Publication select ▼
EASTPOINTE — Tenisia Evans said her passion is to help others. When someone was in need of work with no one to watch her kids, she stepped up to the challenge, having always wanted to open a child care center.
Evans, a former youth pastor, got into the industry about 20 years ago. She started as an exempt provider, then transitioned to a licensed family center. In 2023, she and her husband purchased and revamped the building that would become Boss Baby Learning Center on Gratiot Avenue in Eastpointe.
“In 2023, I finally found the building, and my husband said, ‘This is it,’” Evans said. “So we came in here and we revamped it.”
Since then, she’s expanded her business into two more locations. Her third location, Gampi’s Early Learning Center, opened in 2024.
The facility is named after her husband, J. Richard Evans Sr., who died in 2024. “Gampi” was his nickname, and the logo is a cartoon illustration of him surrounded by his grandkids.
Phyllencia Mccaskill, who owns Little World Childcare Center in Eastpointe, was a kindergarten teacher who decided she wanted to help more families.
The name of her business is in honor of grandmother.
“My grandmother, she owned a daycare, and the name ‘Little World Childcare Center’ happens to be her location,” Mccaskill said. “And I just continued it because I wanted it to be a legacy.”
Mccaskill currently owns three locations: One in Eastpointe, one in Roseville and one in Detroit.
While both of these Eastpointe child care businesses are expanding, it hasn’t come easy for either.
Not enough staff for students
Both Mccaskill and Evans said they wish they could pay their staff better.
“It’s really something that we continually struggle with,” she said. “For me, I try to pay a wage that I know is comfortable for a person to live off of, but that requires the teacher to have different kinds of certifications, different degrees, and even with that being said, I’m still only able to pay her $19 an hour.”
Mccaskill said she feels they should be paid more based on degrees and certifications they carry.
“It’s really sad and it’s really hurting the community for child care because we can’t pay them what we really know they should be paid,” she said.
McCaskill also said the low wages lead to frequent turnover. Teachers might come to work for her so they can get different certifications but then leave for a higher-paying job.
Mccaskill said she tries to be more of a friend than a boss to her employees to help keep up morale.
“I try to let my teachers know that, yes, I am your employer; however, you can come and talk to me, and I can help them in that way,” she said. “I think my teachers stay with me as long as they do because of how I am able to treat them.”
However, in the end, due to not having enough staff, she can’t fill her classrooms, she said. The state requires a classroom to have a certain ratio of teachers to students, but she has trouble hiring enough teachers to meet that, she said.
For example, the state requires two teachers for every four infants. However, she said she likes to have extra staff to help support the kids, but even meeting the minimum is a challenge.
“If I don’t have the proper ratio, then I can’t accept that many children, so that can again become a problem,” she said.
Evans said staffing is a problem for her as well, but she tries to keep up morale with her employees. She pays her staff every week, and when they’re overstaffed, she gives them what she calls voluntary time off.
“I think it’s the incentives that you give your employees that can maybe help when it comes down to that,” she said.
Jennifer Weot, a senior outreach specialist for Macomb County Planning and Economic Development who coordinated a study of the day care industry around Macomb County, said every city in the county — including Eastpointe — is considered a “day care desert.”
She said this is due to facilities not having enough slots for students, which is caused by the lack of staff.
“It’s really hard to find teachers that want to work in a facility for the amount of pay,” she said. “The pay is very low; it’s under what’s considered a livable wage.”
Study finds inconsistencies, best practices
The Macomb County Planning and Economic Development study, which was conducted between January 2023 and August 2024 and funded by a grant from the state of Michigan and the Early Childhood Investment Corp., was aimed at conducting research on the child care industry throughout Macomb County by looking at challenges such as access and the affordability and quality of child care facilities in municipalities throughout the city.
According to Weot, at the start of the study, they created a coalition called the Macomb County Childcare Coalition, which was made up of parents, child care providers, industry representatives and government agencies. They met monthly to look at what was going on in the industry and how to meet specific needs, she said.
Data Driven Decisions was hired to run the coalition. They created three surveys — one for child care providers, one for the business community and a third for parents.
McKenna was also hired to look at all 27 municipalities in the county and evaluate different zoning requirements and how those impacted child care facilities.
“We wanted to gather best practices, to bring those municipalities together and say, ‘This is what we found and these are some of the best practices we’ve been able to find,’ with the goal of having some municipalities take over those,” she said.
What they found was that requirements in different municipalities were inconsistent and dissuaded child care facilities from opening in some, Weot said.
“One thing we did notice is with municipalities and zoning ordinances, one of our municipalities said if you want to run a child care center in our area, you have to have 1,000 feet of outside play area, where another said you need 5,000 feet of outside play area,” she said. “That’s such a huge difference. That latter municipality, businesses don’t want to come there.”
When research was concluded, the coalition decided to do a root cause analysis, she said, focusing on the main issues and how to fix them. The coalition picked the top three problems they felt they could do something about, she said.
First, they created a tool to support families moving into Macomb County by allowing referrals to child care centers. Then, they had municipalities working on a new master plan join the coalition to help them make changes that would allow for more facilities and perhaps entice more residents to move into their cities.
“We want them to understand by making these changes, we may bring more people into their communities,” she said.
They also held an event for businesses to come together to discuss how child care was affecting their businesses and financial ways they can support employees and allow them to send their kids to child care facilities.
They were also able to provide 12 new child care facilities with technology needed to create a home office through a grant, which Evans said was helpful for her.
“They’re struggling with multiple hats, trying to run a business efficiently while they have kids on the property all day,” Weot said. “We were able to provide them with finances to cover computers, tables, printers, shredders and licenses for specific child care software.”
Evans said the grant was helpful for her, but she had money saved for opening Boss Baby.
“My grandmother will always say it’s the fool that doesn’t invest in themselves,” she said. “So I invested in myself.”
Problems caused by ‘systemic’ issues
Weot said the changing requirements also pose a problem for child care centers.
“There are lots of things that are required of them by the state, by the municipality, by the federal government,” she said. “They have inspectors come in for various reasons all year-round saying you need to change this, change this, change this, whatever that might be, and then the following year, it’s all new.”
Changes a child care center makes one year might not carry over into the next year, she said.
“Now it’s five additional changes, and so they keep adding up, and this is all at the expense of the business,” she said.
Weot also said businesses are losing employees over the lack of child care. Employees might leave a lower-paying job to become a stay-at-home parent to offset the cost of child care, she said, which leads to lower enrollment.
The state of Michigan has also introduced its Tri-Share program, a program that allows qualifying adults and businesses to split the cost of child care three ways — between the state, the employee and their employer.
The Tri-Share program can be used by any company, Weot said, and it’s currently being piloted by McLaren Health Care.
In the end, Weot said, there are a lot of layers to the issue.
“It’s very systemic,” she said. “My boss came into one of our coalition meetings and said it’s like an onion. You’re literally peeling back layers, and there’s another layer. There’s all these layers and no one entity is doing anything to specifically say we don’t want child care here. They’ve got all these requirements, and they build on each other. They never meant to do anything against child care, but that’s where we’re at now.”
