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CHIRENO — Every day, Courtney Bush has to figure out who can pick up her kids.
It’s not an easy decision, even after wrestling with it for years.
With no child care options or after-school programs in her rural East Texas town, Bush sometimes leaves work early. And when that isn’t an option, she calls her sister in Lufkin — which is about 34 miles away — or a friend in town.
Bush grew up in ZIP code 75937, otherwise known as Chireno, a rural community of about 1,300 at the south end of Nacogdoches County. Her children now go to public school there. Chireno is one of 263 chronic child care deserts in the state, according to a new report from Children At Risk, a nonprofit that advocates for greater access to child care, especially for the state’s youngest residents.
The report, released earlier this month, found East Texas is home to the most chronic child care deserts, ZIP codes that have lacked professional child care options for at least three years.
Children At Risk’s report has tracked child care deserts across the state. The lack of affordable, quality child care poses quandaries for Texas families — and the state’s economy. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report estimated that the Texas economy loses $9.39 billion annually due to insufficient child care.
Kim Kofron, the executive director of early childhood education for Children at Risk and one of the researchers who analyzed the child care desert map, believes two things cause East Texas’ predicament: it’s mostly rural, so getting operations up and running, and keeping them so, is difficult; and while there is a population of younger families living in rural East Texas, there aren’t always enough children to keep a center open.
Child care, which often teaches children basic life skills as well as provides foundational knowledge in literacy, is critical to prepare children for kindergarten and the rest of their education. And more parents, moms especially, are leaving the workforce because they don’t have adequate resources. This is leading to a growing number of children in families who rely on state support.
Community members say there hasn’t been professional child care for younger children for more than a decade. Families often turn to friends and family to watch their children — a job that often goes unpaid and unregulated.
Jacqueline Woodson, a grandmother in Chireno, has become her family’s go-to child care provider.
“It’s been generational, us having families take care of the kids because there was nothing in the area for child care,” Woodson said. “People have to go all the way to Nacogdoches (city) to put their kids in child care.”
Improving access to child care is difficult. State lawmakers have tried to help parents pay for it, but that’s only one part of the equation. Kofron said the state needs to truly look at how the system operates and find ways to smooth speed bumps for providers and to simplify the process for parents.
Sherry Durham, the senior director of child care for Workforce Solutions Deep East Texas, doesn’t want to see regulations eased, because child care businesses deal directly with some of the most vulnerable Texans. But she does believe more can be done to tell providers about grant programs and mentorships that will help those people who want to open a child care center.
Kofron believes the state is on the right track to begin addressing some of these concerns. Lawmakers in 2025 called for a task force to study the state’s child care landscape and come to the next legislative session in 2027 with recommendations for a path forward. Kofron hopes the new map will provide that task force with a foundation for those recommendations.
Child care deserts expanding
Using data from the Texas Workforce Commission, Children At Risk has published a map of child care deserts every other year since 2017.
A child care desert, generally, is a geographic region where families lack access to regulated child care centers. Regulated centers can be large-scale, serving dozens of children in classroom settings, or they can be home-based operations that serve only a handful of children at a time.
Children At Risk has four classifications for child care deserts.
The first is simply areas where the number of children who need child care is three times higher than the capacity of local providers. There are 413 of these across the state.
The second is a subsidy desert, where the number of children who need a scholarship, which is state-funded, is three times higher than the available scholarships. There are 884 of these.
The third is a Texas Rising Star desert, where the child care centers are not certified with the Rising Star program. Rising Star is a state program that enforces expectations for the quality of child care families receive. There are 938 of these.
And the fourth is a new classification this year: chronic deserts. These are areas where the need for child care has been three times higher than the available options for three years in a row or more. There are 263 of these.
There are four regions in the state struggling the most with chronic child care deserts: East, Deep East, Northeast Texas and the Brazos Valley. Combined, these regions stretch from the Louisiana border to College Station.
In the Deep East Texas workforce development region that includes Angelina, Nacogdoches and Polk counties, 52 of the 82 ZIP codes are deserts. Durham wants to eradicate those deserts, and she believes the way to do that is through improving communication.
Ideally, she would have the time to establish better connections with rural community nonprofits and churches so they can spread the word about what resources the state currently has to offer. However, she’s new to the job and came at a time when workforce solutions were undergoing some changes in leadership and mindset. But she believes that improved communication is on the horizon.
“Texas Rising Star and the Texas Workforce Development Group can offer support in the beginning to establish child care,” Durham said. “Whether it’s a larger center or a smaller home center with maybe five or six children, the same support is available to both.”
Parents may leave labor force
A lack of options in chronic deserts puts parents of young children in a precarious situation. Parents can either find a friend or a family member to watch their kids, or one parent can stay home.
The first option only works if there is someone around who can take on an extra child or two, and it’s not guaranteed. The second option is the path many families take, but it comes at a cost.
For Bush, whose children are now 6 and 11, a lack of child care options in Chireno over the years led her to job hop in search of a flexible schedule. At times, she could rely on friends or family members, often when they had chosen to stay at home to care for their own children, but she always felt guilty for asking so much of them.
She even left the workforce for six months because she didn’t have any better options. The small family relied on a single income, which just wasn’t sustainable.
“I feel like everybody has to work nowadays in order to make it,” Bush said.
More Texas children are growing up in low-income households. And this is putting a strain on Texas’ social safety net. There were 106 new subsidy deserts in 2025 that weren’t there in 2024, according to Children At Risk, which means the need for scholarships outpaced the available funding threefold.
Scholarships, also called subsidies, pay for part of the child care tuition for children who qualify. The child must be under 13, have working parents or parents in school whose income is below a certain threshold that is dependent on the number of children in the household. For example, the monthly income for a family with two children in North Texas must not exceed $5,216.
Income levels aren’t the only rule that governs who gets a scholarship. The providers who accept scholarships for kids must follow several protocols that govern a variety of topics, including pick-up and drop-off rules.
Lawmakers in 2025 designated a historic $100 million to child care subsidies. The entire designation was eaten up by inflation costs and failed to provide any substantial improvement to the child care system.
Without adequate resources for employees, Durham worries companies won’t choose to move to Deep East Texas. And she worries that young East Texans won’t be prepared for kindergarten.
Child care can help prepare kids for school
Young children typically have five years before they go to a traditional school and those years are exceedingly formative.
“So if they live in a chronic desert for three or more years, that’s a majority of the child’s life in a desert,” Kofron said. “That is not only hampering mom and dad from going to work, it’s also hampering that child’s ability to get ready for kindergarten.”
Kindergarten readiness is a key indicator of a child’s success down the road. By the time a 5-year-old starts kindergarten, they should be able to speak clearly, recite their alphabet and correctly hold tools, such as pencils or scissors. They should also have some basic ability to regulate their own behavior.
While parents can ensure their children have these foundational skills, studies have shown that high-quality child care can give children a big step up. This is part of the goal of Texas’ Rising Star program — to establish a standard of education for children aged 0 to 5 that prepares them for that first day of school.
However, a growing number of counties lack child care facilities that are state-certified. There were 88 more rising star deserts in 2025 than there were in 2024, for a total of 938.
Improvements in South Texas
Despite the dire concerns registered by Children At Risk, there were some bright moments of success in Texas’ child care landscape.
Cameron, the Concho Valley and the Lower Rio Grande Valley saw the highest rate of providers being added to the Texas Rising Star roster. And 60 new providers were approved to accept child care scholarships in the last year, Children At Risk found, though the organization would like to see that number grow exponentially.
Plus, more home-based child care providers have opened across the state in the last year, which means there are more options for families seeking child care. There still aren’t as many providers as there were before 2020, but it is an improvement.
In Deep East Texas, Durham said she wants to hear from those at-home centers that aren’t registered yet, like Woodson, who takes care of her family’s youngest members. Durham wants to connect them with more state resources and which might provide a clearer picture of what options are available in rural communities.
Registering home-based centers could also give the state a better understanding of the region’s needs and make more informed recommendations for the future.
Durham said she’s optimistic for the future. She sees the conversation around child care growing and believes there is a legitimate interest in finding solutions.
Kofron is excited to see what the task force assigned to investigate the state’s child care subsidy program learns. She hopes that the task force looks at her organization’s data to inform their recommendations.
She wants them to deeply consider how the state governs early childhood education and what can be streamlined. Finding ways to simplify the process for child care providers and the families they serve could do a lot to improve the state’s system.
“And then it comes down to the funding,” Kofron said. “We have to make sure that we have enough funding in the system to give families the support they need so they can get back to work and support their families.”
