When Cranberry Township resident Allison Truman was pregnant with her first child, Noah, last year, she said she did not expect the crisis facing the county’s child care industry.

“It was hard, to be honest, because I always read things like, ‘As soon as you get pregnant, as soon as you find out, you need to get on a day care waiting list,’” Truman said. “And I always thought — not to call it a joke — but I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s no possible way.’”

For a while, Truman was able to work from home and care for Noah after his birth in May 2022. When the balance of work and child care became too much, though, she was surprised to find that options in the area were limited.

Alexandra “Ali” Feicht, owner and director of Ali’s Little Hands Learning Center in Center Township, said her facility has 38 families on its wait list.

The Rose E. Schneider YMCA’s new Early Learning and Child Care Center had 76 potential applicants on its wait list — with only 50 spots available to families.

Both centers cite a national staffing crisis as the main hindrance to child care availability post-COVID.

“Long, long, long story short is the waiting process to get into a facility is at least six months,” Truman said. “Up to a year.”

After a few months of caring for Noah and working from home, Truman said she and her husband began shopping around for day care.

“We had two in mind that we really liked — one was super-expensive, and when it came down to it, it wasn’t the cleanest, and I just didn’t really get a good vibe,” Truman said. “So then we found one that we really like, we went through that whole application process and waiting process. They said it would probably be like a three-month wait.”

For the time, Truman said she managed balancing work and child care for those three months. A month before Noah was supposed to begin care, though, she was informed that his spot had been given away.

“I was super upset, because I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do now?’” Truman said. “My family lives far away, my husband’s family lives far away, so we really didn’t have any help — it’s just basically us.”

The day care explained to Truman that her spot had been given to one of the facility’s employees who recently had given birth.

“She said he wouldn’t be able to start until the second week of January,” Truman said. “That was back at, like, a month before he was supposed to start — so, like, July.”

During the six-month wait, Truman said she began to have reservations about sending her son to the day care.

“Then we graciously had a family friend step up and offer to ... watch him until we felt comfortable sending him,” Truman said. “So we’ve been doing that ever since.”

Truman said her friend has more than 10 years of experience as a nanny for families and that they pay her comparable to what they would have paid for a child care facility.

“It’s amazing, and I truly feel so lucky because I know most people don’t have this kind of situation,” she said. “Obviously, it is hard for a mother to let her baby go in the care of somebody else for a few hours a day, but not only is she a true friend, she’s a family friend.”

Truman, who works as a buyer for Rue 21, said she and her husband moved to the township from Erie for work and have watched the area outgrow itself in the last four-and-a-half years.

“I think there’s a lot of people flocking to this area, and there’s not enough facilities to support all the growing families that are coming to the area,” she said. “Honestly, Cranberry is such a lovely location, it’s a great community, so I understand why people would want to lead their families here. That’s exactly why we are raising our family here.”

She estimated the average cost of day care in the area to be between $350 to $550 a week, though. By contrast, a family friend in Erie operates Milestones Early Learning Center and Academy, which charges about $250 a week.

“And I don’t think there’s enough child care facilities in not only the Cranberry area, but, I think, the Pittsburgh area,” Truman said.

In an effort to serve that need, the Rose E. Schneider Family YMCA is preparing to open its own Early Learning and Child Care Center. Truman and her husband signed up immediately.

“We got the email — probably because we’re members — I think we ended up getting it first,” she said. “I’m just hoping we’re one of the first ones on the list.”

Truman said her husband signed up only moments after registration opened for members.

“So we’re really hoping now we do secure a spot,” Truman said.

Carrie Ohorodnyk, executive director for the center, said the idea for the new Early Learning and Child Care Center is a response to that need in the community.

“The big thing was that we had this space available,” Ohorodnyk said. “And when we were looking at the best way to serve the community, that was obviously it.”

And while the center only is waiting on a site inspection for a potential July opening, she said, staffing remains an immediate concern — not only for the Cranberry YMCA, but for many child care centers across the country.

“A lot of centers aren’t operating at full capacity because they don’t have the staff to do so,” Ohorodnyk said. “In our Butler facility, for a while, we had a wait list but couldn’t take on more children, because we didn’t have the staff to support the ratio.”

In early June, Ohorodnyk had said the center was only half-staffed, with plans to do a partial opening in July if the trend continued.

“I mean, really, there’s a lot of competition out there as far as pay goes,” Ohorodnyk said. “There’s other industries out there that have competitive pay that’s equal to what we would pay per hour — and they’re doing that instead of working in child care.”

Feicht, of Ali’s Little Hands Learning Center in Center Township, agreed that staffing remains a crisis for day care centers.

“I’ve been hiring since 2020,” Feicht said. “We were doing great until the pandemic hit, but then once the pandemic hit, I still have not fully recovered.”

The center, which has been open since 2018, can hold 72 children — ages 6 to 12 — at maximum capacity. With its current staff of 13, Feicht has stepped down from her administrative role to help, but the center can only care for 61 children.

“Right now, I could have another staff, and I could house between six to 10 more children, depending on the ages,” Feicht said. “We have to be in state compliance.”

Feicht said a core group of longtime employees has been keeping the center operating, but turnover continues to be a problem, in addition to a lack of applicants.

“If a staff (member) quits tomorrow, I have to tell families they can no longer be enrolled because, to stay within state compliance, I have to be within ratio,” Feicht said. “That happened to us in January.”

In addition to the 61 children at the center, she said she receives an average of three phone calls a day looking for child care — adding to the 38 families already on her wait list.

“Most of them are parents who are trying to go back to work, so I’ve had a few conversations with moms trying to get back into the workforce, but they can’t because they don’t have child care,” Feicht said. “It’s kind of like a never-ending circle.”

As a privately owned center, Feicht also said lacking health care benefits for employees has made it difficult to attract staff and fill that need.

“I’m not a corporate center, so I don’t have the policies to help,” Feicht said. “Something that I thought would be very useful is if the state — the (Office of Child Development) and the (Early Learning Resource Centers) — were able to offer a marketplace for them, specifically for child care.”

And while there has been a federal effort to make child care centers affordable for families, the legislation has done little to help the centers themselves, Feicht said.

“I think we need to increase our wages. To increase our wages I would need help from the state or to increase my prices — which isn’t really helping the families,” she said. “If I’m going to increase my rates, which I’ve done to help increase pay for the staff, what they are wanting and what the parents are paying is a very large gap to fill that.”

Locally, Feicht says she participates in a virtual support group of facilities trying to weather this crisis.

“That’s been helpful, it’s like support, you’re not alone, and we’re all on this sinking boat together,” Feicht said with a laugh.

But the issue is not limited to just the county or the state, she added.

“It’s not even just the state — it’s national,” Feicht said. “I mean, I’m part of a support group on Facebook too for directors, and we’re all in that same sinking boat.”

Even as the United States reaches record lows for unemployment, industries such as child care continue to see a staffing crisis in the wake of the pandemic.

“Something’s going to change, or something’s going to break,” Feicht said.