Finding childcare can be a challenge for almost anyone who has a job and young children. It’s even harder when you work in the trades—or any other role that doesn’t follow a typical work week. One of the underlying reasons: Childcare workers tend to be in short supply, given that it’s a difficult job that is also one of the lowest-paid in the country.
A training institute for the trades in Washington state decided to tackle both challenges—rolling out a program that will provide childcare for tradespeople in the immediate area and grow the number of childcare workers in the long term.
The Machinists Institute, which operates seven registered apprenticeship programs—for fabrication welders; heavy-duty equipment mechanics; industrial machinery technicians; machine operators; machinists; trailer, container, and van repair mechanics; and a first-in-the-nation option for manufacturing engineers—will open a childcare center in Everett, Washington, later this year. It will cater to tradespeople who may work very early or into the night, operating from 4 a.m. to about midnight, far longer hours than most centers are open, says Shana Peschek, the institute’s executive director. It will offer care on weekends, too.
The aim is to support access to careers represented by the local International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, especially by providing care during what Peschek calls “that worst shift.”
The institute is also working with the Imagine Institute, a Washington state organization that provides training, mentoring, and other services to early childhood educators. It’s taken a combination of grant money, its own dollars, and private donations to pay for Little Wings Early Learning Academy. Its name is inspired by the aerospace machinists union’s logo, and notably, Little Wings will use apprentices, too: people working to become early educators.
That piece was important for Peschek, who supports the model beyond the trades. The apprenticeship model, like one now being used to expand the early educator workforce in San Francisco, allows hopeful teachers to get paid during on-the-job training, covers the cost of classes required for licensing and beyond, and provides the time to take those courses.
Little Wings will likely open with two or three early educator apprentices on board, Peschek says. Their exact wages are still being calculated, though apprentices generally start with pay that is 60% of what someone earns at the journey-worker level of their career, meaning they’ve completed an apprenticeship and are working independently.
“We hope this is a model that can be scaled and replicated across Washington state,” Peschek says. More childcare options are sorely needed in the state: In 2024, a nonprofit research organization estimated that some 63% of Washington residents live in what is considered a childcare desert. That means they live in a census tract that has three times the number of kids in need of care as there are childcare slots.
Early educator apprenticeship programs are cropping up all over the country and helping some childcare providers put an end to a revolving door of vacancies and hiring. They require a solid stream of money to pay for them, however, and struggle when they lose that or face a lot of bureaucratic hurdles.
In San Francisco, an early childhood apprenticeship program launched last year with support from a commercial rent tax voters approved in 2018 to support a host of early education initiatives. Other early childhood programs in California have been supported by the state’s Apprenticeship Innovation Fund. San Francisco’s apprenticeship program has already attracted more than 450 people, a combination of current early educators who want to advance their education and others who are new to the field, according to the city’s Department of Early Childhood.
The area’s high cost of living and low wages for early childhood educators meant San Francisco childcare providers struggled to employ enough teachers to keep up with demand. On top of working to grow the workforce through apprenticeships and other pathways, some of the money from the commercial rent tax, which generates about $179M a year, is being used to boost wages for current teachers through annual stipends, set a minimum wage of $28 an hour for childcare workers and add spaces for children who need care, the department says.
The stipends, distributed to about 1,700 teachers during the 2024-25 fiscal year, were worth an average of about $13,300.
“San Francisco is treating early care and education like the essential infrastructure it is—by investing in the workforce and access together,” says Ingrid Mezquita, the director of the San Francisco Department of Early Childhood.