After the sunset of COVID-era child care stabilization grants, Macon County Schools will have to increase costs for both Pre-K and after school care in the coming 2024-25 school year. 

Stakeholders around Western North Carolina recognize the end of COVID-era child care stabilization funding and the broader lack of available child care resources as a multilayered impediment to economic development.

The Waynesville recreation center has reopened its childcare rooms and has its drop-in childcare program back up and running. 

A slew of childcare centers in the region will be closing by the end of the month, leaving the families of about 300 children with the difficult task of obtaining childcare on short notice at a time when access is limited.

Before the sun rises on a Tuesday morning in December, Amelia Cline smooches her partner goodbye and heads out the back door of her house in West Asheville. With a thermos of coffee in one hand and a handful of medical supplies in the other, she climbs into the driver’s side of a white Toyota and settles in for her hour-ish drive to Macon County. 

The Covid relief bill now working its way through Congress will mark a transformation in the way this country treats poor children. It’s about damn time.

First the numbers, which vary ever-so-slightly from year-to-year, but which should be appalling to the citizens of the world’s richest country: 24 percent in Swain County, 26.6 percent in Macon, 22.5 percent in Jackson and 22.5 percent in Haywood. That the number of children living in poverty every single day of their lives. Right at one-fourth of the youngsters we see around our community every day.

On average, it costs parents $9,480 a year for infant childcare in North Carolina, which is $2,126 more than they’ll pay for in-state tuition to a four-year N.C. university. 

As executive orders began piling up throughout March to close schools, restaurants, hotels and all other non-essential businesses, childcare facilities remained open. The essential nature of the business meant that even though it is a place where adults and children gather together in close quarters, it would have to adapt to continue its services.

It’s one of those late March days that can’t make up its mind whether winter is really over or might hang on for another of weeks. When the sun elbows through a patch of low, gray clouds, it’s warm enough to take off your jacket, but then the wind picks up and you put it back on.

In an effort to consolidate women’s and children’s services in Franklin, Mission Health has announced it will be closing those practices in Sylva.