Nearly two years ago, Helena resident Christine Miller-Fitzpatrick became the latest in a long line of Montana parents who have turned their struggles finding child care into a new career.
With help from the nonprofit Zero to Five Montana, Miller-Fitzpatrick launched Larch Early Childhood Care and has since built the business to two locations with five full-time workers serving 35 Helena families. She’s grown intimately familiar with the challenges facing this profession — challenges she shared with lawmakers before and during the 2025 Legislature while testifying in favor of a string of child care-centric policies.
“You see that child care is just such a pressing issue for families and employers across the state right now, and I’m really happy that they started to address some of that this session,” Miller-Fitzpatrick said
Of the handful of bills that Miller-Fitzpatrick and child care advocates pushed for, only one became law: House Bill 924, a sprawling multi-million bundle of state-funded trusts aimed at supporting not only early childhood education initiatives but also roads, bridges and pensions, among other issues. And while Miller-Fitzpatrick said she was heartbroken to see other promising proposals fail to make it into Montana’s lawbooks, she said the child care component of the new trust should make a difference for providers like her who face financial and technical difficulties in trying to meet the growing needs of families in their communities.
The funding for early child care initiatives contained in HB 924 has been hailed by providers and advocates as a significant investment in one of the state’s most pressing needs. In recent years, working families have increasingly struggled with rising costs of care, while providers have faced high employee turnover and a shifting regulatory landscape. Providers hope seed money approved by the 2025 Legislature and future revenues allocated to the trust will spur programs that help retain child care workers, increase options for Montana parents and right a ship that’s inched ever closer to listing.
“Nationally, there’s been a real trend in these early childhood endowments, or early child care funds, and a pretty universal recognition that you don’t have workforce if you don’t have child care,” said Sen. Laura Smith, D-Helena, who helped craft the child care trust language contained in HB 924.
Citing an analysis by legislative staff, Smith said the trust will produce as much as $5 million in interest over the next two years for a wide array of child care uses including workforce development, curriculum improvement and safety upgrades for providers, as well as support for before- and after-school programs in Montana communities. How those projects are prioritized, Smith added, will hinge on the work of an oversight board composed of providers, parents and representatives of various state agencies. That board’s membership hasn’t yet been appointed.
In an email to Montana Free Press this month, Department of Public Health and Human Services spokesperson Jon Ebelt said the agency’s first step in implementation will be to advertise and hire a full-time administrator for the early childhood portion of HB 924. Once that position is hired and the board appointed, Ebelt continued, DPHHS will begin writing and adopting regulations for how the trust’s revenue is handled.
The establishment of the new early childhood trust coincides with ongoing efforts by state agencies and nonprofits to better understand the challenges and potential strategies for child care businesses across the state. One such initiative is a comprehensive fiscal analysis of Montana’s entire early childhood system, launched last year by DPHHS, Zero to Five Montana and the national nonprofit Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies. Zero to Five Policy and Engagement Director Alex DuBois, whose Helena-based nonprofit was a strong proponent of HB 924 this spring, said the data gleaned from such studies will help guide how money from the childcare trust is spent.
“What that project is looking at is a collaborative approach to developing and reimagining what the prenatal-to-five system is in our state, and how we can improve that system and generate a deeper understanding of investments that are really needed to support those services and systems,” DuBois said. “It’s neat to see that this board will bring together both public and private individuals, really encourage that collaboration between various agencies, individuals at the local level, individuals at the state level, and they’ll be able to look at all this data and information we’ve gathered.”
Based on her own experience expanding Larch to a second location in Helena late last year, Miller-Fitzpatrick said grants from the child care trust could help with basic growth costs such as new flooring, new cribs and beds, and new safety upgrades like fire extinguishers and first aid kits, much of which is specified in Montana’s child care licensing requirements.
“It’s quite a bit to put in the kind of facility that’s up to our own standards and also the licensing standards as well,” she continued. “It’s not as easy as signing a lease and putting out a couple toys.”
Other policies floated this spring to address Montana’s child care crisis met a far different fate. The issue commanded considerable attention throughout the session, with lawmakers debating proposals to expand state assistance for child care and to establish tax credits for parents and child care workers.
While legislators on both sides of the aisle widely acknowledged the affordability and accessibility challenges rampant in the state, only two of the handful of bills advanced along those lines ultimately passed both chambers: HB 924, and House Bill 456, which automatically qualified most child care workers for the state-run Best Beginnings child care scholarship program. Proponents argued that expansion would help alleviate the financial pressure on employees working in an industry with a median wage of roughly $11 an hour and, as a result, improve providers’ ability to retain those workers.
HB 456 passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support. However, on June 19, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte vetoed the measure. In a letter explaining his rationale, Gianforte cited both a 2023 law broadly expanding Best Beginnings scholarship eligibility and pointed to the new childcare trust.
“With House Bill 924 enacted,” Gianforte wrote, “we have tools at our disposal to address Montana’s childcare shortage and innovate the industry, including offering grants to launch or grow childcare services, improve affordability, and increase access.”
The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Jonathan Karlen of Missoula, said in an interview it was “disappointing” to see the proposal rejected by the governor. Karlen also said he found the decision “surprising” — not just because HB 456 drove one of the highest volumes of constituent feedback of any bill this session, but because of Gianforte’s strong pro-business stance and the testimony of entities such as the Montana Chamber of Commerce supporting the proposal.
“If you want to recruit employees, if you want to be able to run a business in the state, you have to have employees, and those employees have to have child care,” Karlen said. “I feel like this could have been a real win-win for kids, for parents and for business.”
Miller-Fitzpatrick told MTFP this week her Helena-based child care business would have benefited directly from just such a change, as one of her employees currently has a child enrolled in Larch at no cost. Expanding Best Beginnings would have enabled Larch to recoup some of that lost tuition, which Miller-Fitzpatrick currently has set at $1,200 per month. At that rate, she added, the total earnings from the subsidy would likely have been enough to purchase new playground equipment by the end of one year.
Karlen noted a key impetus for HB 456 came from the results of a federally funded pilot program that in recent years increased subsidy eligibility for child care workers employed by participating providers. According to data compiled by DPHHS, 75 child care workers have been covered under the Bright Futures: Birth to Five pilot. Those workers received roughly $750,000 in the program’s first nine months to enroll their own children in child care services — 123 kids all told. DPHHS data also shows that turnover among pilot participants was significantly lower, about 9% compared to a statewide industry total of 32% during the same one-year span from fall 2023 to fall 2024.
Absent the eligibility expansion proposed in HB 456, Karlen said future financial assistance remains uncertain for those workers and their employers when the federal program concludes at the end of 2025.
“As far as I know, assuming they don’t fall under the income cap of the regular Best Beginnings program, I think they’re going to be in a really difficult spot to potentially have the wages that they earn be less than the cost of child care. Or the child care providers will have to give away free spots,” Karlen said, referencing a practice employed by some providers of offering child care slots to their employees at reduced or no cost.
Grace Decker, who coordinates the early childhood coalition Montana Advocates for Children, shares Karlen’s concern about the impacts of the HB 456 veto on workers benefiting from the federal pilot. The program covers families with a household income between 186% and 250% of the federal poverty level, or up to about $68,000 a year for a family of three, Decker estimates.
Comparatively, the current eligibility threshold for Montana’s Best Beginnings scholarship is 185% of the federal poverty level, which Decker said can leave child care workers with a slightly higher-earning partner paying the full price of child care — in some cases nearly as much as they’re making in the very same industry. For Decker and other advocates, that challenge ripples out not just to the providers employing those workers but to the families whose children those workers care for.
“The part that’s about to go away is that we are no longer going to be helping even these lower-income child care workers to access care,” Decker said. “It’s very likely that when this benefit goes away for these folks — those 75 workers, representing 750 or more children they’re serving across the state — when they no longer have their child care, we could see actually a worsening of the crisis.”
Decker said she remains hopeful that Montana can find a way to continue supporting child care workers who are currently receiving support. The pilot has already generated promising findings, she said, and with Gianforte directly referencing the child care trust in HB 924 in his veto of HB 456, Decker will encourage the board, once it is convened, to consider financial support for child care workers among its initial priorities.
“It is an early childhood trust and not just a child care trust, so it really needs to try to reflect a broader set of concerns while at the same time prioritizing the foundational pieces,” Decker said. “I think there’s a first approach that I would hope to see the board do some stabilization of workforce before trying to focus on quality or those kinds.”
This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepress.org.
