Child care crisis forces rural Washington county to try an unusual solution
POMEROY, Wash. – In his four years on this Earth, Aller Matheny has had five different child care providers.
At one point, his mother, Ashlyn Deatherage, considered driving her son two hours to Spokane so he could stay with her sister during the workweek.
Deatherage’s predicament is all too familiar in a nation with a massive child care crisis, and in a state where estimates suggest about half of residents live in areas considered extreme child care deserts.
But here in this corner of rural southeast Washington, the situation is even more dire. Garfield County has no licensed child care centers or in-home care. Parents must rely on informal arrangements or drive long distances.
Right now, Deatherage pays a family friend $45 a day to take care of Aller, who enjoys his caregiver’s homemade tacos.
In the fall, Deatherage hopes her son can start prekindergarten at Pomeroy Elementary. Until then, she worries about another potential shake-up in care.
“I’m very lucky to have the people that we’ve had,” Deatherage said. But if her fiancé hadn’t grown up in Pomeroy, with a local network to tap, “there would be no one.”
Parents here enlist grandparents, trade babysitting shifts with other parents, lean on friends and neighbors and even sometimes bring their kids to work. They delay having more children.
“There’s so much strategy involved in trying to figure out how your kids are going to live,” said Chelsey Eaton, a program coordinator at Garfield County Public Health, who has a 4-year-old son, Noah.
Eaton and her husband pay for a sitter four days a week, but Noah sometimes accompanies her to work, drawing on a whiteboard installed for him at his eye level.
Parents across the country agree on the need for more child care – and that the government should step in to help – but issues of access and affordability persist.
Though New York City and states like New Mexico are testing paths toward universal child care, President Donald Trump said earlier this month that the federal government should favor military spending over child care. And lawmakers in Olympia, facing a stark budget deficit, recently cut funding for the state’s child care subsidy for working parents and for pre-K.
The struggle to find child care is nothing new to the 2,300 people living in Garfield County. A county public health assessment found nearly half of respondents said child care was the main issue the county needed to improve.
The county’s health department listened. It’s launched an ambitious project to do what the private sector hasn’t been able to sustain. It is creating a licensed child care facility in Pomeroy.
The location?
A former funeral home.
A creative solution
“We know it’s weird,” said Alesia Ruchert, the county’s child care navigator, during a recent tour of the funeral home.
Merchant Memorial Group, which seldom used the building for funerals, donated the 4,000-square-foot space. The sanctuary will be divided into separate classrooms for infants, toddlers, preschoolers and children up to age 12.
Being in a rural community often requires creative solutions, Ruchert said.
“This is a building that was previously used to celebrate the end of a person’s life,” she said. “Now it’s going to be utilized to celebrate the beginning of life and nurturing our community’s children into living.”
The project’s backers needed a solution that didn’t depend on one person stepping up to run a child care business, and would allow the provider to weather ebbs and flows in enrollment and revenue, Ruchert said. So community leaders formed a nonprofit, Pomeroy Community Connection. They hope to open the center next summer.
The project is not without challenges.
Ruchert says recruiting and retaining staff might be tricky in an industry beset by burnout, so they are considering options like offering a 32-hour workweek.
And the midcentury funeral home must be renovated into a child care center that will pass muster with state licensers, including seismic retrofitting. In late March, the state awarded a $2 million grant, which means the nonprofit can start seeking bids for the work soon.
The rural care conundrum
A child care center in a small town like Pomeroy can’t operate on the same model as one in Seattle or Spokane, said Emily Ruchert, whose husband is distantly related to Alesia’s husband.
She’d know – she was the owner of the last licensed care facility in Pomeroy, which shut down in 2021. Her program served kids aged 1 to 12, all mingled together in a single classroom she rented from the Pomeroy School District.
Attendance fluctuates and incomes are not as high in this rural community, Emily Ruchert said. Many people work seasonally: Summers are slow because children often go out to the fields with their parents to farm, and teachers with kids don’t need care during the summer.
Emily Ruchert’s program usually had 35 to 40 families enrolled, but she could expect about 20 kids maximum at any given time, she said. Only a handful needed full-day care Monday through Friday.
She tried different ways of accommodating families. She offered varying rates, and drop-in care. If an illness or emergency came up, the program gave families a credit they could apply to their next month’s bill.
That is unusual: Most providers charge private -pay families for days where their child is absent, according to a recent survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
“We tried really, really hard to make it affordable,” Emily Ruchert said.
Despite those hurdles, the decision to close down the center was mostly personal, she said. She wanted someone else to take it over, but didn’t find any willing takers.
Community-designed care
Pomeroy Community Connection wants to build a center that lasts. It is gathering input from parents, business leaders and from other child care providers. Based on that advice, the center will open gradually and wait to offer infant care, which is more staff-intensive and expensive.
Alesia Ruchert, who is spearheading the project for the county, said structuring the new center as a nonprofit will allow donations and grants to relieve some of the budget pressures of running a child care center.
Rachel Gwinn, the superintendent of the Pomeroy School District, hopes a child care center will draw more families to the community.
“I think it’ll be a benefit for kids and less stress for families,” she said.
As it stands, she and other administrators write the district calendar with parents’ lack of child care options in mind, but they also need to balance making time for staff professional development. They’ve asked high school students if they’d be willing to babysit after school.
Mayor Jack Peasley views child care as part of the city’s infrastructure. He said he hopes offering in-town care to people who work in the city but live elsewhere could encourage them to make Pomeroy their home, too.
Pomeroy’s employers include the Garfield County hospital district, a U.S. Forest Service office and the school district. But 40% of these workers live in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley, about 45 minutes from Pomeroy, Peasley said.
“What we hope to accomplish, from my perspective, is to create a situation … where families can stay in Pomeroy,” he said.
Tara Hodges and her husband run an insurance agency in Pomeroy, where her now 8-year-old daughter spent the first year of her life because there wasn’t licensed care for infants.
But bringing her second daughter – who was colicky as a baby – to work wasn’t an option. Hodges initially relied on a local sitter, until that sitter got another job.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “You cannot have a 2-year-old in an office with you all day long.”
She started driving about 45 minutes each way to the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley and back every workday for child care.
Now that Hodges’ kids are school-age, she says her family plans to use the new center’s after-school care once it’s available. Her 6-year-old daughter sometimes has to come with her to work and keep busy with a coloring book.
“Even at the insurance agency, there are times our employees have to bring their children to work,” she said. “It’s not ideal, but we understand.”
Alesia Ruchert’s daughter-in-law, Jolee Ruchert, is an emergency room nurse who commutes to Colfax, about an hour’s drive away, several times a week for rotating 12-hour shifts.
“Every few months since the start of 2024 has kind of just been a roller coaster as far as figuring out what we’re going to do with the kids,” she said at a city park while her daughter Ayva, a toddler, played in the sun with her grandmother, Alesia.
A friend of a friend watches Ayva, but is only available part time. They manage to cobble together after-school care with help from relatives for their 5-year-old until her husband, who works a 9-to-5 schedule, gets off work.
Angie Severson, a mother of four young kids who works in local economic development, makes her child care plans week by week.
Her older two are in school, and the younger ones, a 3-year-old and an infant, go to a nearby babysitter whom she pays $40 a day per child. The older kids often join on early release days.
“I always try to think to myself, ‘Do I have a backup? Do I have a plan B?’ ” Severson said.
She said a more consistent child care option would be “amazing.” The new facility will be walking distance from the city clerk’s office, where she works her second job.
“It would be a really huge economic boost, I think, for the whole community, employers and employees and families alike,” Severson said.
Alesia Ruchert hopes there are enough eyes on the child care issue that the project will get the funds it needs to succeed.
She points to the saying don’t waste a crisis.
“We’re in that place where there’s so much attention on it,” she said, “something’s got to break loose.”