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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
When Courtney Eggleston gave birth to her son, she knew she would have to rely on friends and family to help care for him when she went back to work. That’s because Hines, the Eastern Oregon town in Harney County where Eggleston lives, has few licensed child care providers.
In fact, there is no licensed provider for infants and toddlers in her county, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts.
Eggleston’s experience is representative of the plight faced by many Oregon parents of infants and toddlers. Thirty-four Oregon counties are still child care deserts for that age group. (A child care desert is defined as a community with more than three children in need for every regulated child care slot.)
In the past few years, Oregon has pumped millions of dollars into child care programs.
The effort has generally worked for kids of preschool age, according to a report for the state Department of Early Learning and Care co-authored by Megan Pratt of Oregon State University.
But Oregon parents of infants and toddlers (defined as children younger than 3) still struggle to find child care, let alone affordable child care.
Trump administration cuts to public programs like Medicaid and SNAP will likely have devastating effects on early education workers. Rural counties such as Harney and Wheeler, which already lack child care providers, will likely be hit hardest.
State legislators unsuccessfully attempted to pass several bills during the 2025 regular session that would have further supported child care providers and parents.
Dan Gaffney, a former educator in Clatsop County, offered written testimony for Oregon Senate Bill 467, which would have added an income tax refund for child care workers. The bill died in the Joint Committee on Tax Expenditures, even with support from the state treasurer.
Education, especially for early childhood, doesn’t often take priority in politics, Gaffney says.
“We have to be that much more resourceful and committed to finding some solutions,” he adds. “Attention goes to other areas that are maybe more immediate, and the focus on kids is lost a little bit.”
Child care providers, teachers and aides don’t make a lot. According to data from University of California at Berkeley, 15.8% of the 2024 early childhood education workforce in Oregon lived at or below the poverty level. The workforce’s median wage was $14.33 an hour, or a little under $30,000 per year.
For fast food workers, the median is $16.56 or about $34,000 per year.
The state has tried to fill that gap through subsidy programs run by the Department of Early Learning and Care—such as Preschool Promise, Oregon Prenatal to Kindergarten, and Employment Related Day Care.
In Grant and Harney counties, an agency called Frontier Childcare Resource and Referral has been focused on recruiting new child care providers. The team there has successfully recruited more than a dozen family, or home-based, providers, which usually are run by one person who cares for 10 to 16 children at a time. Some providers also get money from the Preschool Promise program.
But Preschool Promise slots are starting to recede, according to Gaffney, the Clatsop County education advocate. Many of the bills that didn’t make it through the Legislature would have kept those jobs by keeping child care affordable while paying living wages.
The Preschool Promise money is also concentrated in more diverse, underserved populations, he said. Many rural counties that are less diverse but still low income struggle to get funding, Gaffney says.
He has applied for various grants and worked with nonprofits to fill some of the funding gaps in Clatsop County.
“Since the fall of 2022, we’ve been able to distribute almost a million dollars to our local child care providers,” he says. “But again, the funds that we’ve been able to access are beginning to dry up.”
Also on the chopping block is the state’s Medicaid program—a result of national cuts created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Nearly 45% of child care providers in the state, according to research by Georgetown University, rely on Medicaid for health care. Many providers, especially small ones, could close because of the cuts.
This would hamper the state’s progress in reducing child care deserts, especially for infants and toddlers, OSU’s Pratt says. “The loss of one piece [of income] can really create a cascade because these programs operate, in general, on super thin margins.”
