Olga Montellano is kind, patient and unflappable when little kids scream in her face or, as happened on a recent afternoon, she hears what sound like gunshots nearby.
She calmly herded her 3-year-old daughter and her neighbor’s 3-year-old son out of the front yard and inside her home in north Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood.
The ponytailed mother of four has been taking care of kids at her house for the past five years, helping out one parent who works at a factory and another who cleans offices.
This kind of informal, mostly unregulated child care is a lifesaver in Elyria-Swansea, where train yards, Interstate 70 and large industrial plots share space with residential pockets that, as of now, are home to many poor and working-class families.
Licensed child care — particularly for children 3 and younger — is hard to come by here. The problem is so pronounced, the neighborhood has won an unwelcome designation: Child care desert. Put simply, itap a place where the number of small children far exceeds the number of licensed child care slots.
But a slate of recent efforts could help Elyria-Swansea shed the label — and hold implications for other communities grappling with the problem. The initiatives, which use both public and private money, include training for informal providers like Montellano and attempts to bring new child care centers to the area.
The idea is to ease the child care scramble that plagues many working parents and help set up young kids for future academic success.
Nine of Denver’s 78 neighborhoods, including Elyria-Swansea, are classified as child care deserts, according to data from a recent Center for American Progress report. Parts of more than a dozen other neighborhoods also earn that designation, which the report defines as neighborhoods or small towns with either no child care options or so few that there are more than three children for every licensed child care slot.
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Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit chalkbeat.org/co.
