Austin Vance helps keep the lights on in Fort Collins.
As a line crew chief for the city’s electric utility, he and his team are responsible for the infrastructure that delivers electricity to more than 79,000 customers with an advertised 99.99% reliability. He couldn’t do it without his neighbor.
Before Vance and his wife started their family, the woman next door made them an offer: Whenever they had kids, she’d take care of them. That arrangement now allows both parents to hold jobs, and it’s what keeps Vance showing up for a community that depends on him.
“It allows me to have a career,” he said. “It allows my wife to have a career. It’s vital to me.”
Colorado’s essential workers — including firefighters, utility workers and teachers — are critical to safe and healthy communities. But the childcare system that supports them is fragile, expensive and shrinking.
When it fails, it isn’t just parents and families who feel it. It affects classrooms that go understaffed, the wildfire crew that can’t be backfilled and the power that stays out a little longer.
Essential workers with families are being forced to leave their hometowns and even their jobs. Fourteen percent of children under 5 in Colorado are in families where one or both caretakers didn’t take a job or made significant changes to their job responsibilities because of childcare problems, according to the , a 50-state report of household data developed by the .
As Elliot Haspel, an author and early childhood policy expert, writes in his book “Building a community without childcare is building a community on sand.”
Two jobs, few choices
Hygiene might seem like an unlikely place to be impacted by Colorado’s childcare crisis. The unincorporated Boulder County community, west of Longmont, is home to an aging population and a handful of small shops.
Though the community itself has just a few hundred residents, the serves a population of 3,240 residents across 43 square miles.
The fire department used to be fully volunteer-based, and staff responded to calls from their own homes. But those people “are now all retired,” said Lukas Moller, a volunteer Hygiene firefighter.
Rising housing costs are affecting the fire departmentap ability to recruit and retain staff. The districtap 60 personnel now primarily live outside of the area and come into Hygiene to work at the station, including Moller and his family, who own a home in Longmont.
“The town of Hygiene is not a place where itap affordable to live,” Moller said.
The median home value in Boulder County is $756,300, which is 40% higher than the state median of $539,400 and 127% higher than the national median of $332,700, according to the .
Moller is a solutions engineer for , a software company, and his wife works in user experience at .
“If we both didn’t work,” he said, “we wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage payment and afford everything else.”
Add the cost of childcare to the cost of housing, and life gets a lot more expensive. How much more expensive? Moller said the cost of care “eats up 30% to 40% of your take-home before mortgage, bills, food and all that.” His 3-year-old son attends daycare five days a week so he can hold down a job and be a volunteer firefighter.
Without childcare support, staff with families couldn’t respond to emergencies.
“There have been times where a battalion chief has called off, saying, ‘Hey, we need backfill at the station. Crews on a wildfire in Left Hand,’ ” Moller said, “and I can’t go backfill because I’m home alone, and I can’t bring my 3-year-old.”
The need for emergency responders is becoming more acute. In 2024, the Hygiene Fire Protection District responded to more than 300 calls for structure fires, emergency medical services, hazardous materials incidents, utility issues, wildland fires, car crashes and technical rescues.
Proper staffing is critical, especially during a severe drought. This year, the area had more red flag days by March than it usually has in an entire season, Moller said.
On top of his full-time job, Moller typically spends 48 to 72 hours per month responding to health and fire emergencies. Itap a lifelong dream, he said, and childcare is the only thing that makes it possible.
“This was something I always wanted to do. If our kid wasn’t in daycare, there’s no way I would’ve been able to pull that off with us both working full-time.”
The luck factor
The shortage of available childcare spots makes life even harder for those who serve their communities. In Colorado, licensed childcare facilities have the capacity to serve only two-thirds of children under age 6 in families where both parents work.
Consider Joey Angstman and his family. Angstman teaches biology and environmental science at .
“Just being with the students… watching them become people and be curious gives me hope for the future,” he said.
Angstman and his wife, who is also a teacher, are now parents to a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. Their son has attended an at-home daycare since he was 4 months old. The couple found the center through a friend.
“We were looking for childcare forever,” Angstman said. “We’d call people and nobody would respond to us.”
A coworker told his wife about a mutual contact who ran a daycare service. They called the provider immediately, and she “just happened to have an infant spot.”
The care experience for their son has been more consistent than it was for their daughter, who had to move centers a few times due to childcare center closures.
Private providers are in a precarious moment right now due to funding strains caused by , rising operational costs, and enrollment decreases tied to .
A 2026 showed that 25% of providers reported being at risk of closure this year or struggling to stay afloat.
Angstman was grateful to find somewhere for his daughter to land before she went into public school.
“We felt like just whatever we could find was kind of the best at that point,” he said.
Reliable childcare for their son gives both parents the chance to work and, as Angstman put it, to make an impact beyond their own home. For Greeley West, it means having the staff students need, which isn’t a guarantee: Colorado’s teacher shortage rate has nearly doubled since before the pandemic, according to .
Angstman sees his job as critical to equipping students with critical thinking about future policy and climate issues. His environmental science curriculum focuses heavily on preparing students for the challenges of a changing climate.
“This generation’s going to really have to be educated when it comes to understanding how climate change works and changes that need to be made,” he said.
The impossible choice
Vance, the line crew chief for Fort Collins Light and Power, and his wife are from northeast Colorado, near Fort Morgan. After having kids, they considered moving back to the area for cheaper care and housing, plus the family support available there.
“I pay more in daycare than I do my mortgage,” said Vance, who pays $2,200 a month for two kids, versus a $2,000 mortgage payment.
In Colorado’s 10 largest counties, families spend 18% to 25% of their monthly income on childcare, according to a report on licensed childcare from the Colorado-based, business-funded think tank . The federal governmentap benchmark for affordable childcare is 7%.
Ultimately, the Vances decided to stay in Fort Collins. “Itap hard to leave this community and hard to leave my job,” he said.
Vance takes great pride in his work.
“We serve our community,” Vance said. “Without line workers and without power companies, a lot of things we take for granted would not be here: your lights, your refrigerators, your TVs, your communications.”
Itap a job Vance wouldn’t be able to do if their 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter weren’t taken care of by their neighbor, the at-home childcare provider.
For many middle-income families like the Vances, the cost of childcare has even affected how many children they plan to have.
“We’ve decided two is enough because if we were to throw a third one in, we’re like, ‘Oh geez, how could we afford that?’ That would be another $1,100 a month.”
The Vance family makes things work by delaying future costs, such as buying a larger home. They decided to wait and “stick it out where we’re at,” reassessing the possibility “once we can drop the daycare bill.”
Until then, Vance keeps showing up to work, helping keep the lights on for his neighbors.
