38% fewer head start seats

and that's the Valley alone, over just five years.

Head Start in the Mat-Su has cut its capacity by thirty eight percent. Not because families stopped needing it, but because the funding stopped keeping up with what it costs to run.

Fifty five percent of Alaska kids don't have reasonable access to childcare, and sixty percent of them live in a house where every parent works.

The price is the other half of it. Center based care runs about twelve thousand four hundred dollars a year. Home based care is over eleven thousand.

One longtime provider down on the Kenai charges eleven hundred a month for an infant. She's been doing this more than forty years, and she says the hard part now isn't finding families, it's finding anyone who wants to work in early childhood at all.

There is help out there. A Wasilla mom in this story pays seventy one dollars a month with state assistance, and that's the difference between having a job and not.

The state approved twenty point four million dollars for childcare assistance this year and kept sixteen point seven five million for Head Start. The Governor also vetoed six point four million meant for recruiting and keeping providers.

If your kid is sitting on a waitlist in Palmer or Wasilla right now, that's the why.