ROCHESTER – "Waaaagh! My eye fell off! I only have a fake eye!" a 5-year-old says while fixing his robot made out of tape and cereal boxes.

About a dozen preschool children played around inside Meadow Park Preschool and Child Care Center on a sunny April Tuesday. Not just building cycloptic machines, the kids were hard at work learning how to make magnets move around with wands, creating castles using plastic pieces and wooden boxes, army-crawling in front of a newspaper photographer, even trapping ladybugs and reciting how to tell the difference between the male and female insects.

Karin Swenson surveys the room, taking in all the joyful chaos, questioning the kids about their projects and how they're working through problems that arise. The director at Meadow Park, Swenson could use at least one more staffer to help support and teach the children here.

"After almost a two-year wait of trying to find people even just to apply, I was able to hire two different people," Swenson said. "I could very easily hire another one and a half to get myself up to full staffing."

It's a common refrain in Rochester and around the state: There aren't enough providers to take care of infants and preschoolers.

But Rochester faces unique challenges: It's one of the fastest-growing cities in the state and Minnesota's third-largest city. It's expecting an influx of people over the next few years. And one quadrant of the city has a dearth of day care providers.

Providers and economic experts alike say there have to be changes in Rochester's child care industry before it starts to hurt the city's pending growth.

"Along with housing and transportation, child care is certainly near the top of that list as an important issue that we need to face as a region," said John Wade, president of Rochester Area Economic Development.

Olmsted County has had around 10,000 child care slots for the past few years, according to Child Care Aware of Minnesota, but those slots haven't kept up with the area's growth.

In-home family providers have been cut practically in half over the past decade, Olmsted County officials say. There were 453 such providers as of January 2014, but only 244 as in January 2024.

"We gain some, but ultimately we lose about 13 providers per year," said Tiffany Kacir, a child care licensing supervisor with Olmsted County.

The reasons are almost universal across Minnesota: Providers are paid far too little for their work, as federal reimbursement rates don't cover costs. There usually are no benefits or insurance for providers even at child care centers; many workers with college degrees could find better pay and benefits in retail jobs. In addition, providers cite overly burdensome state regulations that make it difficult to operate a business.

"Providers aren't sticking in the field very long," Kacir said. "It's not a lifelong career for a lot of individuals. And really the profession of child care is not really seen as a profession, so it's pretty underappreciated."

Complicating things is a lack of access to child care in southeast Rochester, where many low-income families and families of color live.

A 2023 report from local education nonprofit Cradle2Career highlighted the southeast part of the city as a child care "desert," citing a "strong overlap" with poverty rates and area schools that receive federal Title I funding for low-income students as part of the reason providers are so scarce there.

Area providers say money is the key to greater child care access more than anything else. There would be plenty of child slots, providers say, if they could staff the classrooms they already have.

"It's great to have all full-time teachers and very consistent schedules, but that's not what the workforce is willing to give," said Teresa Bahr, owner of Early Advantage Developmental Child Care Center in nearby Byron.

Early Advantage now has a team of about 70 staffers, most of whom are part-time, to cover classroom space. Bahr said she's had better luck with staff retention in the past few years since bumping up pay and adding small benefits for workers, but many providers aren't so lucky.

A recent sampling of local child care center directors found almost all of them had at least one job opening, according to Bahr. The directors found that filling those jobs would add 400 to 500 child care slots to the region alone, though it didn't take into account all area child care centers or in-home providers.

"(People) think it's a lack of space, and it really isn't the biggest problem," Bahr said. "We have to look at why we don't have the staff."

Rochester officials are debating potential community fixes to boost the child care industry. Ideas stem from adding a center in the upcoming West Transit Village development created as part of the city's bus rapid transit line to lining up state and federal grants for workforce training.

At the state level, providers and economic development experts are lobbying for fewer regulations, easier licensing requirements and a continuation of compensation funding passed in 2023 that providers use to boost pay — the latest child-focused omnibus bill in the Minnesota House allocates about $260 million over the next two budget years.

"It's going to take a combined effort," Kacir said.

For providers like Swenson, who has worked in child care for more than three decades, reform can't come soon enough. At Meadow Park, she and two other staffers have master's degrees in education, but they have little retirement savings to show for it. Swenson would like to see things change for the next generation of workers.

"I don't want to retire before the system is reformed," she said while negotiating with 5-year-old Kai Lukes over what he could use to take home two ladybugs he'd caught. "I'm 63 right now, and I probably won't retire before I'm 70."