'Child Care is Community Infrastructure' panel discussion set in Bemidji

BEMIDJI — If you don't have young children, you may not think much about child care.

But those involved with caring for children want people to see it as vital community infrastructure.

"I think this idea that if you don't currently have kids, you don't need to think about child care, is kind of the same as if you work from home, you don't need your community to have roads," Nate Byrne said in a recent conversation on the KAXE Morning Show.

Byrne is the director of Summit School, a child care center in Duluth. He is involved with Kids Count on Us, a statewide organization of child care providers that advocates for access to affordable high-quality care as well as worker wages and benefits.

The group is hosting the Child Care is Community Infrastructure Road Tour, Saturday and Sunday, March 21-22, in Thief River Falls and Bemidji. The public is invited to a panel discussion with elected representatives, business leaders and parents at 12:30 p.m. Sunday in the commons of Northwest Technical College in Bemidji.

"Right now, we're treating child care more like a luxury good," Byrne said. "You can have it if you can afford it, and even if you can afford it, it's still hard to find."

He also described the impact of child care access on people's ability to work and what it means to businesses if they can't hire somebody due to a lack of it. Another recent difficulty has been allegations of fraud by the federal government.

Funding for Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program was frozen by the federal government in January. A federal judge blocked that freeze, but there's still a lot of uncertainty, according to Byrne.

"New funding is hard to find," he said. Without it, "it's hard to do the work that we need to do."

Listen to our full conversation above.