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In Rural Alaska, A Powerful Documentary Flips the Script for Child Care Funding [1]
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Date: 2025-03-19
Social worker and filmmaker Laura Norton-Cruz remembers vividly finding out that she was pregnant and feeling like she’d just been “thrown to the wolves.” “What am I going to do about child care?” she asked. “What am I going to do about breastfeeding and pumping at work? What am I going to do about paid leave?”
None of those supports were available at her workplace in Anchorage, Alaska, much less in the remote villages where she often worked with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
When a decade later she was given the opportunity to design a project for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders initiative, and recalled how abandoned she felt during her first years as a single mom with a baby and a toddler, she turned her camera lens on Kotzebue, Alaska–a remote town of 3000 residents, primarily Alaska Native people, with more than 500 children under the age of five, and not a single licensed child care facility.
In collaboration with filmmaker Joshua Branstetter, Norton-Cruz produced At Home/In Home: Rural Alaska Childcare in Crisis, a documentary that would cause a stir up at Alaska’s state legislature.
It tells a story of parents who leave jobs because they can’t find child care, employers who can’t find workers, public officials who tally the economic damage of the child care crisis, and an intrepid mother-daughter pair–Tracey and Bailey Schaeffer–who battle the state child care licensing system as they try to establish a home-based child care facility.
The film is a portrait of small-town families–where, for example, a 55-year-old grandmother would like to return to her job and earn a retirement pension, but instead is home raising five grandkids.
It’s also a story of how bureaucratic barriers and the realities of rural infrastructure–homes that don’t meet state licensing requirements or lack of reliable internet service–prevent qualified caregivers from getting licensed.
That’s the story that hooked state representative Julie Coulombe when she watched the film at a legislators’ lunch-and-learn where Norton-Cruz presented the film. “A lot of times when we’re talking about bills and issues in the legislature, there’s no human face to it,” said Coulombe.
“But Laura’s film lets real Alaskans tell their stories. She showed the complicated logistics, the hard work, of taking care of children. Seeing that, I just felt sheer frustration. I mean, these women want to take care of children in a place where it’s almost impossible to find child care, and they can’t even get over the first hurdle, which is paperwork. That kind of frustration drives me to action. It motivated me to want to change the system.”
According to a December, 2024 report from the Alaska Governor’s Task Force on Child Care, 61% of Alaskans have limited or no access to licensed child care facilities, even though more than half of young children live in households where all parents are employed and need child care.
Norton-Cruz noted that the regulations for home-based care are typically based on center-based care in more urban settings. “They’re not created with homes in mind, and certainly not rural homes in Alaska which are often intergenerational,” she said. “People heat with wood stoves or propane that doesn’t meet the safety regulations. To get licensed, the child care provider has to have a Child Development Associates credential (CDA), which requires unpaid, supervised hours from someone who already has that degree in a licensed center.”
That translates to a person from Kotzebue having to make a trip to one of the major cities, hundreds of miles away, in order to stay there long enough to meet the requirement. For most people interested in operating their own child care business it’s an impossible proposition.
Laura Norton-Cruz working in the Alaska snow. (Photo by Laura Norton-Cruz)
When Representative Coulombe learned about these barriers, she felt so frustrated that she sponsored another screening to draw attention to the child care crisis and its impact on the state’s economy. Ultimately, Coulombe sponsored a bill that resulted in a $7 million increase for child care funding to increase provider wages and expand access to subsidies for middle-income families.
Pressure from the public, from legislators like Coulombe, and child care advocates including Norton-Cruz, prompted the governor to set up the Alaska Child Care Task Force. Eventually the Department of Health Commissioner viewed Norton-Cruz’s film and, with input from the Task Force, the agency which oversees state licensing regulations, which had originally declined to answer questions put forward in the documentary, also saw the film. They are now revamping their website, and have changed the IT system that prevented rural users (without expensive fixed IP addresses) from registering and requesting a background check.
As a result of these changes, the Schaeffers were able to open Nunakins, a non-profit early learning program on the second floor of Bailey’s house. Two years later, it’s still the only licensed home-based child care in Kotzebue. They serve 8 children, are assisting staff in getting their CDAs, and have a waiting list of more than twenty 0-5 year olds. “We’re still open,” said Tracey Schaeffer, who handles the books for the business. “But financially this is not really sustainable. Utilities are so expensive here. A gallon of milk costs $12, gas and heating fuel are $9 a gallon. Then there’s worker’s comp and liability insurance. I’d have to charge families more than $2000 a month to cover the cost of care, but the subsidy only pays $1500 for an infant, so that’s what I charge.”
Tracey Schaeffer, who is also the clinical coordinator for the Northwest Arctic Borough that provides essential services to Kotzebue and the surrounding 10 villages, also participates in a community Child Care Working Group.
“Our focus is on stimulating community development,” she said. “We want workers to be able to stay in this area. Also, we want kids who go into foster care to be able to stay here near their families, their culture, their language. To do that foster families have to be able to have child care. For a lot of people, this is home. We need to make it a place where people can stay and thrive.”
Recently, the Alaska Child Care Task Force, recognizing the acute child care crisis in rural areas where there are few centers, has recommended expanding “licensed exempt provider types” that are eligible for subsidies, so that a family that is eligible for the state subsidy can select a family, friend, or neighbor as their child care provider.
Even amongst her Anchorage constituents,“It’s really clear that most parents prefer in-home child care, a smaller setting with a relative or friend or a neighbor,” said Representative Coulombe. It’s an observation backed up by data from Home Grown, an organization that advocates for home-based child care providers. Licensed home-based care is also an option that often works best in rural areas where residents must travel long distances to get to urban centers.
Coulombe is continuing to press for improvements in both the licensing process and the subsidy system, including tax credits for businesses that provide child care benefits. “People are starting to wake up,” she said. “Do you want to keep and retain workers? If you have a child care benefit attached to your job, you’ll be loyal. If you have safe, affordable care for your child, you don’t move away and you don’t quit your job.”
Meanwhile, Norton-Cruz is documenting it all, filming child care workers in the rural Kenai peninsula and an infant-learning program in the Mat-Su region of Alaska, which focuses particularly on Alaska Native communities. “We have to keep paying attention to this issue and keep the pressure on,” she said. “Because that’s what leads to changes in funding and changes in policy. We need to help employers, legislators, and leaders see that this is the most important part of child development and the most abandoned policy issue of our time.”
You can watch At Home/In Home: Rural Alaska Childcare in Crisis free on Vimeo.
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