The Boone County Commission recently approved $2.5 million in funding from the state of Missouri to construct a childcare center specifically for Boone County first responders and other public safety employees.
Kip Kendrick, the presiding commissioner of Boone County, spoke about the center's mission to address barriers to employment for public safety employees through providing access to affordable childcare.
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Kip Kendrick: So, this is a new venture for us. Boone County Government has not been in the childcare business, but we know – just nationwide – we’re kind of at a crisis level on access to childcare, and certainly affordability issues with childcare.
And then, when you look at like our public safety personnel, our first responders – those issues are exacerbated.
You know, take, for example, our joint communication center, you know, about a year and a half ago, we were really staggeringly low employment levels. We were at about 19 dispatchers.
Today, we're over 43 and we've got a new group starting soon, and so, pleased with where those employment levels have gone, but we also know, like, we haven't quite crossed that hump yet on how do we make sure that we can get to, you know, long-term, sustainable staffing levels at our joint communication center.
So, we want to address, certainly, the access portion of this, right? Having access to a public safety childcare center on our public safety campus for our law enforcement personnel, our jail detention officers, and then our joint communications, which is all right there in the same location.
"It's a creative way of addressing a very real problem for young families, for young professionals trying to make a career happen while also running at the very real barrier of access to childcare."Kip Kendrick, Boone County Presiding Commissioner
So, it's access and then it's affordability, as well, and so, we're going to find a way to subsidize the cost of this and bring it in below market rate.
We certainly believe that it will help on the recruitment side. Recruiting not only 911 dispatchers, but our sheriff deputies, our jail detention staff.
So, we believe it's going to help on recruitment and then certainly the retention piece of it. It's a creative way of addressing a very real problem for young families, for young professionals trying to make a career happen while also running at the very real barrier of access to childcare.
And so, we believe that it's going to be – not only help on the recruitment, but we expect that retention side will go up, you know, anecdotally speaking, we'd expect at least maybe five or six year, potentially longer, retention for those individuals who have children at the center.
And so, you know, we think it's going to be important tool, and, you know, in this day and age, employers have to be creative, and this is a way, especially on our public safety side, with the critical nature of first responder jobs, that we can be creative in such a way that increases public safety across Boone County.
So , data collection is going to be really important for us and as it certainly is a public entity, we want to make sure that we can collect that data and then share it back out as resource to other counties, to other municipalities – not just in state of Missouri, but across the nation.
And that will be, certainly be the mission of this, as well. How do we provide that, you know, that model for others to try to emulate, and how can they learn from our success and our failures along the way?
