Children

KIT CARSON

While Kayla Buchanan sits at her desk at the Country Living Learning Center, her husband, Cheyenne County Sheriff Michael Buchanan, slips in the front door a little before noon and heads down a hallway to a small kitchen. 

A Colorado Sun series

This series aims to unpack why child care costs have become so high for both families and providers and will also explore what it will take to make child care affordable and widely available across the state.

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There, dressed in full uniform for his department’s afternoon firearms qualification exercises, he hovers over the oven preparing pizza for a dozen hungry kids. At the day care operation Kayla   opened last September, the job of serving Colorado families on the Eastern Plains from Kit Carson all the way into western Kansas sometimes becomes a family affair. 

“He’s my lunch lady today,” she laughs.

The 34-year-old mother of four embodies the requisite resourcefulness of moms and dads struggling to make parenthood mesh with increasingly difficult economic realities. Her decision to open the doors to Country Living, a nonprofit center in the midst of a rural day care desert, seems more like the inevitable result of a personal evolution — from desperate parent to helpful neighbor to determined problem solver. 

LEFT: Kayla Buchanan, shown here in a Dec. 10 photo, operates the Country Living Learning Center in Kit Carson, providing day care for families on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. The center opened in September. RIGHT: Kayla’s husband, Cheyenne County Sheriff Michael Buchanan, slices lunchtime pizza Dec. 10 at Country Living. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

In a region where young children are more likely to be cared for by relatives or neighbors, the facility isn’t yet at capacity for all the groupings it offered at its inception — infant, toddler (12 months) and preschool. But while the infant room hasn’t seen enough enrollment to launch, there’s a waitlist for the toddler room and only two or three preschool spots available on a given day.

In all, there are 15 kids enrolled, overseen by two teachers in addition to Kayla as director. But she remains confident that greater demand is out there, perhaps far flung across the farm and ranchland as parents wait to see how Country Living evolves before signing up their kids.

“It’s a brand new center,” she says. “(Parents) want to see how it does before they pull their kids out of grandma and grandpa’s house or an in-home center.”

Country Living is the only center licensed for infant and toddler care in Cheyenne County, as well as the neighboring counties of Kiowa and Lincoln — making a significant swath of the Eastern Plains that so-called “day care desert,” notes Julie Witt, the coordinator for the nonprofit Cheyenne-Kiowa-Lincoln Early Childhood Council that serves the region.

“The majority of our infant and toddler care in Lincoln County is done by grandparents and neighbors,” Witt says. “In Kiowa County, we have zero licensed child care providers serving infants and toddlers. The only licensed available care would be at our school district preschool, which is usually just ages 3 to 5 — and obviously those are only open during the school year.”

The council tries to bolster the supply of trained providers through recruitment, scholarships and classes, but doesn’t get a lot of interest. In Limon, the council’s headquarters and also the largest community in the three counties it serves, there’s a federally funded Head Start program, but only for ages 3 to 5. 

Multiple applications for a grant to serve infants and toddlers have been denied, at least in part due to lack of staffing. Infant care is the most expensive for families because one caregiver can look after no more than five infants at a time, meaning child care centers must spend much more on personnel for infants than for 3- and 4-year-olds, who require one educator for every 10 kids.

“It’s just a vicious cycle type of thing,” says Lora White, the council’s administrative assistant. “You feel like if you were able to get more funding, you’d be able to pay staff more, but you’re not eligible for that funding unless you meet certain quality standards. It’s been really hard, even for us, to pinpoint specifically where to start to try to solve it.”

Resources, but little interest

The council’s efforts begin with providing personal resources.

It offers monthly free professional development and invites anyone caring for children, including family friends and neighbors, to attend those training sessions. The council also can help individuals enroll in college classes to become early-childhood qualified or provide the training for them to work toward a home child care license, Witt says.

“But there just seems to be no interest in becoming a licensed home provider,” she adds.

The shortage of qualified staff makes it difficult to launch a dedicated child care center. The absence of a permanent location in turn makes it difficult to attract job applicants. 

“But the lack of staffing is something that needs to be resolved first,” Witt says, “because even if we get a place, we seem to not be able to keep it because of the lack of staff.”

That’s what happened in the Lincoln County town of Hugo, where the nonprofit Country Living Learning Center originated before moving about 32 miles south on U.S. 287 to Kayla’s renovated building in Kit Carson, which in terms of population is about one-third the size of Hugo. Witt notes that child care advocates have often talked about which model is best suited for smaller communities — a dedicated center or licensed home child care.

Witt estimates there are probably more licensed spots for in-home care than for center-based care in her three-county area, in part because there are fewer professional qualifications and regulatory hoops for in-home caregivers. Even then, the requirements can be daunting.

“The paperwork and the licensing process is very difficult, and it is very invasive for your family or your home,” she says. 

Additionally, an in-home provider must use their primary residence and either own the home or obtain landlord permission to enroll kids. The latter can complicate compliance if physical changes to the home are required for licensing.

Witt says that she’s known of two or three individuals who sought a license for home child care but ran into issues because they wanted to care for the kids in a rental home that was not their primary residence. For regulatory purposes, that would have made the child care facility a center, which triggers a different set of requirements for the director and teachers.

“It just adds on a lot more challenges,” she adds.

For those wanting to pursue in-home child care, the council can offer support — including virtually all the necessary training — for free. It can also reimburse for expenses like background checks. 

But even then, the problem circles back to a shortage of staff. Although the council can help people interested in becoming an early childhood teacher or assistant through its connections with Morgan Community College and even offer scholarship funding, candidates are hard to find.

“We’ve even tried to encourage high school students to consider taking some early childhood classes to kind of grow our own,” Witt says, “but we just don’t get a lot of interest.”

And so child care remains a persistent problem for rural areas, a puzzle intertwined with all the other inherent challenges facing small communities struggling to sustain themselves. And that’s why Kayla Buchanan’s reimagined Country Living venture in Kit Carson offers hope.

“If you have a child care center and it can sustain itself for very long, that’s a big step in building up a community to where people would want to move there,” White says. “Having child care opens up a ton of job opportunities for young parents. It’s hard to get teachers or employees to want to move to our communities when child care isn’t even an option.”

A start with in-home child care

In 2018, then-single Kayla and her oldest son moved from Thornton, where she had worked at day care centers, to live on the family ranch near Wild Horse, a speck on the map about 13 miles from Kit Carson. She landed a job as director of Country Living Learning Center in Hugo.

Later that year, she met Michael Buchanan. 

They married in 2020 and Kayla, who specializes in early childhood education, took a teaching job with the Kit Carson School District.

The couple’s first child came along in 2021, and Kayla’s nearby aunt agreed to watch him during the day. That worked for a while, but once their son reached the toddler stage Kayla quit her job and stayed home, eventually taking in a few additional kids — some the children of teachers at the school who’d found themselves facing a similar child care conundrum.

That decision to expand provided an off-ramp for a local unlicensed at-home day care that had reached capacity. Kayla already had her certification from working at the Hugo day care and added five more kids to her home in August of 2022, making sure to go through the licensing process so she could legally handle the extra enrollment. After their second son was born in April of 2023, the scarcity of day care options in the community seemed even more pronounced. 

Kayla could only take up to eight children by herself and already had a waiting list. To bump her capacity to 12, she hired another caregiver.

The arrangement definitely filled a void for the community, but it made no economic sense for the family. Taking on the extra kids meant the additional income they generated made only a brief stop in their bank account before cycling out to pay the extra worker. 

Meanwhile, down the highway in Hugo, the Country Living center was facing a crisis, primarily due to staffing issues. There was plenty of demand — kids were queued up on a waiting list — but keeping qualified staff proved difficult. 

Again, the economics of a competitive job market became problematic: The center could only afford to pay workers so much in order to keep costs to the families down. Even some fast-food jobs in nearby Limon paid more — and without child care’s ongoing training requirements.

It’s not just fast-food jobs that compete for workers. In some rural communities, child care facilities also go up against the local school district and have a difficult time matching pay and benefits for district jobs that may require little more than a background check.

At the time the Hugo nonprofit operation realized it needed to close its doors, Kayla’s in-home day care had continued to expand — not only the number of kids, but also her need for space to accommodate them. 

As it happened, the Buchanans had purchased a building on Main Street in Kit Carson. They’d already speculated what it would take to turn half the space into a day care center. But after crunching the numbers, it seemed that by the time they raised the money to make it happen, all their own kids would be starting school. 

But by transferring the Country Living nonprofit from Hugo to Kit Carson, they could make an expedited —  and, in terms of square footage, expanded — transition. And so they did.

“My family and my kids and the community is really what drove us to make this decision,” Kayla says. “Because when you have kids coming from Cheyenne Wells, you have parents driving almost two hours a day, roundtrip, to bring their kids to you. I wanted to do everything I could to help other people, help the community.”

The hard economics

Tuition at Country Living — she kept the Hugo nonprofit’s name — runs between $32 and $35 a day, depending on the age of the child. Kayla figures that to be as little as one-fourth the cost in the Denver metro area, although estimates vary. The projected monthly cost at that rate would be about $700. A Common Sense Institute report last year put Denver’s estimated monthly total for child care at $1,574, while another accounting put it as high as $2,998. Infant care costs more.

Country Living’s tuition basically covers the cost of teacher salaries at $15 an hour. On a Monday-through-Thursday schedule (the center mirrors the local school’s four-day week, generally with Fridays off) workers can count on logging 32 to 35 hours.

The day care currently draws kids from as far away as Sharon Springs, Kansas, about 60 miles east. Four-year-old Harley and younger sister Nova, 2, currently travel the greatest distance of any kids at Country Living. Their parents, Dalton and Megan Richards, both work in Cheyenne Wells, about 30 miles east of Kit Carson, and commute from Sharon Springs, population 750, about 30 miles farther east. 

For the last five years, Megan stayed at home, as the only two licensed child care providers in Sharon Springs were perpetually full.

But when she started working at Keefe Memorial Hospital as director of dietary and environmental services, they needed to figure out a plan. For a while, the couple tag-teamed child care, with Dalton, 30, working days at a local John Deere dealership and Megan, 26, working nights at the hospital. But when she took on a day shift, they needed to find another solution.

She found Country Living on Facebook and reached out to Kayla. After paying a visit to the facility and learning it had openings, the couple decided it would be worth the extra hour in the car.

“The cost there in Kit Carson, it’s actually very reasonable for our kids to go,” she says. “There’s just not enough child care, and that’s why a lot of people stay at home or the husband works days, the woman works nights, just to avoid the child care costs out here — and avoid child care altogether.” 

The rural child care crunch derives in part from general economic malaise. It’s another expense added to rising consumer prices at a time when towns like Kit Carson struggle to reimagine themselves, fighting back against years of declining population, housing scarcity and commercial stagnation. There’s no easy solution to child care when families need two incomes to get by.

“There’s not a lot of stay-at-home moms out here because we can’t afford it anymore,” Kayla says. “I moved out here at a time when Kit Carson was really kind of falling apart.”

There was no grocery store, no liquor store, no real recreation opportunities. And no licensed day care. The Buchanans — echoing the feelings of many town residents — felt they needed to do something to help stem the crisis. They ended up buying the building on Main Street, anchored by the post office, and renovated the remaining space.

They created the Golf Garage, a membership facility with a golf simulator and regular dart leagues to improve sparse recreational opportunities. And with some major renovation, they carved out space for Country Living.

Those ventures, added to several others, triggered new optimism — though the Buchanans’ have known from the beginning that their efforts lean more toward civic-mindedness than profitability. In a recent conversation, Kayla reminded her husband that she was holding her breath waiting for three different grants to come through for the day care facility.

“And he’s like, ‘If they don’t, then what happens?’” she says. “And I told him, ‘Well, my salary is going to be the first to go.’ I would be volunteering to do day care, because I don’t want to put all these other families out of child care.”

Fortunately, Country Living recently was awarded two of those grants, though at only about two-thirds of the total funding Kayla had sought. Still, the infusion of an additional $15,000 will help pay for food, building maintenance and utilities for the year.

But Kayla points out that tuition and grants alone will not continue to keep the doors open. Country Living has sponsored fundraisers to harness community support, including a successful haunted house last October. A St. Patrick’s Day family bingo night and a meat raffle, with tickets sold for a chance to win a donated quarter side of beef, are also in the works.

She has even started testing a new, six-week program of after-school care keyed to music and movement. For $50 per child, kids from 2 to 9 years old can play in a dancing room, do tumbling exercises and navigate obstacle courses set up in the hallways on consecutive Wednesday afternoons. 

If it goes well, the program could become more than a one-off fundraiser. Kayla can imagine it as a regular feature geared to changing activities — perhaps arts and crafts for one six-week bloc, STEM activities for another. It could also serve as a gateway to pull in regular day care clientele.

The key, she says, is engaging the entire community, including those who may not have kids but understand the importance of having access to child care. If enrollment stalls, she has told the nonprofit’s board, then the next strategy might be to explore ways to provide transportation to make long-distance child care make sense to more families in Cheyenne Wells or Eads, which is 20 miles south on U.S. 287.

“Because I know that there are families in both of those towns that need child care,” Kayla says, “but you don’t want to drive an hour round trip.”