Yadira Salazar has been attending Mom’s Group workshops in Vickery Meadow for three years now.
She has three kids. Occasionally, a family member can take care of them when she needs childcare. Otherwise, she said affordable childcare in the neighborhood is difficult to find.
“In the area, there's no one… there's nothing. No other childcare around here,” Salazar said. “If it is, it's expensive and I don't have that money to pay for it.”
Vickery Meadow is a densely populated neighborhood in northeast Dallas, with more than 30 languages spoken among the nearly 40,000 residents.
The programs Salazar attends are hosted by Vickery Meadow Youth Development Foundation (VMYDF).
The nonprofit offers free childcare for participating parents, so, while Salazar is at a women’s health workshop or learning about CPR, her kids are in a nearby classroom.
“Bringing them here makes me comfortable because I'm learning, and they're having fun at the same time as I do in class,” she said.
Salazar is currently in a 12-week workshop at VMYDF facilitated by SuperVive, a nonprofit focused on chronic disease prevention that provides health and wellbeing education tailored to Hispanic women.
The workshop is in Spanish and touches on everything from how to read beyond the labels for healthier grocery shopping, to resources and tools for addressing stress and depression.
Childcare is a large financial burden for families in Vickery Meadow and across the region.
To afford childcare for one infant in Texas, a minimum wage worker must work full time for 37 weeks, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute. That annual total comes out to more per year than in-state tuition at a four-year public college in the state.
Rhonda Rakow is the Director of Dallas County for ChildCareGroup, which manages funds from the Texas Workforce Commission’s statewide childcare subsidy system.
“We [Dallas County] are the second largest program for the subsidy program statewide because of our poverty level,” she said.
Parents can apply for the funding through ChildCareGroup to cover a portion of their childcare costs. But Rakow said the need is always greater than their funding can support.
“Parents will stay on the waiting list until we have funding available,” she said. There are parents that are on the waitlist for only a few weeks and others “who've been on about 12, 13 months."
With affordable, fulltime daycares hard to come by in Vickery Meadow, offering childcare during adult programs allows nonprofits like VMYDF to reach more parents.
“When we don't provide childcare, we have less attendance,” said Blanca Lerma, a family support specialist at VMYDF.
She said financial burden, transportation and language barriers make it challenging for parents in the neighborhood to find childcare and attend programs like these.
“All the families are struggling with finding accessible childcare,” she said. “They want to find a place where the people speak their own language to speak with the little ones.”
Literacy Achieves, a nonprofit offering free adult English classes in Vickery Meadow, has childcare for parents enrolled in their programs too.
“If we would not offer that [childcare], most of the parents could not come and attend classes, so they couldn't learn,” said Birgit Scott, the early childhood education program director at Literacy Achieves.
The nonprofit’s students come from around 48 different countries and speak approximately 42 different languages, according to Scott.
“Some come because they need to learn English for their work," she said. "Others come because they want to speak to the teachers in their children's school. They want to be able to go to the store or to the doctor."
Northwest Community Center, another Vickery Meadow nonprofit, also offers childcare for refugees and asylum seekers enrolled in their adult English classes.
“That [childcare] is a really big challenge for them,” said Katie Irwin, a refugee ministry leader at the organization. “The kind of jobs that they have don't pay at the level that allows them to afford daycare.”
High numbers of Vickery Meadow families are low income and learning English as an additional language.
At Jack Lowe Elementary, the closest elementary school to Northwest Community Center, 97.1% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and 77.5% are English language learners. At Jill Stone elementary, another nearby school, those numbers are 96.2% and 69.8%, respectively.
Many parents in Vickery Meadow don’t work the often-assumed 9-5 job, with moms crossing Central Expressway for early morning shifts at NorthPark Mall and dads working nights at the 24-hour convenience store.
Language barriers can limit job prospects, so English skills can open the door to opportunities with hours more conducive to caregiving.
“I wish there were more jobs available for refugees that were during the daytime, like that didn't involve strange work hours, and weren't so far away,” Irwin said. “They have more childcare needs because it's not when their children are in school.”
Foreign-born parents like many of those participating in programs at VMYDF, Literacy Achieves and Northwest Community Center make up a sizeable and increasing portion of the parent population in the U.S. today. (Though the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown may alter that trend.)
Free childcare during these workshops and classes alleviates the pressure of childcare needs, at least temporarily, while the parents gain new skills for themselves and their families.
“They need English skills to be able to be successful here, to provide a good home for their family and to have a safe and peaceful life here,” Irwin said.
She continued, “If they are really going to be able to be in an environment where they can learn, they need to have childcare for their children.”
This story was supported by Better Life Lab at New America.
Ava Thompson is KERA's digital producer. Got a tip? Email Ava at athompson@kera.org. KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members.
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