Dear Mayor Wolosin, Vice Mayor Taylor, and Councilmembers Doerr, Combs and Nash,
On behalf of the San Mateo County Child Care Partnership Council, we’d like to share Menlo Park’s Child Care Needs Assessment Profile from our recent San Mateo County Child Care Needs Assessment. In 2022, the Council retained Brion Economics to complete a needs assessment that included estimates of child care supply and demand at the City and County level, a parent survey, a workforce survey, and economic analyses related to increasing the child care workforce and raising wages for those workers.
In case you have not already seen the results of the needs assessment, some of the highlights for Menlo Park are as follows:
* In 2022, the City had a shortage of 2,449 child care spaces for children ages 0-12.
* Shortage projected to grow to 3,122 spaces by 2032. Shortage is for families of all income levels in Menlo Park who are working and could use a formal child care space.
* One of working families’ greatest needs is for infant care - in 2032, only 23% of the demand for child care for infants will be met.
* The shortages are worse for families with lower incomes. In Menlo Park, there is subsidized care for only 35% of the children ages 0-4 who would qualify for state child care subsidies.
* The City needs an additional 703 subsidized child care spaces to help lower-income Menlo Park residents obtain affordable child care while they work.
The full needs assessment can be found on the San Mateo County Office of Education website, https://www.smcoe.org/about/child-care-partnership-council/needs-assessment.html. If your city would like a short presentation on the needs assessment findings and to learn more about the Council and strategies that are being pursued to address the child care shortage, please contact Sarah Kinahan at skinahan@smcoe.org.
Sincerely,
Sarah Kinahan
Coordinator, Child Care Partnership Council
Christine Padilla
Director, Build Up San Mateo &
Chair – Access Committee, Child Care Partnership Council
