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Across the country, preschool directors are all saying the same thing: It is incredibly hard to hire early educators.

One of countless examples is the Granite Start Early Learning Center in Nashua, N.H.

This is where “owner Joyce Goodwin said the phone hardly stops ringing as families hunt desperately for child care,” the New Hampshire Union Leader reports.

Goodwin “gets calls every day from parents looking for a place to put their children as they return to work, and weekend tours of the center are reliably full.” She could accept another 10 or 12 children, “but only if she could hire three more teachers.”

Despite placing want ads, Goodwin can’t find candidates. She’s up against the same problem as other directors, salaries in child care are “notoriously” low.

“Over the past year, hundreds of trained child care workers have left the field in search of higher-paying work and jobs that feel less dangerous in a pandemic,” the Union Leader says.

Early Learning NH conducted a workforce survey of “196 business owners, who together own about 40% of the 700 licensed day cares in the state,” and found similar circumstances. 

“Those owners could accommodate almost 2,300 more children day care — if only they could hire enough staff,” specifically 643 more staff members.

“Extrapolating that number across all day care providers, about 6,000 day care seats remain empty because of staff shortages — a figure supported by a March state report on barriers to post-pandemic economic recovery.

“That means one in eight of the state’s 46,000 licensed child care seats must remain empty.”

In Tucson, Ariz., Ernestina Fuentes, founder and director of Herencia Guadalupana Lab Schools, has the same problem.

“Before the pandemic, Guadalupana had 14 employees, all of whom, Fuentes says, were dedicated to the program’s mission to transform the lives of children and send them into kindergarten ‘verbal, confident and brilliant,’ ” EdSurge explained earlier this year. “But by the end of March 2020, she’d lost nine staff members, all for reasons relating to threats or challenges created by COVID-19.”

“ ‘It left a big hole in the quality of our program, the strength of our program,’ Fuentes said by phone in mid-January, during her program’s third 14-day closure due to multiple confirmed COVID-19 cases. ‘It’s not just the loss of staff, but the loss of quality. It’s a hard job to build quality. We pride ourselves on that. That’s gutted.’ ”

“Hiring is one of the hardest things during this pandemic. They just don’t stay,” Fuentes also tells EdSurge. “They have to decide if they want to take the risk—because it’s high risk. Then, do they want to do the training? It’s a lot of training.”

“Our turnover is horrific. In a month, I’m guessing we have three to four people leave.”

 The shortage of early educators threatens the nation’s ability to recover economically from the pandemic since parents who can’t access child care can’t go to work. 

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. It would help to establish pay equity with public school teachers, but this isn’t immediately achievable. The field also needs long-term recruitment strategies to build a pipeline that leads high school and college students to early education careers.

Advocacy can help. Please make sure that your elected officials know about the workforce shortage and how the pandemic has made the shortage worse. Encourage them to continue making investments in high-quality early education and care – and in higher salaries — so that the field can recruit, compensate, and retain high-quality early educators.