Meet Rebecca Rogers, a 27-year-old from Yakima. She’s a single mom of two young boys, ages 4 and 8 months. Her family of three qualifies for the Working Connections Child Care program, a state system that helps low-income families pay for child care so they can continue working or pursuing work. Read more
Hi! Thanks for joining The Growth Gap, my new reporting series and newsletter on how Washington state’s declining child care sector is edging out young learners. Read more
As of mid-January, 13% of providers statewide closed because of the pandemic, a loss of 712 licensed child care programs, according to Child Care Aware, a nonprofit that works with child care providers statewide. It has reduced capacity by 29,290 children. Read more
Reliable child care in Central Washington and beyond has always been hard to find. But with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, providers considered essential to restarting the economy have struggled to keep their doors open amid mounting costs and plummeting paychecks. Read more
I’m Janelle Retka, a 28-year-old illustrator and education journalist reporting for the Yakima Herald-Republic here in Central Washington and creator of The Growth Gap. I’m a proud auntie of three (soon to be four – looking forward to meeting you, Baby Lou!) and a dog mom to Marv, a now-4-year-old street dog I adopted while living and reporting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a handful of years.
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