After the last students and teachers left Mile High Early Learning’s Northeast Early Learning Center on Friday and the door closed firmly behind them, all the chatter and babbling bouncing between two classrooms of young learners hollowed into silence.
The Denver-based child care and education provider, which serves hundreds of children from low-income families, closed its northeastern location to students and is also eliminating 38 slots, equivalent to five classrooms, as it buckles under hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial losses that are still growing.
Facing similar financial pressure, Denver’s Family Star Montessori has cut eight teachers and administrators, scaled back its hours and is planning to close a classroom in August, sell one of its two buildings and move into a new location to save money.
A freeze in the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program — stemming from changes made under the Biden administration — is to blame for the uncertainty. The situation is worsening as enrollment freezes and waitlists have expanded to at least 24 counties, leaving low-income families of more than 6,600 Colorado children with few options for child care, according to data from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood from early June. That’s up from more than 5,700 impacted children recorded at the beginning of May.
Get top headlines and KUNC reporting directly to your mailbox each week when you subscribe to In The NoCo.
Warnings from early childhood education advocates and providers about in the midst of the freezes are beginning to pan out, with concerns of more closures across Colorado’s child care landscape only escalating.
To read the entire story, .