In Grants, a homegrown day care expands as New Mexico’s universal child care takes hold

GRANTS — For nearly 13 years, Heather Apodaca has run a day care business out of her family home in Grants.

Apodaca and her four staff members watch at most 12 children, ages 6 months to 13 years, from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day in her living room.

“I never get away from it,” Apodaca said. “I put my kids to bed, and if I have paperwork to do, I have to go do paperwork. Work and home life is not separated for me.”

Apodaca’s own four children will no longer have to wake up to kids outside their bedrooms when, on Jan. 1, she moves her business into a new building — the former location of the Calvary Christian Fellowship Church down the road.

“It’s going to be nice that they have their own space,” she said. “They’ve been born and raised in a day care.”

The new building has more than 3,400 square feet, five rooms, and will allow Apodaca to take in more children and hire up to five new staff members, she said.

Apodaca closed on the building at the beginning of November. That same week, she stopped charging families for her services as New Mexico’s universal child care program came to fruition. 

The initiative, announced in September by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, made New Mexico the first state in the nation to offer free child care to all residents, removing income limits that previously restricted the service for families earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level, or $128,600 for a family of four.

Free child care has tangible economic benefits for parents, economists and state officials say. The average cost of child care for a New Mexico family is $1,000 per month, per child, according to state officials. A family with two children earning the state’s median household income of $67,816 will spend 35% of their yearly pay on child care.

The program may also be an economic boon for small child care business owners, who are mostly women, said Elizabeth Groginsky, Cabinet secretary for early childhood education.

Through the program, Apodaca receives a stipend from the state for each child she cares for, which she expects will be more than what she was earning before. 

“I’m super thankful for it,” she said. “I’ve had some parents that were $30 over (the income limit), some that were $10 over that didn’t qualify. It’s not right.”

Apodaca said she also applied for a $200,000 low-interest loan as part of the same state program. If approved, she hopes to use the money to build a playground at her new facility.

Universal child care “is going to help out a lot of parents,” Apodaca said. “Because you can’t be a stay-at-home mom most of the time. It’s just too hard, or it has to take two incomes.”

The state received 116 completed applications for the low-interest loan fund for which Apodaca applied, many of those from day care providers running businesses out of their homes, like Apodaca, who sought to open their own centers.

“Seeing that trajectory, where you might start small, but then you really want to serve more children — getting access to capital and growing their program is critical to our initiative,” Groginsky said.

Women made up almost 85% of New Mexico’s child care workers last year, according to the state Department of Workforce Solutions. Historically, women make up a smaller share of business owners than men across the country — in New Mexico, 48% of businesses were woman-owned, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. 

“We’re building a system here that has many career pathways to start as an entrepreneur,” Groginsky said. 

New Mexico’s universal child care initiative is expected to cost the state around $600 million in its first full year — a concern for some state lawmakers. 

The reception to New Mexico’s universal child care program has been largely positive, but an increased demand is going to require the state to keep up, said Chris Herbst, public affairs professor at Arizona State University.

“Any time you heavily subsidize or make something free for a really large number of families, there’s going to be this enormous increase in the demand,” Herbst said. “I think in the short run, you would expect to see supply constraints.”

Even before the universal program was announced, New Mexico didn’t have the capacity to provide sufficient child care for all of its children. 

A legislative report from August found the number of care slots for children under the age of 2 fell short of the need in most New Mexico counties. In Cibola County, where Apodaca lives, there are only 19 day care spots for every 100 children under 2 years old.

New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, or ECED, forecasts a need for 5,000 additional child care employees statewide in order to meet the need and satisfy the newly increased demand.

Nationwide, recruiting and retaining child care workers has proved difficult since the pandemic, Herbst said, since big-box retailers now offer a higher hourly wage than many day care centers can afford to pay.

New Mexico is offering a higher reimbursement rate to facilities that commit to paying their entry-level employees a minimum of $16 per hour. The state intends to give providers a stipend higher than what they would have made if families were paying out of pocket so that they can pay their employees a higher wage, Groginsky said.

“I think the question is, is it enough? Is it going to be enough to entice workers away from Target and Walmart and Amazon and into child care centers?” Herbst said.

Groginsky says it does appear to be enough — last December, ECED processed 40 applications for background checks for new child care workers. This December, they’ve processed over 100, she said.

“It’s a little indication that the workforce is growing, that people are excited about the profession,” Groginsky said. “This is heavy, relationship-based, intensive work. That is exactly why it’s critical that we increase the wages to attract and retain early childhood professionals.”

The state has received 113 applications to start home-based day care businesses since the universal child care program was announced in September, Groginsky said. ECED has approved 26 of those, creating 166 more slots for children across the state.

Before Apodaca bought the church, she said she and her husband contemplated moving to Albuquerque because Grants had no buildings available that were “move-in ready.”

“It really broke my heart, because I was like, I feel like I’m giving up on my little babies I have now and their families,” she said.

Apodaca plans to open her new location, which she’ll call Little Rascals Day Care, in January. In addition to an office, a cafeteria and a commercial kitchen, she hopes to include a mural of the handprints of all the children she’s taken care of in the past decade.

“I put tears into this. I put a bunch of joy, a bunch of stress,” she said. “But you know what? I would do it all over again for these kids.”