INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Indian River County families are running into long waiting lists and high child care bills, and a Florida Chamber Foundation report released Tuesday says the squeeze is also costing employers workers.
The Indian River County Early Learning Landscape Analysis and Roadmap, prepared with Childcare Resources of Indian River, found that 65 percent of surveyed providers keep a waiting list. Those lists total 466 children.
Among parents who named a specific barrier, 62 percent said they could not find an open slot. Fifty-eight percent said child care costs strained the rest of the household budget. Seventy-eight percent said they get no financial help, and only 27 percent knew about School Readiness, the state’s main child care subsidy.
The tightest squeeze is among the youngest children. Infant rooms at responding centers are at 96 percent of reported capacity. Toddler enrollment already exceeds capacity. Providers pointed to classroom space and trouble hiring qualified infant and toddler teachers as the main reasons they cannot expand.
The staffing picture is thin, too. Thirty-two percent of surveyed early learning educators said they seriously considered leaving the field in the past year. Thirty-eight percent work a second job.
The report ties the shortage to the local economy. Employers lose time to absences, turnover and schedule gaps when parents cannot lock in reliable care. Fewer than 1 percent of Indian River County businesses use the Florida Child Care Tax Credit, which the Chamber says could help offset some of those costs.
“For employers, these challenges in the childcare system can translate into absenteeism, turnover, scheduling difficulties, and a smaller available workforce,” said Katy Healy, senior vice president at Northern Trust Wealth Management and a member of the Florida Business Alliance for Early Learning.
The Chamber also flagged school readiness. Fifty-five percent of Indian River County kindergartners were not yet demonstrating kindergarten readiness on the fall 2025 assessment.
Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson said the county has a chance to pull business, education and community leaders onto the same plan.
“If we fix early learning, we fix 1,000 other things,” Wilson said.
Shannon McGuire Bowman, executive director of Childcare Resources of Indian River, said the opening is bigger than filling empty classroom seats.
“The opportunity before the community is not simply to address childcare challenges, but to strengthen the foundation for lifelong learning, economic mobility and regional prosperity,” she said.
The roadmap calls for six local priorities: keeping early learning teachers on the job, building behavioral health support, making it easier for families to find help, closing remaining cost gaps for working families, adding infant and toddler slots, and growing a bilingual educator pipeline. It also recommends an Early Learning Leadership Table and a yearly Employer Child Care Roundtable.
Wilson said no single group can close the gap alone. The Chamber report is based on parent, provider, and educator surveys plus public data. The survey results reflect respondents and are not a full count of every family or center in the county.
