LOA, Utah — Loryn Morgan, the office manager at Blackburn Propane in Loa, sometimes jokes that she works at a “full-time daycare with a part-time job.”
On a recent workday, the TV in her office plays cartoons. Nearby, a crib sits ready in the corner. And in the hallway, a baby gate guards the stairwell and a toybox is filled to the brim.
Morgan lives in southeastern Utah’s Wayne County, which is one of four counties in the state that has absolutely no licensed child care options. So she said she feels lucky that her father – who owns Blackburn Propane – allows her to bring her youngest two children to work with her each day. Her older two come by after school gets out. And in the summer, all four spend the day with her at work.
“I think that I do have it good,” she said of the child care set up during a recent interview from her office with FOX 13 News. “I am so fortunate.”
But bringing her children to the office is also a test of patience, which Morgan describes as a sometimes chaotic effort to work “two full-time jobs” at once.
“You're raising your kids, and being in a business where it is a professional setting, it is really hard because kids don't understand that,” she said, as her children played and ran around in the background. “They don't understand when is the time to be quiet? When is the time to not color? When is it not naptime?”
Child care access is a challenge for parents across the country. In 2018, about half of all Americans lived in a so-called child care desert, according to the Center for American Progress. The nonprofit policy institute, which has researched the issue extensively, defines those as areas “where there are too few licensed slots for the number of children who need care.”
But residents in Utah – the country’s youngest state – are among the most impacted. The Center for American Progress found in 2019 that 77% of Utahns live in a child care desert – the highest percentage of any state in the country.
“We are having a child care crisis,” state Sen. Luz Escamilla (D-Salt Lake City) told FOX 13 News in a recent interview. “What does that mean? It means that our families are struggling. We have an issue of cost. We have an issue of access.”
Escamilla was co-chair of the now-disbanded Women in the Economy Subcommittee, which recently commissioned a deep dive into the issue. The resulting Utah Childcare Solutions and Workplace Productivity Plan found there are about 60,000 licensed child care slots for children under the age of 13 who have working parents. But the capacity to serve “the full universe of these children in licensed care” only meets about 14% of the need.
In four Utah counties — Daggett, Piute, Rich and Wayne — there’s no licensed child care at all. The percentage of working families with young children in those areas ranges from around 41% in Rich County to about 64% in Wayne County, according to the report.
The lack of child care access in the state has had wide-ranging impacts – from the highly personal decisions some families are making to delay or even forego having children, to the broader economic losses that occur when parents who would otherwise want to work choose to instead go part-time or quit their jobs altogether.
In Wayne County, home to Capitol Reef National Park, Morgan said nearly every young family she knows has been impacted by the issue in some way.
“It is so hard,” she said. “Everybody is just literally making do with what they can.”
'It takes two’
When he was growing up in Wayne County, Commissioner Roger Brian remembers his younger siblings going to work with his mom at his grandfather’s meat plant.
"My little sister pretty much grew up over there, both my little sisters, until they went to school,” he said in an interview from the commission’s chambers. “And then she'd always make sure she was home to get them and take care of them when school got out.”
The economy has changed a lot since then. And Brian said it’s now even more necessary for both parents to work in order to provide for their families – especially in rural Utah.
"It's a tough place to make a living down here. It really is,” he said of Wayne County. “Nowadays, it takes two to make enough money to survive. And I think it's even more so down here.”
Brian said he and other Wayne County commissioners want to increase opportunity for families in the area – but the lack of child care has posed real challenges for spurring economic development.
"It's pretty tough for us to get people to invest and bring businesses here as it is,” he said. “And if the workforce is not being taken care of, like with housing or child care and stuff like that, it's easier for them to stay, say, in Sevier County – or even go up north – than it is to come here where we don't have those amenities.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated in 2023 that Utah loses $1.36 billion annually related to child care challenges. And while it’s not clear how much the lack of child care affects Wayne County specifically, Brian said securing more help for parents is now seen as a prerequisite for spurring economic development there.
"It ranks pretty high,” he said. “It's a very high thing in order to get businesses and people to come in here.”
Wayne County Commissioner Roger Brian explains how the lack of daycare options affects rural Utah:
With few options for child care, Brian noted that many extended family members in the area have stepped up to help. In other cases, working parents have taken on part-time jobs “more so than full-time work because they can’t get their kids taken care of.”
That’s the case for Loa resident Makayla Barton, who currently works as a part-time dental assistant.
After her son was born, Barton was working both there and in another part-time job as an advanced EMT – a position she said is “very needed” in the county and that she found fulfilling.
"We help serve underserved communities,” she said. “You know, no one's knocking down the door to be an EMT in the middle of nowhere.”
But because the on-call schedule made it so difficult to find child care, Barton said she made the difficult decision to resign from that role at the beginning of the year.
She now pays a friend about $350 a month to watch her son two days a week while she works at the dental clinic. And while the more consistent schedule has eased some child care concerns, Barton said the uncertainty that comes with having so few options in the county still keeps her up at night.
“I go to bed at night and like, ‘Where's my kid going tomorrow?’” she said. “‘Who's gonna call out sick? Who's gonna have their child sick?’”
Barton said the lack of child care hasn’t just affected her employment decisions. It’s also delayed her and her husband from having more children.
“At this point, we have to do the smart thing, to say, ‘No,’” she said, adding that she may have decided not to have their first child when she did if she’d known the lack of child care was “as serious as what I know now.”
'A role for government’?
In an effort to address the state’s child care deserts and create more access for parents, Escamilla sponsored a bill during this year’s legislative session to create a pilot program that would turn unused state buildings into daycare centers.
The bill, SB189, would have created a public-private partnership to provide the care, with spots set aside for state employees and military members.
During debate of the bill, Escamilla said the state hoped to find a property in one of the rural areas most affected by child care access – something she told FOX 13 News could help keep or bring families to places like Wayne County.
“If you don’t have a mechanism to provide access to high-quality child care, those young people that are going to start a family, why would they want to stay in a place where there’s not a child care center, right?” she said. “You don’t need to do a lot of math to figure it out that there’s no place, I can’t feel that it’s a good place for my family to go.”
The bill passed through the Senate. But it faced opposition in the House, where lawmakers questioned whether the government should be involved in child care and worried that a state-supported daycare center would pull children away from home-based settings.
Others raised concerns about the bill’s fiscal note of $2 million for construction-related costs.
“The intent is good,” said Rep. Mark Strong, R-Bluffdale, during a debate on the House floor. “But if we have state-owned, obsolete facilities, we should be selling them off or utilizing them for state-run purposes. We shouldn't be in the business of private child care.”
Several lawmakers spoke in favor of the bill, including Rep. Christine Watkins, R-Price, who argued that the state has many public-private partnerships in areas other than child care.
“If you’ve never been in a situation where you have no place to take your children, it’s awful,” she added. “We have many, many smart, strong, hard-working women who would like to go to work. But they don’t have a place to take their children.”
The House voted 22-48 to kill the bill for the second year in a row – something Escamilla said left her "in tears” as she considered the impact on families who were hoping the pilot program would go through.
“To me, it was a solution,” she said in an interview with FOX 13 News. “I recognize it may not be perfect and it’s not a solution to everything – but one solution.”
Ultimately, Escamilla said she does believe there is a “role for government” to facilitate solutions on the state’s child care crisis. And she doesn’t plan to give up anytime soon.
“I will continue to bring it back,” she pledged of SB189. “I’m going to continue to work on this.”
Sen. Luz Escamilla discusses her legislative proposal — which was killed in the House — to retrofit vacant state buildings for child care: