The Little Spartans Clubhouse in Moberly looks like any other childcare center – there’s tiny tables with tiny chairs around the room, cribs labeled with names along the back wall and toys of all shapes and colors littered all around the room.
Three-year-old Owen Ensor walks around the room and asks his teachers for another cookie – even though snack time has passed. He’s one of the inaugural students at the Little Spartans Clubhouse, a new daycare for district teachers that’s housed inside Moberly School District.
Rachel Ensor is mom to Owen and his little sister, five-month-old Harvee, as well as the new medical technology teacher at Moberly Area Technical Center, where the daycare is located.
She started at Moberly just this school year, and she and her husband were stressed about childcare as their previous home-based provider didn’t have a spot for Harvee and wouldn’t until she was six months old.
“We were going to be struggling with childcare for our new one for at least six months,” Ensor said. “We were gonna have to swap back and forth between mom on my side and mom on her dad's side.”
Plus they would still have been paying for Owen’s spot in the daycare. Then the daycare closed all together – leaving them in need of care for both young kids.
Now, she teaches just down the hall from where her children spend their day.
“When it opened here, it was fantastic,” Ensor said. “I just take them to work with me and drop them off, go right down the hallway and start my day."
Cristina Wright, the Superintendent of Schools for Moberly, said this was the goal of opening the daycare. It provides current teachers with convenient care that saves money, all while retaining and attracting teaching talent.
Wright said the district has been losing teachers to smaller, rural districts in the area that have provided a perk of their own: a four-day school week.
“Our staff members are so important to us, we had to find a way – because we can't lose them,” Wright said. “They needed help with their childcare so they could be regularly showing up for work, so we knew we had to respond to that.”
Childcare in Moberly, much like in the rest of the state, is limited and often pricey.
According to Childcare Aware of Missouri, an organization that researches the childcare landscape, the average cost of full-time childcare per year in Missouri is $8,100 - though these costs vary depending on availability, as well as age and development of the child.
This can eat into a teacher’s budget quickly – especially in Missouri, which ranks nearly worst in the country for average starting teacher salary at less than $37,000 according to the National Education Association.
This is where the Little Spartan Clubhouse may come in – not only does the new daycare provide easy access to teachers who are parents, it also follows the school calendar.
Parents also only pay for the approximately 35 contracted weeks of a school year. They don’t have to pay to hold a spot during summer break, and they don’t pay for care on snow days.
The Moberly School Board set the price per week at between $125 and $190 dollars, depending on a child’s age and whether or not they’re potty trained. That comes to between $4,200 and $6,400 per kid per year – cheaper, but not perfect.
Parents will still have to find alternative care for their kids when school isn’t in session, perhaps with a family member or a babysitter. Superintendent Wright hopes it’s enough.
“We are hoping it's a recruiting tool,” Wright said. “It would have been for me when I was a young teacher, lower on the salary schedule and considering income very closely, to have that size saving would have been very attractive.”
Mark Jones is the spokesperson for Missouri National Education Association, which represents about 40-45% of the teachers in the state. He said while he’s excited to see a district come up with a creative solution that benefits teachers, it’s important to remember this won't necessarily benefit all teachers.
“Not every educator has a child that would make sense to be in daycare or may not have children at all at home anymore,” Jones said. “So, while it's a good solution, and probably one that helps in Moberly, it's most likely not one that can be necessarily replicated across the state.”
He says many Missouri districts struggle with teacher retention just as Moberly has, and while the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has come out with some good grant opportunities for districts – the key, he added, is to give teachers enough time and resources to teach their students, as well as live their lives.
Jones said the MNEA hears the same thing from teachers again and again: They want to be respected, be professionally supported, have good working conditions and have the freedom to do their jobs effectively
“Teachers have their own needs, and their families have their own needs, so compensation is part of that,” Jones said. “But a big part of it is also just having support in the workplace, not being burdened by mandates from Jefferson City that don't apply to their classroom, to their students, and frankly, just having the ability to plan their curriculum.”
GROWING THE NEXT GENERATION
Superintendent Cristina Wright is hoping that the new Little Spartans Clubhouse will also help the teacher shortage issue in the long run.
The program hires high school students in their last two years of school who are utilizing a school flex program offered in Missouri. This programs allows students to work at a job in the community and make money – all while also receiving school credit.
Keyan Martin, a senior at Moberly High School, said she usually spends her fifth and sixth hours working at the daycare. She hopes to one day be a pediatric oncologist.
“My goal was to work with all ages of kids,” Martin said, “Just to make sure I'm compatible with every age, and I'm prepared for everything in the future, and I love it down here.”
She began working at the daycare when it opened in January, and said she had to go through tuberculosis testing, CPR training and watch other training videos before starting.
“It's one of my favorite things I do every day, and normally the hour I go back to the high school, we talk about just the experience of the day and how fun it would be," Martin said. “I have a lot of people that are interested in next year.”
Kaleighia Brown, another student staffer, wants to be an early elementary teacher in the future. She said she was talking with her school counselors a few months ago about how she could get a head start on her training when the opportunity to work at the daycare came up.
“I was called back in there, out of my class, and they're like, ‘Do you want to work in a daycare?’ and I was like, ‘Of course, I want to work in a daycare!'" Brown said. “And they're like, you want to be a teacher, you're already good with kids – let's put you in this daycare that we're setting up.”
Brown and her seven fellow student staffers rotate through shifts during the day. Some work drop-off and breakfast in the morning and then head to classes, while others start at school and then end their day doing snacks and parent pickup.
“It's part time for me, which is great, because I can get credit from the high school for doing work flex, and then I'm also getting experience in a field that I want to go into,” Brown said.
Vicky Snodgrass, the director of the Little Spartans Clubhouse, has worked in the Moberly School District for a decade and was hired to open and run the day-to-day of the daycare center.
She said she loves working with her staff and getting to see the little ones already enrolled in the daycare grow.
“They're phenomenal staff, they have the energy, they want to be with these kids, they are learning. It's just all around – it's a great opportunity," Snodgrass said.
Six of the two dozen or so spots at the Little Spartans Clubhouse were claimed when it opened earlier this year, but with numerous teachers on maternity leave, enrollment is expected to grow.
There are also plans for future expansions.
