By MaryBeth Matzek | Photography by Hillary Schave
Amanda Sherer feels like she can’t win.
The Waunakee mom worked part-time from home after she and her husband adopted their daughter in 2019.
She eventually enrolled her daughter in part-time child care before transitioning her to full time and returning to work herself full time. That same week, Sherer found out she was pregnant.
“I work in nonprofits and after putting the numbers down on paper, it quickly became clear that having two kids in daycare, especially an infant, was not going to work,” says Sherer, who pulled her daughter from daycare after her son was born and began working part-time from home around caring for her children.
In January 2026, with her daughter now in school and her son past the expensive under-age two rates, Sherer enrolled him in child care and is back to working full-time outside the home.
“The whole child care system is just nuts. It’s super expensive for parents. The workers don’t get paid much. The centers aren’t making money. Other parents I talk to are struggling,” Sherer says.
Sherer is not alone in her assessment.
For years, the early childhood education industry has been challenging for parents to navigate and afford while remaining chronically underfunded.
Since 2020, short-term federal funds have offered a critical lifeline for Wisconsin providers. This funding peaked in 2022 and has steadily declined since, with all remaining payments scheduled to end in June 2026.
There’s nothing waiting to take its place.
“This is going to lead to higher prices for families,” says Heather Murray, owner and director of Arthouse Preschool LLC in Waunakee and a 2025 BRAVA Woman to Watch. “I’ve already warned my families that an increase is likely coming. I can’t pay my people less. I need to pay them what I do to keep them. We’re such a fragile industry right now. We’re just all hanging on and doing the best we can.”
STRUCTURAL CHALLENGES
Even as families face steep costs, many child care centers struggle to stay afloat.
Murray says the system in Wisconsin — and in most states — isn’t financially sustainable. At Arthouse, she says families pay about $1,400 a month for infant and toddler tuition, but the actual cost of care is $2,400, which includes salaries, food, supplies and building-related costs, such as utilities and insurance.
Wisconsin is one of only six states that until recently invested no additional public dollars into child care beyond federal funding and required state matching funds. For the first time, the Wisconsin 2025–2027 bipartisan biennial budget set aside $65 million in general-purpose revenue for Get Kids Ready, a program aimed at financially supporting school readiness for four-year-olds in child care programs that don’t provide four-year-old kindergarten (4K) through state-funded school districts. It launches in July.
Amy Kesling, a Madison mom of three children, ages nine, four and an infant, says paying for child care is as expensive as paying for college, “but there are no scholarships for it and no one is saving up for it.”
A co-owner of a small business, she says paying for child care is challenging, especially when you have more than one child. “It’s a decision each family needs to make and sometimes you just need to do it because you need to work,” Kesling says.
Adding to the cost of child care, Kesling says not all mothers receive paid leave after their child is born, putting them at a “deficit and then [they’re] faced with a child care bill after that.”
While Kesling received 60% of her salary for six weeks tapping into her short-term disability policy and some PTO, she says it didn’t come close to replacing her full salary for 12 weeks. Adding to her family’s stress, her youngest spent time in the NICU, creating thousands in medical debt.
“If we could figure out free child care and free health care, that would be great,” Kesling says.
Child care has structural economic challenges, says Paula Drew, director of early childhood education policy and research at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA). To make the numbers work, “child care needs to be recognized as a public good and receive public funds,” she says.
Direct and significant funding to child care providers first entered the picture in Wisconsin during the pandemic when child care providers were declared essential workers.
“For people to go to work, they realized we needed to have child care,” Drew says.
The state distributed federal funds to child care providers so centers could increase pay to retain employees, and help pay rent and other basic costs to keep facilities open. When those federal funds dried up, the state used interest from unspent American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funding as a stopgap measure to continue paying subsidies to centers based off of the number of employees and enrolled children a center had. But all of that funding steadily decreased the last few years and all of it will cease this June.
That will lead to hard choices, including tuition increases, for child care centers, Murray says. The last time she raised her rates, two families decided they could no longer afford child care and the moms quit work to stay home with the children. Last year in the U.S., 400,000 women ages 18 to 40 nationwide left the workforce. While not all of them left for child care reasons, for many, child care likely played a role in that decision.
“Society is set up in such a way that you need both parents to work. Everything is so expensive. I had to work so we could have health insurance,” says Jenn Bilderback, the administrative director of Big Oak Child Care Center of Madison.
Drew says with so many women leaving the workforce, it can be hard for businesses to grow. According to a survey conducted by KW2 in coordination with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF), 86% of surveyed Wisconsin employees agree that without access to affordable early child care, Wisconsin businesses will face workforce or labor shortages now or in the future.
“A lack of child care can stall economic growth, which is why businesses should care about this issue,” she says. “They need to have their employees at work and they understand how important child care is to that equation.”
Once federal funds cease in June, Drew says some child care centers may decide to close down if they can’t make the numbers add up, which then adds to the continued shortage of child care availability.
“It’s an exasperating situation,” she says.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
While prices increase for families, there are fewer open spots for children.
A WECA study found that 25% of educators leave the early childhood education field each year, which steadily erodes the capacity of child care programs. Statewide, child care programs operate at 75% of their licensing capacity due to staffing shortages, leaving 33,090 unfilled child care spots.
Drew says the hiring pool for child care workers continues to shrink and centers are unable to maximize their space.
“Child care has historically paid low wages and many of these people have associate’s or higher degrees — but they can go to Kwik Trip and get paid more and get benefits,” she says. “Women — and it’s mostly women in these roles — feel like their work is not being valued.”
Murray agrees. When she opened Arthouse 20 years ago, she had room and staffing for 65 children. She now has room for 30 — “primarily because I can’t keep teachers. I don’t want to over-enroll. I feel comfortable being able to staff for 30 students.”
If centers don’t invest in wages, staff members will work elsewhere, Bilderback says.
“There are a lot of unknowns in the future. Right now, we do what we can to find different grants or special programs that we can apply for and find a way to lower costs, but our goal is to find something long-term that provides us with funding,” she says.
“It’s just very challenging out there right now for providers.”
The structure Bilderback advocates for would mirror the funding public schools receive.
“We’re part of the education system and children learn the most in their first five years. Schools couldn’t survive without public funding and child care providers should receive that same funding,” she says.
The 2025-2027 bipartisan biennial budget provided one more year of direct funding to child care providers with federal funds and added a new program with state funds to support four-year-olds in child care centers to help them to prepare for kindergarten. The program, Get Kids Ready, is for child care programs that do not offer 4K programs through local school districts that already receive state funding. According to the DCF, 40% of group child care programs and 20% of family child care programs have applied to participate in the Get Kids Ready program.
“My take on this is that the state dedicates a decent amount of general-purpose revenue to our four-year-olds through 4K and now Get Kids Ready.
But there’s [still] no state funding for children ages zero to three [in this], and only 10% of child care slots are dedicated to infants. So we’re forgetting about our younger kids that arguably need the most high-quality care,” notes Drew.
Echoes Murray: “When I was in the Capitol lobbying for public funds for child care, that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I was hoping to get some funding for the younger kids who are more expensive to care for,” Murray says.
“I feel like Get Kids Ready is similar to the public school 4K program, so it’s like they are funding two programs that are really close to one another.”
Murray notes that, with the 2025-2027 bipartisan biennial budget finalized, no additional funding for child care centers will be allocated this cycle. But she’ll continue advocating for public funding for child care as she has for the last several years. She views it as the only way the industry can survive.
When federal funding for child care providers was first introduced during the pandemic, Murray increased her new employees’ pay from $14 an hour to eventually $18.50 per hour.
“They are worth every penny. But to be honest, I had to do it to keep my staff and sometimes, it’s still not enough,” she says. “Child care is not easy work. I had one woman leave for lunch and never come back.”
Murray says parents are supportive and understand the fiscal pinch child care centers are in.
“Parents will need to be the next wave of advocacy since they are feeling the ramifications of expensive childcare,” she says.
Child Care May Be an Issue in the Governor’s Race
With it being an election year, advocates say there won’t be any more meaningful changes once the current state child care subsidy to providers ends on June 30.
But it may provide an ideal time for the issue to draw some much-needed attention, says Heather Murray, owner and director of Arthouse Preschool LLC in Waunakee.
“Candidates know that child care is an issue,” she says, adding that four Democratic candidates for governor — Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, former Lieutenant Gov. Mandela Barnes, State Rep. Francesca Hong and State Sen. Kelda Roys — have all brought up the idea of universal free child care.
“No one has talked about how they’ll pay for it, but it’s something they’re talking about. Maybe if a Democrat wins the governor’s race and … the Legislature, I can see a chance for it,” notes Murray wistfully.
There are several states in the country, including New Mexico and New York, with subsidized child care or universal, free child care that depend on a variety of funding mechanisms.
“There are some wonderful examples out there,” says Paula Drew, director of early childhood education policy and research at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. “Most use excise taxes, sin taxes, lottery taxes — things like that.”
However bleak things may feel right now, Drew asserts that the child care conversation is in a much better place than it was just a few years ago.
“We’re on a positive trajectory and things are getting better. I’m hopeful about it,” Drew says.
State Investment Ranking
According to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, until recently, Wisconsin was one of only six states in the United States that invests no additional public dollars into child care beyond federal funding and required state matching funds. On average, state investment across the country for child care and preschool is $1,300 per child with a high of $8,000 per child in the District of Columbia.
These funds help administer initiatives that support the early care and education workforce, and keep tuition low for parents.
