creating a rate floor means that, for the first time, all facilities will get at least the statewide average for subsidized care. Without that base rate, subsidies have ranged widely across the state, which has made it difficult for some facilities to survive.
The state’s child care subsidy program uses state and federal money to help pay for child care for low- to moderate-income families who qualify. Families still have to cover a co-pay. The subsidy can be used for children through age 12, or up to age 18 for children with special needs.
While the state doesn’t set salaries for child care workers, increasing the subsidy gives providers the flexibility to pay workers more.
Low pay has been an issue in attracting and maintaining child care workers. Starting median hourly wages for child care teachers in 2023 was $14 per hour, according to the 2023 North Carolina Child Care Workforce Study by Early Years (formerly Child Care Services Association.) That’s the same or less than entry-level jobs at retail stores such as Target and Walmart and fast food restaurants such as Five Guys and Whataburger.
“With our current economic situation and the prices of everything increasing, it is very difficult to stay in the field of childcare and make ends meet with the average pay offered,” McBride said in an email.
“It’s not only about attracting people to the field, but encouraging them to stay,” she added.
To quickly train child care workers, legislators funneled $1.5 million in one-time funding to replicate child care academies modeled after the program in Wayne County across the state. Two-thirds of that funding will cover tuition costs. The remaining $500,000 will pay for stipends of $500 for every student hired within three months of graduating and who stays employed for at least one year at the same child care program.
“This funding for child care is a huge step forward in helping to stabilize North Carolina’s child care system,” Kella Hatcher, executive director of the Child Fatality Task Force, said in an email.
Budget funding for child care
State legislators are pumping millions of dollars into the child care industry aimed at training more workers and keeping them employed. Here’s a look at what’s in the 2026-27 budget passed in July:
- Fund a career-ready lead teacher academy pilot program to provide free, comprehensive training in child care. Sets aside $1.5 million in one-time funding to expand existing academies in Wayne and Johnston counties and add 10 academies across the state. Most of the money, $1 million, will pay for tuition. The remaining $500,000 will pay for stipends of $500 for every student who is hired within three months of graduating and stays employed for at least one year at the same child care program.
- Create a provisional early childhood credential for 16- and 17-year-olds so they can work as group leaders in out-of-school and summer programs, including those at licensed child care facilities. Once they turn 18, they can notify the state’s Division of Child Development and Early Education to be issued a full early childhood credential.
- Give $7.3 million in one-time funding to the North Carolina Partnership for Children, to expand mental and behavioral health services for children, families and staff in child care facility settings and out-of-school programs, including on-site services and behavioral health supports. The partnership will be able to use any money left at the end of the fiscal year to spend on these services instead of the money going back to the state.
- Allow licensed child care centers to use the combined education and work experience of two staff members to meet the requirements for Level II and Level III certificates or designation for the NC Early Childhood Administration Credential certificate. Child care centers can now receive the same quality rating improvement system credit toward a star-rated license as the center would receive if the requirements were met by one employee.
- Direct $3.25 million in federal funds to a Family Child Care Home Direct Support pilot program. The money will be shared among three counties representing the coastal plain, mountain and Piedmont regions of the state. It is to be used for a two-year pilot program to build child care capacity in those counties by recruiting and coaching prospective child care operators through creating a business, and by providing mentorship to new providers.
- Amend the prohibition on sex offenders, adding an additional prohibition for work in seasonal child care camps.
- Direct $350,000 in nonrecurring funds to the Department of Insurance to study creating a general liability insurance program for child care providers.
A model program
In Wayne County, Wallace and Willis with the Partnership for Children are hoping the increased subsidy rate, along with a new rate floor, will ease high turnover while the academies help train new child care workers more quickly.
They’ve had about a dozen people sign up for each session, the most recent of which ran from Aug. 3 through Aug. 14. It was the first of three planned for this year under the Camber grant.
“Those may not seem like high numbers, but if you can put that many people to work, it makes a huge difference in a child care,” Wallace said. “Our numbers are going to be fewer, but they’re mighty if we give these folks the necessary training that they need.”
Wallace said they’ve tweaked their academy a little bit every year to make it stronger and attract more people.
“We’ve learned with each academy that we’ve done, and last year we worked with the North Carolina Partnership for Children to try to get this to be aligned,” in anticipation of the state creating a pilot program, Wallace said. “So if people were doing it across the state, everybody was doing the same curriculum, and it was going to be consistent with what people were coming out of the academies with.”
They’re not sure if they’ll add more academy classes this year based on what was passed in the state budget. It depends on whether their program is considered aligned with the state plan. They could add up to three more sessions later in the fiscal year based on that state plan, Wallace said.
The training allows students like McBride to be hired immediately.
McBride, 29, was working for the Wayne County Department of Social Services when her mother saw a notice in 2024 about the free training to become a child care worker. It came at a perfect time for McBride, who was disillusioned with the paperwork involved in her DSS job.
And she always wanted to teach and work with children, she said. In her now-former job at Little Bulldogs, she worked with the 2-year-olds.
“It can be very chaotic,” she said, describing children that age as wanting to be more autonomous but not quite ready for that. “But I enjoyed every bit of it.”
Every day, she saw the need for more child care workers.
“We weren’t getting enough child care teachers as much as we were getting kids,” McBride said. “We couldn’t keep up.”
Her work at Little Bulldogs inspired McBride to go back to school for a degree in early childhood education with a focus on special education. She now works with children on the autism spectrum at Action Behavior Center in Clayton.
She’s grateful for Wayne County’s child care academy.
“It definitely helps you prepare,” she said. “The one thing that can deter you is feeling like you’re not equipped to do it.”
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