This school year, Montana, a state with fewer than 8,000 teachers, had 1,000 unfilled teaching positions. Meanwhile, Dutton-Brady Public Schools, a rural district about an hour from the Canadian border, easily filled its three vacancies. 

Administrators credit a blue-hued room strewn with toys and highchairs: Little Diamondbacks Daycare, which is located inside the district’s K-12 school, steps from the cafeteria and the library. On a chilly Monday morning, children were trying on costumes, riding rocking horses and enjoying a rowdy game of musical chairs. 

Eight-month-old Rowan watched the action from the arms of a staffer. Rowan’s mother, Jessica Toner, is a rookie teacher who heads the third-and-fourth-grade classroom down the hall. Though Toner was offered four higher-paying positions in Great Falls, where she lives, she could neither find nor afford decent child care. “I called probably 15 different daycares,” she said, but they either didn’t have openings or were too expensive. “It was a nightmare.” 

Toner hadn’t considered Dutton-Brady, which is a 32-minute drive from her house. But when she heard it had an opening — one that came with subsidized daycare — she applied. “That’s what drew me,” she said. “And then I came to find that I love it out here.”

In-school daycare can be found across the U.S., from Maine to Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s one way to tackle two crises: a shortage of qualified teachers and a shortage of quality child care. Recent data suggests that 79% of U.S. schools with teacher vacancies had difficulty filling them, while half of Americans live in “child care deserts” — communities that have at least three times as many children as licensed child-care slots. In many places, including Montana, both issues are more acute in rural areas. And of the 10 states with the highest rates of residents living in child care deserts, seven are in the West.

Ask anyone involved with school-run daycare, whether staff, clients or administrators, and they’ll probably say they’re delighted to have it. Experts, however, warn that it’s not a panacea. “All of this is well-intended,” said Chris Herbst, a professor who studies child care at Arizona State University. “But none of this is a sustainable, broad-based, fully funded solution to a long-standing problem.” 

In the spring of 2022, Dutton-Brady faced several teacher retirements. Superintendent Jeremy Locke knew it would be hard to replace them; it always was. 

The Dutton-Brady School District is deeply rural, serving 131 students in a 625-square-mile region, an area larger than Grand Teton National Park. Its main school is in Dutton, and two others are located on colonies of Hutterites, an isolated Anabaptist religious sect. Dutton, which is the only town for miles, is home to two taverns, a water tower, a bank and a gas station that also sells fertilizer and livestock feed. There’s not a single stoplight.

Recruiting teachers has long been difficult; at times, the district has had to lure teachers from as far away as the Philippines. And veteran teachers rarely apply. Most recruits are like Toner: recent graduates who are just starting out, and perhaps starting families. 

So, at a meeting that spring, Locke and the Board of Trustees seized on the idea of opening a daycare center to boost recruitment and retention. They scrambled to get the paperwork, financing and staffing in order before the 2022-2023 school year began. “We had to make it work,” Locke said. “Or else we knew that we were going to be dead in the water as far as staffing goes.” 

Little Diamondbacks now serves 21 children, ranging from a few months to 5 years old. Dutton-Brady teachers pay up to $270 per child, per month for full-time, year-round care, a rate that is subsidized by state grants and by non-staffers who pay full tuition of up to $540 a month. 

Staffing the facility has been a constant headache — it’s tough to find child-care workers anywhere, let alone in such a rural county — but Locke said it’s been worth it. “If we didn’t start this daycare last year, we would not have filled our three openings,” he said. “We have no teacher shortages right now.”

In-school daycares exist elsewhere in rural Montana, too. Ekalaka, a town of 399 people on the eastern edge of the state, opened its center in August 2022. Browning, located on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, started its facility in 1985; it was initially meant to serve teen mothers but now serves mostly staff members. 

Browning’s superintendent, Corrina L. Guardipee-Hall (Blackfeet-Cree), used the daycare when her children were small. “It really helped me be able to be a teacher and eventually administrator and now a superintendent,” she said. “It did help retain not only me as an employee, but also other people around the district.” It’s also a recruitment incentive: Guardipee-Hall noted that two new teacher assistants submitted daycare applications for their children immediately after being hired.

Montana’s school-based daycare centers would seem an ideal way to attract and keep teachers. But Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, said they don’t address the root causes of shortages: low wages and decreased public perceptions about the profession’s prestige. Plus, daycare centers support teachers for only a short time during their career, if at all. 

“There are a lot of initiatives to compensate teachers in ways other than actual wages,” Kraft said, referring to efforts to subsidize student loans, housing or child care. “All of those have potential, although I would argue that it may be more effective to simply take the cost of those programs and fold them into higher teacher pay.” 

In that regard, Montana has a long way to go: Its starting teacher salaries rank 51st in the nation. When the Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit, adjusted for cost-of-living differences, it found that the average starting salary for a Montana teacher was only $36,480 — far behind neighboring Idaho ($44,150) and Wyoming ($51,530).

As for why school districts might provide housing or child care before increasing wages, Kraft explained they might be “hesitant to commit to permanent and substantial pay raises with some uncertainty about the fiscal climate.” Besides, he noted, compensation must be negotiated with teachers’ unions — “often a time-intensive and slow process” — whereas a district can unilaterally decide to open a daycare. 

Ultimately, Kraft said, solving the teacher shortage will require major policy changes, as well as “generational shifts in how we perceive the profession.” 

In rural areas, in-school daycare centers aren’t merely useful to the school; they also serve the community. About half of Little Diamondbacks’ regular attendees are the children of non-staffers, some of whom drive from nearly 40 miles away. Ekalaka’s facility, which is also open to community members, is the only licensed one in the county.

In rural Colorado, the West Grand School District, between Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, has had an early childhood center since 2018. West Grand opened its facility after several teachers quit because they couldn’t find child care, but administrators soon realized it would address a greater need: The town has just one other licensed daycare, and it’s often full. 

The school’s daycare center now serves roughly 22 children, only seven of whom are the offspring of teachers. “We knew we needed to [open it],” said Superintendent Elizabeth Bauer. “Not just for our teachers, but for our community.” 

Hannah Wynd, who works for the local health department, said she might have had to move if she hadn’t gotten a spot at West Grand. “I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children,” she said. “It’s super important, what it’s provided for my family.”

Experts don’t dispute the critical role these facilities play in families’ lives. In-school daycare centers have been “introduced or enacted by well-meaning people who are probably frustrated that nothing is happening federally and are taking it upon themselves to try to better their community,” said Herbst, the Arizona State University professor. 

Yet, ultimately, Herbst believes such changes are “piecemeal,” and that true change must happen on a national scale. He wants Congress to support child-care subsidies, like those that were initially included in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. 

In the meantime, rural administrators, teachers and parents plan to keep doing what they can to keep their jobs local, their schools open and their kids cared for. (That includes obtaining additional sources of funding for their daycares: Dutton-Brady’s largest grant recently ran out, and West Grand is seeking new community funding partners.)

They don’t have the luxury of waiting for policymakers to decide their fates. 

Because here’s the picture Locke painted: If Dutton-Brady loses a single teacher, it might not be able to replace them. If the school loses a second teacher, and a third, it could end up being assimilated into a bigger district. And then the community hub, the heart of the tiny town of Dutton, would be gone. 

“We don’t have an option to not figure it out, because when we don’t, everything dries up,” Locke said. “It’s really an existential threat.” 

The post How Dutton schools solved their teacher shortage: by opening a daycare appeared first on Montana Free Press.

This story was originally published November 20, 2023 at High Country News.

BOZEMAN — Connie Howell has lived in Montana for 40 years, nearly half that time in a tan-and-brick apartment complex in Bozeman. It’s always been a pleasant place, with a small courtyard and distant views of the Bridger Mountains. But since 2015, the rent for the one-bedroom unit that she shares with her husband, Chris, has nearly doubled.

The couple, who depend on Social Security and disability payments, now put about half of their monthly gross income toward rent. Affordable housing, in contrast, is generally defined as costing no more than 30% of a household’s gross income.

Howell has seen friends leave Bozeman because they could no longer afford housing, and her daughter hasn’t been able to move back here for the same reason. Compared to them, she considers herself lucky. But at age 65, she is “scared to death” of that luck running out — of something happening to her or Chris, since neither could make rent on their own.

“I get this thought in the pit of my stomach that just sometimes won’t go away,” she said. “I don’t know how I would survive, and I don’t know how he would survive.”

Montana, like much of the country, is experiencing a housing crisis. At the start of 2020, the value of a typical home here was $282,277, according to Zillow; now it’s $453,567, a leap of 60%. Renters suffered, too: In Lewis and Clark County, which includes the state capital, Helena, rents jumped 37% in two years, ranking it fifth among all U.S. counties for rent growth. Across the state, the rental vacancy rate plunged from a healthy 6.9% in 2017 to just 3.2% in 2022.

These rapid changes prompted Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, to appoint a bipartisan housing task force in summer 2022. The group’s recommendations led the state Legislature to pass a raft of housing-related bills in its 2023 session. The speed and breadth of the changes garnered national attention, with some even dubbing the reforms “the Montana miracle.” 

Yet many Montanans, who find themselves and their neighbors unhoused, insecurely housed or fiscally imprisoned in dilapidated digs, deride that characterization. They say they’re not feeling any miracles — and that, even if the recent bills boost the housing supply, many people will be left in the lurch because lawmakers failed to adequately address affordability.

Even experts aren’t sure how Montana’s strategy will fare. Martha Galvez, executive director of New York University’s Housing Solutions Lab, was heartened by the state’s progress, calling it a “pretty impressive change in a pretty short amount of time,” but she wasn’t ready to declare victory yet. “It’ll be interesting to watch how these new changes play out,” she said.

Between 2020 and 2022, with many people eager to flee cities and live out their “Yellowstone” fantasies, Montana added more than 40,000 new residents. And just 8,700 new homes. Some of these newcomers were remote workers, who brought their incomes with them: The share of Montana households earning more than $200,000 annually rose by more than a third in recent years, the largest surge of any state by far. As thoese high earners sought housing, and as the costs of materials and labor went up, prices ballooned.

“A decade ago, [Montanans] could get into a rental, get a job that paid a wage that covered their needs, save up for a down payment and reasonably buy a home,” said Kaia Peterson, executive director of NeighborWorks Montana, a nonprofit housing organization. “That formula really doesn’t exist in most places anymore.”

As similar scenes unfurl throughout the West, some say there’s a relatively simple solution: Build more housing. Though the approach has its skeptics — those who argue that more development merely leads to more luxury condos and gentrification — Galvez’s NYU colleagues have found otherwise. In two reports that analyzed dozens of academic studies, the authors concluded that building more housing can, eventually, lower prices for low- and middle-income families, through several different mechanisms.

One is by sparking so-called chains of mobility: As wealthy people move into brand-new granite-countered, stainless-steel-applianced developments, their former, slightly less shiny housing becomes available to those with slightly lower incomes, and so on down the line. Plus, housing units often grow less desirable with age, which means that today’s new builds could, decades down the road, become tomorrow’s bargains.

The build-more solution “is just basic economics,” said Eugene Graf IV, a fourth-generation Bozeman homebuilder and member of the state’s housing task force. “Prices are going to go up if there’s not supply.” The task force embraced the theory, and Montana’s Legislature followed suit.

It passed a slew of measures intended to promote greater and denser development, such as requiring cities to allow duplexes and accessory dwelling units and eliminating minimum lot sizes and parking requirements. Legislators also increased funding for a trades education credit to address the state’s shortage of skilled laborers, and for infrastructure like sewers and roads.

The state front-loaded its public review process for certain subdivisions, too. Under the old system, residents could comment on developments as they arose; now, Montanans must voice their concerns when cities are creating land-use plans. Once those plans are completed, any conforming developments will proceed by right. Combined with other red-tape-cutting measures, Graf, the builder, estimated the changes could halve the time needed to construct a new subdivision from roughly four years to two. 

More subdivisions, however, are only half the equation. The other half is making sure that people can afford to live in them. As the NYU researchers wrote: “New market rate housing is necessary but not sufficient. Government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes.” 

And despite a $2.5 billion surplus in the state budget, Montana lawmakers chose not to pass several affordable housing measures during the 2023 session, instead spending nearly half of it on tax cuts and rebates. Just $106 million was devoted to down-payment assistance for middle-income homebuyers and low-interest loans to developers of affordable multi-family housing.

Benjamin Patrick Finegan, co-founder of Bozeman Tenants United, sees that as a major misstep. “Unregulated building of more housing isn’t going to ensure that people who live and work in Montana and are trying to build lives here and start families will actually be able to do that,” said Finegan, a 26-year-old whose own parents have been priced out of the city. “The creation of new housing and ensuring that it’s affordable, I think, have to go hand-in-hand.”

The Republican-controlled Legislature voted down several affordable housing proposals, including a housing tax credit, which would have incentivized affordable rental development, and a housing trust fund, which could have subsidized the construction of roughly 500 additional low-income apartments every year. (Gianforte’s office declined to answer questions about the importance of affordability.)

Finegan is frustrated that the housing task force, which is mostly composed of developers, politicians and government officials, doesn’t include anyone who is, to his knowledge, housing insecure. (It does include representatives from Shelter WF and Habitat for Humanity, two housing nonprofits.) “More conversations about the housing crisis are good,” Finegan said. “But they need to be had with the right people: people that are experiencing the housing crisis.” 

In November, Montana voters expressed their frustrations by electing one of the tenant group’s co-founders as mayor of Bozeman, and Andrea Davis, former executive director of the nonprofit organization Homeword, as mayor of Missoula. Davis wishes lawmakers had placed a greater emphasis on immediate affordability in the last session. “We could have helped alleviate some of the pressure right now, versus waiting for the market to respond,” she said, referring to the fact it could take years before more housing results in lower prices. “The need is now.”

Affordable housing advocates hope to soon see more support for subsidized and deed-restricted units, which mandate resale conditions to keep prices affordable. They want to see inclusionary zoning, a practice that requires developers to devote some units to low- and middle-income families or else pay a fee — and which was implemented in Bozeman and Whitefish before the Legislature banned it in 2021. (State lawmakers banned rent control, too, in 2023.) Advocates also want heavily touristed cities to pass regulations, as Bozeman recently did, that ensure more homes are occupied by locals, rather than vacationers or second-home owners.

As for whether Montana’s new housing strategy will live up to its hype, Davis said to check back in five years. If, at that point, firefighters and teachers can afford housing, then the state will, indeed, have pulled off something of a miracle.  

High Country News is an independent magazine dedicated to coverage of the Western U.S. Subscribe, get the enewsletter, and follow HCN on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Has Montana really solved its housing crisis? appeared first on Montana Free Press.

This story was originally published Oct. 31, 2023 at High Country News.

In a squat 1,100-square-foot building on the outskirts of Helena lies a pile of enormous tongues. They are thick and leaden, stacked on a steel table like fish out of water. The bovines from which they came hulk nearby, cold carcasses hanging from cold hooks. Bearded men, their white coats covered in blood, rhythmically chop livers, punctuating the hum of industrial refrigeration.

This small meat-processing facility, which a group of ranchers started under the name Old Salt Co-op, is one of many that have appeared across the country recently. “Small” is an understatement: Old Salt can process the equivalent of 20 cattle per week, while major meatpackers butcher thousands per day.

Just four companies process 85% of American beef, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Though the consolidation has long affected ranchers, it wasn’t until the pandemic — when the industry made headlines with bottlenecks, price hikes and COVID-19 outbreaks among workers — that the general public noticed. Even the White House got involved, pledging $1 billion to boost the nation’s independent meat-processing capacity. In Montana, a state with more cows than people, this helped at least 17 plants open or expand.

But in all the excitement — the ribbon cuttings on shiny new facilities, the feel-good of fighting for the little guy — it’s easy to forget: What happens after that local chuck gets wrapped in cellophane? Since most independent ranchers and processors lack the volume to supply major grocery chains, their survival rides not only on how much brisket they produce, but on how many people buy it. 

Without a strong customer base, Rebecca Thistlethwaite, director of the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network at Oregon State University, fears that many small processors will fail. She cited a University of Illinois study that suggested success is contingent upon local demand. “It’s not a field of dreams situation; it’s not an ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Thistlethwaite said. “You can’t build supply chains without having that end consumer.”

Local meatpackers used to be more common. In 1980, the four largest companies processed just 36% of the nation’s beef. The authors of a recent USDA report wrote that they “knew of no mature American industry that displayed as dramatic a change in concentration in as short a time.” 

The cause of that consolidation: economies of scale. “As larger processors have demonstrated lower costs of production,” said Eric Belasco, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University, “it’s just been harder for a smaller processing facility to compete.”

While that created better margins for the “Big Four” meatpackers JBS, Tyson, Cargill and Marfrig (formerly National Beef) — it hasn’t lowered prices for consumers. Since the early ’80s, the inflation-adjusted cost of ground beef has risen by about 30%. 

Ranchers haven’t benefited either. Data on net profits is difficult to find, but gross profits are certainly down. Fifty years ago, ranchers got 60 cents of every dollar that consumers spent on beef; today, it’s 39 cents, according to the White House, which noted the decline when announcing its $1 billion investment. While that money supports facility expansion and workforce development, it doesn’t help build markets for local meat.

Two decades ago, Lisa Wade Mayorga, whose family has ranched in Montana since 1903, abandoned the Big Four and began selling beef directly to consumers. Unlike many independent ranchers, who must travel long distances to process their meat, she had a small facility nearby. 

But earlier this year, it went up for sale, putting Wade Mayorga’s business in jeopardy. So she joined four other ranching families to form the Glacier Processing Cooperative, which is purchasing the plant. Though the co-op has applied for a federal grant for new equipment, its ultimate success depends on whether its members can attract and retain enough customers.

For independent ranchers, major chains — like Walmart, where 26% of America’s food dollars go, are basically out of the question. “To get into a chain grocery store, you have to have volume,” explained Bill Jones, general manager of the Montana Premium Processing Cooperative, which opened in January. And since it takes two years and roughly $2,500 to raise a single head of cattle, Jones said it’s “a heck of a challenge” for ranchers to establish enough volume to interest a grocery chain. 

Jones said the ranchers in his cooperative sell their meat online, at farmers markets or to local grocers and restaurants. “And then some are doing all three,” he added.

Old Salt, the Helena plant with the tongues on the table, is taking yet another approach. Rather than each ranch running its own marketing and social media and fighting for a sliver of the same small pie — Montana only has 1.1 million people, after all — the company has united four ranches under a single brand. 

“There’s a lot of cannibalization of each other in local food,” said Cole Mannix, an Old Salt co-founder whose family has been ranching in Montana for five generations. “So we decided to try to consolidate that into one kind of regional effort.” Old Salt has also gone beyond selling meat online: opening a buzzy burger stand in the heart of Helena, organizing a festival and cookouts and ranch tours, and building a butcher-shop-slash-grill that will showcase its products and host community events. 

Mannix hopes those efforts convince Montanans there’s a value in local meat — a value that a Walmart rib-eye can’t offer. “How can all these breweries survive?” he asked. “Because they’re a place for people to hang out. Local food is about human connection.”

Zoe Barnard, who lives in Helena with her partner and their four children, believes that buying locally raised, grass-fed beef is healthier for her family and her community. And, since independent ranchers typically manage their cattle from birth to burger, rather than sending them to feedlots, she also believes it’s more humane and ecologically sustainable. “It’s just such a bizarre thing that you would go to the supermarket in Montana and buy meat that had come from Brazil,” she said. 

LOCAL FOOD IS ABOUT HUMAN CONNECTION

Barnard gets an Old Salt meat box every six weeks. Since it’s more expensive than shopping at the store, she serves red meat only once or twice a week. Barnard has also convinced several of her friends to get on board. “I’m like, this is the best meat I’ve ever tasted,” she said. “I don’t even get into my politics.” 

Whether Old Salt can find more people like Barnard is an open question — and a critical one. As Mannix put it: “If customers don’t change their buying habits, local meat really doesn’t have a chance.” 

Thistlethwaite, of Oregon State University, agrees. “I don’t think [local meat processors] are going to survive unless we see consumers step up more seriously,” she said. “But that’s not really a message that is easy to tell. I get it: Beef is super expensive right now, it’s a luxury item in my household.” While Thistlethwaite said locally processed meat is often available in bulk — and is usually cheaper per pound than beef from the grocery store — she acknowledged it’s not an option for many families, owing to the high up-front cost and requisite freezer space.

So Thistlethwaite thinks institutions like schools, prisons, hospitals, universities and government agencies should start buying meat locally. “That would make a huge impact,” she said. “There needs to be more than just household consumers purchasing local and regional meat.

High Country News is an independent magazine dedicated to coverage of the Western U.S. Subscribe, get the enewsletter, and follow HCN on Facebook and Twitter.

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