Months after Krystian Thomas moved to Baltimore, she still hasn’t secured child care for her 1-year-old son, an all-too-familiar issue in the city.

The single mom of two has struggled to find high-quality care that’s close and affordable. For now, she says her best options are her apartment near Druid Hill Park or her sister’s in D.C.

“Thank goodness I can work from home and bring him with me to work,” Thomas, 29, said. “I’m not just going to to take him over to any day care just because they have availability. I want to feel safe in handing him over.

“It’s, at times, very depressing, to say the least: feeling like you have options, but none at the same time, and you’re by yourself.”

For many Baltimore parents, child care can be out of reach, with potentially significant consequences for their child’s development and their own careers. According to a report released Wednesday, there are spots for only half of Baltimore children under 5 at local, regulated early childhood education programs. The first years are even harder: There’s capacity to serve just 20% of the city’s infants, according to the Baltimore City Early Care and Education Landscape Analysis, which brings together hard-to-gather data on conditions for children ages 0 to 5 in Baltimore.

As the cost of care has risen between 8% and 21% for families since the pandemic, the city lost 1,665 seats at center-based programs alone between November 2019 and May 2024. This could not only impact kids’ kindergarten readiness, but securing a coveted child care spot can be imperative in getting parents back to work.

Lieny Jeon, co-lead on the report, said it revealed an important reality in Baltimore.

“There’s a crisis for families and our future workforce,” said Jeon, an associate professor of early childhood education at the University of Virginia. “Early care and education access is not only for young children. It’s for parents, it’s for their jobs and it’s for our future.”

Making child care more affordable and letting parents work could be key to keeping families from leaving Baltimore, which census data showed marginally gained population for the first time in a decade. More than three in four parents looking for child care say their job is the reason, dwarfing all other factors, according to data collected by the Maryland Family Network and shared in the report.

According to the latest American Community Survey, 64% of Baltimore City kids have two working parents, the report said. Because pre-K often only covers the school day, the report calculated how many kids under 5 could be served by non-preschool programs likely offering full-day hours: just 36%.

And those spots are not available equally across the city.

“Children’s ZIP codes or [their] parents’ paycheck shouldn’t determine their access to early learning,” said Jeon, who is also the director of early childhood initiatives at the Baltimore Education Research Consortium. “But that was the reality that we found from this report.”

Just because a parent can find a spot doesn’t mean they can afford it. Costs can range from just under $700 to $1,200 a month, depending on the type of program and age of the child. That means typical families of four can spend over 30% of their income on child care, four times the federally recommended rate of 7%.

“I have other priorities that I need to handle, and if that means I have to lug my 1-year-old and my 6-year-old around with me while I figure out the rest of my life, then that’s what I’ll do,” Thomas said. “I would rather keep them with me than trying to exhaust myself, just working to pay for them to stay with somebody else.”

In recent years, thousands more Baltimore families benefitted from the Maryland child care scholarship program. But state budgeting woes mean that for now, the program is frozen, leaving new families without relief.

And while Baltimore has invested in full-day pre-K for low-income 4-year-olds since 2008, the city actually lost seats over the last two school years. The report estimates the city has enough pre-K spots for just 65% of all its 4-year-olds and less than 10% of 3-year-olds who qualify for free pre-K under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

Even with a capacity gap, during the past school year, the city filled just 86% of its available seats in the school system. That could be for many reasons; pre-K isn’t zoned like the rest of elementary education, for example, which means parents may not be able to easily access their pre-K program.

Plus, parents may not know the program exists.

The report recommends doing targeted outreach to families with certain kids, such as those with special needs, living in high-poverty neighborhoods that don’t have high pre-K enrollment or multilingual learners, to keep filling seats.

Jeon also recommends figuring out which locations need the most investment and continuing to bring private programs on board with pre-K expansion.

“Investing in early childhood isn’t really optional,” Jeon said. “It’s very essential to Baltimore’s growth, equity and resilience.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.