Putting kids first: new coalition helping families afford child care in Southeast Idaho
Sam Ross
POCATELLO, Idaho (KIFI)– Bannock County and United Way of Southeastern Idaho have partnered with local businesses and leaders on a new program called the ‘KIDS First Coalition’ to provide affordable child care for working families in the Portneuf Valley.
KIDS First Coalition leaders say they launched the pilot program to combat the rising cost of childcare in the area and boost the local economy by helping parents stay in the workforce.
“If you have an infant, you want to put them in childcare, that’s equal to a semester’s tuition at Idaho State University,” said Jeff Hough, chair of the Bannock County Board of Commissioners and founding member of the KIDS First Coalition. “If you are a single parent and only making $15 to $18 an hour, you can’t afford to work and have childcare; so what this program is designed to do is to help ease that burden so that you can go back to the workforce rather than being on a welfare program.”
Hough said the KIDS First Coalition works through a collaborative effort between governments, employers, and working parents in what the Coalition is calling the ‘Tri-Share model’.
Under the Tri-Share model, employers agree to pay one-third of child care costs for eligible employees on a sliding scale based on business size, budget, and employees’ choice of childcare center. The employee will also pay one-third of the cost, and local governments will pay the other third.
“It tackles a lot of issues with one program,” said Sadie McMorris, KIDS First Coalition liaison for United Way. “It helps stabilize our workforce, it helps parents who may be struggling, it also helps childcare providers who are facing high turnover rates right now; so if we can stabilize their income, then we’ll be able to help their employees stay on board… it helps not only businesses, but families and childcare providers.”
The KIDS First Coalition launched on October 1. United Way, Biggie and Smalls Learning Center, and Southeast Idaho Council of Governments are the first three employers to sign up for the pilot program.
Bannock County and the City of McCammon have both allocated one-time seed funding from their fiscal year 2025 budgets to get the project started.
Coalition leaders said they hope to have at least 10 businesses opt in to the program so they can collect data on the initiative’s benefits and drawbacks to guide Coalition decisions and continuation in the future.
“For employers, it’s a really beneficial tool because one of the statistics that we’ve seen is people are starting to ask their employers to modify their hours because they’re having trouble with daycare hours,” said Commissioner Hough. “What this will allow them to do is pay for full-time daycare and help stabilize that… it can be a recruiting tool, it can be a retention tool, it can be used a lot of different ways, and the thing that I like most about the program is it’s flexible for the employer.”
To learn more about the KIDS First Coalition, click HERE.