Clear Lake council hears update on Child Care Works Collaborative

CLEAR LAKE — Clear Lake’s City Council last night received an update on efforts to improve the availability of child care in Cerro Gordo County.

The City of Clear Lake previously committed $25,000 from both the Fiscal Year 2024 & 2025 budgets toward the Child Care Wage Supplement Program. It’s a program supplementing child care worker wages by $2 an hour in an effort to retain employees, and in turn, get many child care centers back up to capacity and have a solid business model in place.

Kelli Gerdes of the Cerro Gordo County Department of Public Health also represents the Child Care Works Collaborative and says the boost in wages has paid off for local child care centers by retaining workers and growing the number of slots available.  “The wages of our child care center providers, $2 an hour starting last January. So that was an average of 17% increase in salary, which was pretty significant for someone particularly at that low of wage. When we started the program, our centers were averaging right at about $11.81 an hour, with starting rates ranged anywhere from $8 to $10. A full year in, like I said we’ve got that 17% hike across the board, but our starting wages have jumped to a minimum of $10, upwards of $16 an hour for the centers’ starting wages.”

Gerdes says the Collaborative is looking for continued support from the city, but they are also hoping for state matching funds once again as well.  “The state, if you listened to the governor’s Condition of Iowa speech, she pledged another upwards of $30 million into the Childcare Solutions Fund. We want to be ready that we can again reapply for the state matching funds that will be coming through, we were able to do that the first round. We actually were awarded a two-to-one match, so your money was essentially double-fold there, which was awesome as well.”

While the council did not vote on anything last night, they will consider additional support from the city’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget as part of the budget process.