Children play at the Bright Start Learning Center in Leadville. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)
A Colorado Sun seriesThis series aims to unpack why child care costs have become so high for both families and providers and will also explore what it will take to make child care affordable and widely available across the state.
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LEADVILLE
Eight toddlers in eight tiny chairs are gathered around a foot-high table, stuffing corn and edamame into their mouths with fat fists.
It’s afternoon snack time at Bright Start Learning Center, where one boy has his blue Crocs kicked off under the table and a teacher is standing by with a vacuum ready to clean the floor of vegetable bits.
This toddler room, with colorful lions on the curtains and Mount Massive out the window, is the only licensed one in Lake County. And like nine other counties in Colorado, there are zero licensed child care spots in Lake County for infants.
So where are the rest of Leadville’s children?
They’re at the neighbor’s house, at home with older siblings, toted “over the hill” while their parents clean ski condos in Silverthorne or Vail, and sitting in bouncer-chairs next to desks as their moms and dads attempt to focus on remote work.
A Colorado Sun seriesThis series aims to unpack why child care costs have become so high for both families and providers and will also explore what it will take to make child care affordable and widely available across the state.
Read more
Coming Monday: Child care providers fight headwinds on Colorado’s rural Eastern Plains, with staff in short supply
The child care situation, like so many places across Colorado, is so desperate here that parents have postponed having babies or quit their jobs or moved away. Some rely on in-home day cares that are unlicensed and are breaking the law by having more than two children under age 2, including one home that several local residents said takes care of 16 kids, though it has not received a violation notice from state inspectors.
“People are desperate because there isn’t enough care,” said Stacy Petty, director of the Rocky Mountain Early Childhood Council, which is the child care resource and referral agency for Eagle, Garfield, Pitkin and Lake counties. “It’s wherever they can find a place to put their kid.”
Lake County has 518 kids age 5 and under, which doesn’t square with these numbers: zero licensed spots for babies, 10 for toddlers, and 113 for preschoolers ages 3 to 5. By conservative estimates, child care experts say, about 60% of non school-age children need child care, which would mean Lake County needs at least 310 spots — about three times as many as it has.
The scarcity shows up not just in the personal stories of parents trying to make a life in Leadville, but in a socioeconomic and racial rift in a town where 70% of children are Latino. Nearly all the kids at Bright Start, where the shelves are stacked with books and the bins are filled with educational toys, are white.
One of the children in the Chrysalis classroom at Bright Start poses after asking to be photographed with her unicorn toy. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)“There are mothers who are looking for a place to leave their babies who are 1 or 2 months old and they don’t know where to go,” Yadira Renteria, a mother of five who until recently ran an in-home day care watching two or three babies and toddlers each day, said in Spanish. “It’s hard. I took care of a baby who was 5 days old.”
This shortage of options, and the disparity that divides the town, has gone on for years, but now, residents say there is a new, collective understanding that Leadville can’t wait around for business or the state government to fix the problem. Creative ideas to boost child care funding and open more spots — including talk of a new tax — are happening not just among parents and nonprofits, but at the city and county government.
Most kids at Leadville child care center are white
Leadville parents are getting on the waitlist for the county’s only licensed toddler classroom when they find out they are pregnant.
If they don’t get a toddler spot, and until their babies turn 1, unlicensed child care is the only option in town. Petty, at the early childhood council, encourages parents to make sure the care they choose is safe even if it’s not licensed. She points them to the state website, Colorado Shines, where the public can search quality ratings and violations. She also advises them to scope out homes for books, games and toys, and find out if the home has a safe place to play outside.
The lack of quality child care is obvious to teachers when kids show up at school not knowing how to hold scissors, unable to name 15 letters or get freaked out when they are asked to touch paint. But what’s telling in Lake County, Petty said, is that even teachers are sending their own children to whatever patchwork of care they can put together — a couple of days at a home day care with too many kids or the neighbor down the street. The care is often “not developmentally rich,” and it’s risky, Petty said.
A large contingent of the town’s population works in hotels and restaurants in the ski resort towns in both directions, choosing to live in Leadville because it’s less expensive than Vail or Summit County. The Climax mine, a molybdenum operation just outside of Leadville, employs 2,800 people, many of them dads in Lake County. And since the COVID pandemic, more people are working remotely in the 10,000-foot mountain town of 2,600 people.
Long road to child care
Many parents in Leadville drive about an hour to either Vail or Summit County for jobs in hospitality, construction and other industries.
Remote employers and businesses in town have adopted informal policies that allow babies to come to work or sit next to desks, but that only works well when those babies are sleeping.
“It’s one thing to have a baby,” Petty said. “It’s another to have a toddler that’s running around getting in trouble. You can’t leave him to his devices. He’s going to burn the house down! It’s not possible to live and work with little children running around your house. There is a crazy assumption that moms work from home and have their kids and it’s great. It isn’t real.”
Katy and Kody Aigner, who have one toddler and a baby on the way, moved to Leadville from Evergreen about three years ago because they thought it “would be a great place to raise kids.” And it is, except for the lack of child care options.
Kody works at the mine, running communications equipment, everything from two-way radios to computer tablets, and a shift keeps him away from home for 11 hours. Katy works remotely for a New York-based company that helps businesses with client management and onboarding new workers. She managed to do this mostly with ease while their son, Otto, was an easy baby. But then at about 8 months, he started scooting around, trying to crawl, putting toys in his mouth, and generally acting like a “little menace,” joked his dad.
They were on the waitlist for the toddler room at Bright Start, but Otto could not start until he was 1 year old.
Katy and Kody Aigner explained that when their son, Otto, was born, they initially intended to care for him at home, but it became unmanageable with both working, even with Katy’s remote job. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)“The original intention was to take care of him full-time at home, but with our jobs, it became pretty unmanageable,” said Katy, who is already wondering how that 8-month to 12-month stretch will go with baby No. 2.
Otto showed up to the toddler classroom still crawling, but was on his feet walking in no time trying to keep up with the rest of the kids. Katy and Kody were amazed at how fast he grew developmentally through socialization and classroom activities, and were grateful they were among the small percentage of families in Leadville whose kids have spots in the toddler room.
“If this place didn’t exist I don’t know what we’d do,” Kody said, as Otto heard his parents’ voices outside the classroom and popped into the hallway. “Outside of the mine, and like a few other small places that really don’t have that many jobs, it’s hard to make decent money up here. But compared to people we know that have kids in child care in other counties around here, this is absolute steal.”
The toddler room rate is $1,191 per month. Bright Start is losing $2,000 per month on the room though, in order to pay teachers a liveable wage. The two preschool rooms, which can have a higher student-teacher ratio under licensing regulations, subsidize the toddler room. The center’s board talks about opening another toddler room and an infant room, which would require one teacher per five babies under the law, and Bright Start would want to have one teacher per three babies, if possible. But the operating cost is too high to make it work.
This is despite the fact that the child care center is a nonprofit, receiving free rent from the school district building where it’s housed, donations and a bit of public funding from the county’s tourism tax.
And in a town where 30% of the population is Latino and 70% of the population under 18 is Latino, nearly every kid in the toddler room and two preschool rooms at Bright Start is white.
“I don’t think the demographics of that classroom match the demographics at large,” Kody said. Part of that is cultural, with many Latino residents who have lived in Leadville for generations relying on grandparents and cousins to watch each others’ kids. Kody and Katy’s extended family, meanwhile, lives 1,000 miles away.
Leadville taps tourism money for child care
Leadville’s entire tourism budget, used to run the visitor’s center and market the high-elevation town known for its ultra-running races and Melanzana hoodies, is just $300,000 — and 10% of that is now going to support child care.
The local tourism office partnered with the early childhood council last year to share a slice of the local lodging tax for child care teacher training and tuition scholarships for low-income families. The first check, for $31,000, was dispensed this winter.
Talks about bigger ideas are on going, including the possibility of someday asking voters to support a new sales tax that would boost child care spots in the county.
Adam Ducharme, a dad of a 2-year-old and 5-year-old and Leadville’s tourism and economic development director, looks forward to the day when “this priority finally has the buy-in and the votes from the dads.”
“The cavalry is not coming for any of us,” he said. “We all have to work together as parents and as a local community and as local ecosystems. I don’t think there is a rural community in Colorado that doesn’t have issues around housing and child care. These two continue to rise to the top as the largest issues. They are not social issues; they are 100% economic development issues.
“If you can’t imagine having a family in a place then what does your future in that place look like?”
Children in the Chrysalis classroom play dress-up at the Bright Start Learning Center in Leadville. Spots at Bright Start are highly desirable, with some parents joining the toddler group waitlist during their pregnancies. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)It’s cool that so many employers let workers bring their babies to work in Leadville, he said, but what about the people without desk jobs — the electricians or construction workers or the crew at the mine. “It’s one thing to have a crib by your desk and it’s another to have it on the jobsite,” Ducharme said.
Ten years ago, “there was a person to provide child care on every street” in Leadville, he said, mainly because there were more single-income households and moms who stayed home with their kids were also watching other kids. But the area median income in Lake County has gone up 40% in five years, and along with it, the cost of housing, utilities and property taxes have shot up, too.
“That is an excruciating competitive landscape to try to make a living in,” Ducharme said. “Everybody is having to pay more, which means regardless of your gender, very few people have households where there is somebody at home who can provide care.”
It’s led to tough choices about who watches the kids of Leadville.
“We have siblings who are only a few years older taking care of younger kids,” Ducharme said. “In some of our manufactured home parks, there used to be a family friend on every block and now it’s every six blocks. You’re talking about providers who might have 10 to 15 kids that are all being watched by one or a few adults. It’s heartbreaking.”
Ducharme has sought unlicensed options for his own kids, and calls some of those caregivers the “most incredible human beings that you will ever get a chance to interact with.”
“And yet, it doesn’t change the fact that the thought of having 15 little ones to navigate is really challenging. Obviously, there is not a licensing board in the world that would allow for that.”
Children share a snack in the Chrysalis classroom at the Bright Start Learning Center in Leadville. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)The idea to pour some tourism dollars into child care came from the Lake County Childcare Coalition, a group formed in 2021 after the COVID pandemic closed schools and made the child care shortage even worse. Its members are parents and child care providers as well as city and county government leaders and nonprofits.
They are talking about controversial ideas like tapping into property taxes or a new sales tax to fund child care, or creating a special tax district to fund child care along with recreation or fire infrastructure, which are community needs that might get greater voter support.
Lake County wasn’t part of a Roaring Fork Valley group that got voters in nearby Garfield, Pitkin and the western part of Eagle counties to approve a special tax district last November to fund early childhood education from Aspen to Parachute.
The Leadville coalition is modeling its efforts after successful ones in Larimer County, which has a sales tax for child care, and La Plata County, which passed a lodging tax for child care, but “tailoring it to our local context,” said Carlye Sayler, who is the coalition’s interim facilitator and executive director of the nonprofit Lake County Build a Generation.
“In rural communities like Lake County, the disparity is so massive,” she said, noting that she hasn’t given up on statewide support that would help rural areas with small tax bases generate funds.
It’s “impossible” for child care centers to turn a profit without subsidies, she said. “They can’t rely on tuition alone from families because … families don’t make enough to pay what it would take to provide the true cost of care,” Sayler said. “The math doesn’t add up.”
Two children under 2 is the limit for unlicensed care
Tens of thousands of people across the state rely on unlicensed child care provided by family, friends and neighbors. People are allowed to offer in-home, unlicensed care, but there are laws they must follow to avoid an investigation and a cease-and-desist order from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.
In the last fiscal year, the department received 46 complaints about unlicensed child care operations. All were investigated; six were substantiated and ordered to shut down, according to Chynna Roberts, spokesperson for the department. None were in Lake County, the department said.
Unlicensed day care providers cannot have more than four children at a time, including their own children, and cannot have more than two children under the age of 2. After receiving a complaint, the state department’s licensing specialists will stake out home day cares, observing how many children are dropped off and picked up.
If they determine one is operating illegally, the center receives an order to cease and desist, which is posted online, and if further observation shows the center did not close or legalize its operations, it is reported to the state attorney general’s office.
Toddlers have snack time in the Caterpillar classroom at the Bright Start Learning Center in Leadville. Although the requirement for toddler classrooms is a 1:5 teacher ratio (two teachers for 10 toddlers), Bright Start provides three teachers for 10 toddlers. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)The Department of Early Childhood has a liaison who coordinates with the state child welfare division, which receives reports of child abuse and neglect through its statewide hotline. Child care operations, licensed or not, would likely face two simultaneous investigations after a child abuse allegation, one focused on licensing and the other centered on child welfare.
In one egregious case three years before the state Department of Early Childhood was even established, police officers found the operator of a home day care center in Colorado Springs hiding 25 children behind a false wall in the basement. Play Mountain Place, which was shut down in 2019, was licensed to have just six children.
The owner and a worker were convicted of child abuse, and the parents of 19 of the children who attended the home day care sued her, saying the wall kept them from seeing how many kids were cared for at the home and that their children suffered injuries and neglect.
Of the 130,000 reports to the child abuse and neglect hotline in Colorado each year, 1,225 involved licensed child care centers in 2025. As for unlicensed centers, the state child welfare division doesn’t know. “We can’t account for unlicensed facilities, as that is not data we have since we do not provide oversight to them,” Julie Popp, communications manager for the Office of Children, Youth and Families, said via email.
“We just need to keep the doors open for Lake County”
The child care ecosystem in Leadville is so fragile that Desiree Trujillo, the executive director of Bright Start, knows right away when a home day care in town has closed. She recently “got a wave” of families trying to enroll at Bright Start because a woman taking care of children in her home broke her hip and had to decrease the number of kids in her care.
One child at Bright Start is walked to day care each morning by older siblings because their parents leave for work so early. In another family, the mom and dad work in Summit County — one a day shift and one a night shift — so they meet at Copper Mountain in the mornings and the parent heading home from a night shift drives the child back to Leadville. Their child attends Bright Start part time.
Trujillo, who used to cart her own kids to work when she cleaned Vail condos, knows why unlicensed centers don’t get licensed — it’s not economical. The staff ratios required for licensed centers are tight, plus there are requirements for playground safety, learning materials, and staff training for safe sleep and infant CPR.
“We’re jumping through hoops,” she said. “We are maintaining all the rules and regulations, for a reason.”
Her eight teachers could make more per hour in Breckenridge, but they don’t want a commute that would make them late to pick up their kids from school or miss their sporting events. Teachers’ aids start at $19 per hour and move up after they receive their credentials, which Bright Start can pay for with its nonprofit funding.
The center’s $1,191 monthly tuition for toddlers and $1,137 for preschoolers is affordable by Colorado standards, but for many families, “it’s half their paycheck” and “like another mortgage,” Trujillo said, so it feels like many parents are constantly asking “should I even work right now?”
“We don’t need to make a huge profit. We just need to keep the doors open for Lake County.”
LEFT: Desiree Trujillo, Bright Start executive director, said she was among the many in Leadville who commuted out of the city for work before she came to Bright Start. RIGHT: Before coming to teach Bright Start, Yadira Renteria said she ran a day care out of her home because she wanted to keep her young children with her. (Claudia A. Garcia, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The only other licensed child care option in the county is The Center, which is a preschool, not infant or toddler care, and not ideal for many working parents — it is closed on Fridays, because Lake County School District is on a four-day week, and during the summer. It’s housed at the school district, and has 76 preschoolers.
Unlike Bright Start, the preschool’s demographics reflect the school district’s, so about 70% of children are Latino and some speak only Spanish when they enroll because that’s the language they speak at home, said Tanya Lenhard, the director.
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SUBSCRIBEThe Center took care of babies and toddlers years ago, but stopped because of the cost. It opened in the 1980s, around the time that the Climax mine shut down when the molybdenum market crashed, as a way to help families who had lost their jobs and were scrambling to find work in other towns, taking jobs working overnight and struggling to afford Christmas presents. To this day, a foundation in Leadville buys a Christmas gift for every child at The Center, even though the mine reopened in 2012 and The Center is no longer open on Christmas Day.
Since the preschool is open four days a week and closed for the summer, many older siblings are babysitting preschoolers for a significant part of the year. And on school days, if a preschooler is sick, their older siblings miss school, too.
“People bootstrap it,” said Kate Bartlett, superintendent of Lake County schools and a former director of the preschool. She described her life as a younger, working mom as living not exactly day by day, but “chapter by chapter,” with a jigsaw puzzle of child care.
The Center gets federal funding from Head Start, as well as state funding through the Universal Preschool Program that provides 15 hours of weekly tuition-free preschool for 4-year-olds. Donations and tuition, which is $1,216 per month for the few families who pay full price, fill in the gaps, Lenhard said.
None of its families currently qualify for the state’s child care assistance program, in some cases because they haven’t filled out the paperwork.
For immigrant families concerned about raids and detentions, filling out paperwork is a no-go lately. Some immigrants in Leadville are afraid even to go to work, or the grocery store, especially when often-false information circulates that immigration authorities are staking out a store or gas station along Interstate 70.
Renteria, who has twin 2-year-olds, twin 10-year-olds and a 12-year-old, moved to Leadville from Mexico 11 years ago. She ran her home day care until three months ago, when she started working as a preschool teacher at Bright Start. She speaks mainly Spanish, so she easily communicates with the handful of children and parents who also speak Spanish and she is helping English-speaking kids learn Spanish words.
Renteria’s husband works as a residential and commercial painter, and while she was home with her children, she watched two or three other babies and toddlers. She didn’t feel like she had many other options. Moms who had no maternity leave would bring her their newborns. One grandmother who had custody of her brand-new grandchild but was working full time brought Renteria a baby that was still on oxygen.
Now, Renteria’s 2-year-olds come to work with her at Bright Start, where one was curled up for an afternoon nap and the other played with trucks.
“It’s difficult to find a responsible person to take care of them,” she said. “That’s why I did it for so many years.”
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