Jade Miller is finding it increasingly difficult to live in Durango, where she was born and raised.

The mother of two qualifies for low-income child care at the Roberta Shirley Center, but the day care is cutting back on extended hours, making it impossible for her and other parents to send their children to the center while maintaining full-time jobs, she said.

It creates a catch-22: Pay more for child care and sink further into financial hardship, or cut back on work hours to care for children, which also results in less income.

“I work 40 hours a week, my husband works 50 hours a week,” Miller said. “I don’t even know how to find another place for my kids to go. Everywhere that offers extended hours, you have to pay tuition over $500 a month. I called one place that’s $975 per kid. I have two kids. My rent – I pay $775. It’s literally impossible.”

Parents were notified Aug. 10 that “extended hours” at the Roberta Shirley Center would be scaled back for Head-Start (ages 3 to 5) and Early Head-Start students (ages 0 to 3). Children used to be able to attend classes from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. But beginning Sept. 12, Head-Start classes will be offered only from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and Early Head-Start classes will be offered from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Lisa Stone-Muntz, executive director of Tri-County Head Start, said the center’s priority must be to the federally funded program, which is Head-Start and Early Head-Start. The extended care program is paid for by parents, but the center hasn’t been able to fill teacher positions for the extended hours for more than 18 months, she said.

“The bigger story here is the lack of teachers in the area,” Stone-Muntz said. “... That really was the deciding factor. ... This has been really challenging in the Durango area to recruit and retain early childhood teachers.”

Roberta Shirley Center cannot afford to pay staff and teachers enough money and has experienced constant turnover, said Kristie Ribera, who has two children, ages 2 and 3, who attend.

Ribera said the timing worked out OK for her because she was able to arrange her college class schedule around the center’s new hours. But she feels sorry for working families.

“As a community, we need to pull together and find options for low-income families to continue to work,” she said. “People like to complain that people live off the government, but if you can’t afford to go to work, you can’t afford to feed your kids. If you go to work, you can’t find someone to watch your kids. It’s a community problem that needs to be dealt with. There’s a lot of women that don’t work even though they need to or want to because they don’t have day care.”

Ribera doesn’t blame Tri-County Head Start for the situation; rather, there’s not enough funding to support day care and qualified teachers. But she feels the center should have given parents more than one month’s notice, which included a two-week summer break.

Stone-Muntz said the changes impact about 11 families. The center has helped nine of those families find affordable options, she said.

“Affordable housing is the main issue for families here that we work with,” Stone-Muntz said.

The lack of affordable child care impacts the entire community, even though changes at the Roberta Shirley Center affect only a few families, Miller said.

As low-wage earners can no longer afford to live in Durango, it creates a hollow community, she said.

“I think if they (the community) understood they would lose their everyday coffee person or everyday banker or everyday receptionist ... just because we don’t have enough money for our kids to go to school, I know somebody would care,” Miller said. “I was born and raised here, I’ve worked my butt off in this town for multiple companies; it’s not like I don’t do my part for the community.”

The Roberta Shirley Center is experiencing its own effects of a low-wage community, she said. In two years, there have been four directors and about five teachers who have left because they can’t live on the wages, which start at $9.50, she said.

Stone-Muntz said Friday she was unable to immediately confirm whether the center has experienced that much turnover, in part because a human resource director was unavailable and in part because Stone-Muntz has been there only five months.

“I am working diligently to turn our organization around and really improve the quality,” she said. “We have a plan to increase our teacher salaries over the next year.”

If anything, Stone-Muntz said middle-income families are worse off than low-income earners.

“Low-income families have access to programs that are subsidized,” she said. “Middle-income families really struggle, because they don’t get any kind of financial assistance, and yet the cost of child care, especially in private-pay, regular child care centers is very expensive.”

One of Miller’s sons has an attachment disorder. The high turnover has worsened his condition, she said.

“It’s harming to the kids because they don’t understand the change,” she said. “My little boy got close to a teacher, they rip her away from him, and then they put her back into the class, and then he puts up a wall. That’s what children with detachment order do. They put up a wall because they’re afraid of getting hurt. They’re afraid that you’re just going to leave them again. They did this over and over and over again to my little boy.”

But like Ribera, Miller doesn’t blame Tri-County Head Start.

“I don’t want to point the finger and say they’re not trying hard enough because I don’t know what they did behind the scenes,” Miller said. “If we want our community to strive and we want our babies to grow and become better, then we have to be there for them now. And that means everybody.”

shane@durangoherald.com